It is madness, if you will excuse the expression, to extend Canada’s already-permissive euthanasia/assisted suicide regime to the mentally ill. As we have recently reported in these pages, the Trudeau government’s Bill C-7 eliminates what modest restrictions existed in their 2016 euthanasia law, including that death be imminent. While claiming that C-7 does not allow mental illness as a reason to access euthanasia, it permits so-called Medical Aid in Dying for psychological suffering, i.e. mental illness.
Psychiatrist Bernardo Carpiniello recently examined the clinical reasons for opposing assisted suicide for those with mental illness. Some of those reasons include: difficulty in determining mental competency, the inexact science of treating mental health issues and determining whether further action is futile; and the fact that some mental disorders are characterized by inconsistent moods or strong reactivity that may lead to an assisted-suicide request but which is not representative of the patient’s actual wish to continue living. (See “Italian psychiatrist raises doubts about assisted suicide and mental illness,” on p. 2.) That is, the very nature of mental illness undermines the usual “safeguards” that supposedly protect vulnerable individuals from the irreversible “treatment” of medicalized murder.
Anti-euthanasia activist Wesley Smith recently wondered if efforts to promote euthanasia and assisted suicide send a signal that suicide is a valid choice. He also argued that legal euthanasia regimes undermine the important efforts to promote suicide prevention, especially among youth who are suffering from depression and other mental health issues. Paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, Smith says, “we can’t be half suicide prevention and half suicide promotion. Sooner or later, we will be all one or the other.”
