08/20/2024
Psychiatrists lack tools to predict whether people with mental disorders may recover their interest in continuing to live. Is it 'discriminatory' to bar people with mental disorders from being eligible for an assisted death? John Scully said court is his last hope. No medication, or therapy eased PTSD, depression, sleep deprivation which the former 83 yr old war correspondent suffers.
Liberal government delayed a planned expansion that would have allowed people with mental disorders to be considered. The government cited concerns from psychiatrists about how to determine whether someone's mental illness could be cured.
Dying With Dignity argues the mental-health exclusion violates S7 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; people have the right to life, liberty, and security. "There is no constitutional justification for the prolongation of the enduring and intolerable suffering of those Canadians who are eligible for MAID but for the mental-illness exclusion," the documents state. The new filing argues people with severe and incurable mental disorders are deprived of their security, forced instead to endure prolonged suffering, and the liberty to make the deeply personal decision to end their life. The right to equality under the law is also violated, Dying With Dignity argues.
The government passed its assisted-dying law in 2016, updated it after a 2019 Quebec lower court ruling found it was unconstitutional to require that a person's death be 'reasonably foreseeable' to make them eligible. In 2021, the government passed another updated law.
People with intolerable mental disorders were initially supposed to be able to be assessed for an assisted death. Ultimately, the government legislated a three-year delay, which Health Minister Mark Holland and Justice Minister Arif Virani said was necessary to address the concerns and to provide 'additional time for training.'
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has pledged to scrap the expansion altogether, if his party forms government.
Helen Long, the CEO of Dying With Dignity Canada;
"The fact that they have been forced to ...wait for an assessment,"... Scully says the sleep deprivation he suffers from is pushing his mental condition and other ailments over the edge, causing him to live in constant fear that he will commit su***de. He has attempted to take his own life twice before. "Every day it gets a little closer," Scully said. "I don't want to, because I know the horror and the grief it causes the survivors. Death by su***de is awful, just awful, for the ones left behind." Canadian Press.
