Debate rages as Canada offers euthanasia to mentally ill

Thursday, April 28th, 2022

Doctors in Canada are concerned about legislation passed in 2021 that expanded euthanasia and medically assisted suicide eligibility to the mentally ill.

Debate rages over whether a doctor may reasonably say patients with depression, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder have realistic recovery prospects.

Experts are debating if the mentally ill have the ability to consent to end their life, the National Post reports. There are concerns the availability of euthanasia and assisted suicide will make it harder to treat those with mental illness.

The legislation will take effect in March 2023 and has stripped the requirement that a person seeking euthanasia or assisted suicide must have a “reasonably foreseeable” death. It now allows someone to seek legal euthanasia or assisted suicide even if mental illness is their sole underlying condition.

The legislation was written in response to a 2019 Quebec Superior Court decision which found that limiting euthanasia and assisted suicide only to people with “reasonably foreseeable” deaths was a violation of human rights.

Canada’s Catholic bishops have strongly opposed the 2021 legislation.

“Our position remains unequivocal. Euthanasia and assisted suicide constitute the deliberate killing of human life in violation of God’s Commandments. They erode our shared dignity by failing to see, to accept, and accompany those suffering and dying,” Archbishop Richard Gagnon of Winnipeg, then-president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in an April 9 2021 letter.

Dr Viren Naik, medical director for the medical aid-in-dying programme in the Ottawa area, told the National Post that most providers are unwilling to see patients not in danger of imminent death but who still wish to be assessed for euthanasia or assisted suicide.

Many parts of Canada lack psychiatrists to treat mental illness. Fewer still are available to assess a patient for a euthanasia or assisted suicide request, the National Post reported.

Dr Sonu Gaind, a past president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, told the National Post, “There’s no doubt that mental illnesses lead to grievous suffering. That suffering can be even more grievous in some cases than other illnesses.”

“It’s the irremediability part that our framework also requires and that scientifically cannot be met. That we cannot do. That’s the problem.”

Depression, he noted, affects a patient’s outlook on the future.

“You don’t think about the future the same way. You see nothing. And there’s that hopelessness,” he said.

Archbishop Gangon, in his letter on behalf of Canada’s Catholic bishops’ conference, expressed concern that the new law will result in those with mental illness or disabilities being pressured into ending their lives. The legislation did not include conscience protections for medical professionals not wishing to participate in euthanasia or assisted suicide.

There has also been legal pressure on hospices with a history of opposing assisted suicide or euthanasia. That includes hospices with an explicitly Christian identity.