Canada will expand their assisted suicide law to include people with mental health issues.

 

File photo of Canada's Supreme Court. Reuters. 

Canada is preparing to expand their assisted suicide law to include people with mental health issues. Reuters. Starting in March people with mental health will be able to apply for access to assisted suicide. Under the previous law these patients were not able to do so. 30,000 Canadians have died since the country legalized assisted suicide in 2016, with 10,000 of those cases happening in 2021, which amounts to 3.3% of all deaths in the country. The system has come under criticism with some people requesting death because they lack adequate support. Four Canadian veterans also reported that they were suggested to commit suicide by the department unprompted. Others criticize the expansion as it is likely impossible to determine if a mental health case is so severe that it can't be treated by conventional means. 

My Comment:

Canada's state assisted suicide program is again in the news. It has been bubbling under the surface for awhile but it seems pretty clear that things are stepping up. In the past it was just terminally ill people that were being put down, but now it's the mentally ill as well? 

I'm not a fan of assisted suicide, at least in the way Canada does it. I do think that people have a right to end their lives if they are suffering, but I don't think the government should have anything to do with it whatsoever. If it is done at all it should be between that person, their family and whatever deity they worship. What gets me is that in Canada someone who purchases a firearm and then pulls the trigger on themselves would be condemned but if the same person goes to the government they will be all for it. 

Supposedly there are a lot of controls to ensure there aren't any abuses of this system, but I have little faith that there aren't abuses going on. Asking the veterans to consider suicide seems like something out of a parody but it apparently happened. I can see things getting worse when the mentally ill are allowed into this program as well. 

What is really scary about this is that the system has a major perverse incentive to promote assisted suicide. Many of the people requesting suicide are expensive to the state as they cost millions of dollars in care as their lives come to an end. And now people with mental health issues, who are also expensive to treat, are going to be able to kill themselves as well? It seems like the government has a major incentive here to not protect these people. 

Who is to say that people with non-terminal disease won't be encouraged to end their lives? It's one thing to assist someone in suicide if they are already in the process of dying. But with the mentally ill included it could be that other expansions could happen as well. Perhaps someone with cancer will be told to kill themselves instead of getting expensive surgery and treatment? It just seems like an expansion to rationing healthcare. 

I also think it sends the wrong message to the people with mental illness. I don't know a whole lot about suicide prevention but I do know that for most mental health cases suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I also don't know how you can argue that some kid having a bad day killing himself is bad when you also say that someone with some kind of long term mental issue killing themselves is good. It's hypocrisy. 

 Yes, many people with mental illness aren't ever going to get any better. And yes, some of those people might be better off dead. But I sure as hell don't trust any government, yet alone the government of Canada, which has been so abusive to its citizens lately, to make that kind of decision. The government has every incentive to put these people down like dogs.  

Would this be as much as a problem here in the United States? I doubt it. The incentives are not there in a private system with most people paying for their own healthcare. Of course then you would have the insurance companies pushing this instead of the government, but at least then they wouldn't have the power of the state backing them. On the other hand many people end up on socialized healthcare in America with Medicare and Medicaid and those people could be abused. 

But in Canada with socialized medicine? I have a real concern that people will be convinced to end their lives simply to save money. Indeed, I would absolutely believe that this was just a cynical plot by the Trudeau government to do exactly that. It's scary to say the least.