Canada already has the largest number of deaths by MAID of any nation, with 10,064 in 2021, a 32% increase from 2020. With the addition of serious mental illness (SMI) as an eligible category, the country is on track to have the most liberal assisted-death policy in the world.
Concerns about the additional number of patients who could become eligible for MAID, and a lack of evidence-backed standards from disability rights groups, mental health advocates, First Nations leaders, psychiatrists, and other mental health providers, seems to have led the Canadian government to give the proposed law some sober second thought.
“Listening to experts and Canadians, we believe this date needs to be temporarily delayed,” said David Lametti, Canada’s minister of Justice and attorney general of Canada; Jean-Yves Duclos, minister of Health; and Carolyn Bennett, minister of Mental Health and Addictions, in a Dec. 15, 2022, joint statement.
Canada’s Parliament – which approved the expansion – will now have to vote on whether to okay a pause on the legislation.
However, the Canadian Psychiatric Association has not been calling for a delay in the proposed legislation. In a November 2021 statement, the CPA said it “does not take a position on the legality or morality of MAID,” but added that to deny MAID to people with mental illness was discriminatory, and that, as it was the law, it must be followed.
“CPA has not taken a position about MAID,” the association’s president Gary Chaimowitz, MBChB, told this news organization. “We know this is coming and our organization is trying to get its members ready for what will be most likely the ability of people with mental conditions to be able to request MAID,” said Dr. Chaimowitz, who is also head of forensic psychiatry at St. Joseph’s Healthcare and a professor of psychiatry at McMaster University, both in Hamilton, Ont.
Dr. Chaimowitz acknowledges that “a majority of psychiatrists do not want to be involved in anything to do with MAID.”
“The idea, certainly in psychiatry, is to get people well and we’ve been taught that people dying from a major mental disorder is something that we’re trained to prevent,” he added.
A ‘clinical option’
Assisted medical death is especially fraught in psychiatry, said Rebecca Brendel, MD, president of the American Psychiatric Association. She noted a 25-year life expectancy gap between people with SMI and those who do not have such conditions.
“As a profession we have very serious obligations to advance treatment so that a person with serious mental illness can live [a] full, productive, and healthy [life],” Dr. Brendel, associate director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School in Boston, said in an interview.
Under the Canadian proposal, psychiatrists would be allowed to suggest MAID as a “clinical option.”
Harold Braswell, PhD, a fellow with The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, calls that problematic.
“It’s not neutral to suggest to someone that it would be theoretically reasonable to end their lives,” Dr. Braswell, associate professor at the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University, told this news organization.
It also creates a double standard in the treatment of suicidal ideation, in which suicide prevention is absolute for some, but encouraging it as a possibility for others, he added.
“To have that come from an authority figure is something that’s very harsh and, in my opinion, very potentially destructive,” especially for vulnerable groups, like First Nations people, who already have elevated rates of suicide, said Dr. Braswell.