Canada’s euthanasia regime is currently the subject of the sort of debate that the country should have had back in 2016 – and experts are giving parliamentarians truly catastrophic predictions of what will come to pass if assisted suicide for mental illness comes into effect as scheduled in March 2027.
At the joint committee on assisted dying last week week, Dr. Sonu Gaind, a clinical professor at the University of Toronto’s department of psychiatry and addiction, warned that the assisted suicide rate is already a “runaway train” that will get much worse if “psychiatric euthanasia” is introduced next year. Gaind noted that for conditions such as treatment-resistant depression, “MAiD assessors” have an accuracy of 47 percent: “worse than flipping a coin.”
In addition to chilling testimony from Gaind and Dr. Trudo Lemmens, the chair of health law and policy at the University of Toronto, another nightmare case out of the Netherlands has prompted calls for policymakers to reconsider expanding euthanasia in Canada to those suffering solely from a mental illness.
A Dutch teenage boy between ages 16-18 has been euthanized just four years after being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. The boy, who had requested the lethal injection, felt “joyless” and struggled with anxiety, fitting in, and hypersensitivity to stimuli. His doctor stated that he had “no doubts whatsoever” about the teen’s ability to decide to commit suicide by doctor.
“The threshold (for assisted death) in Canada is actually lower than the Netherlands,” Gaind told the National Post. “If MAiD for sole mental illness is opened up in Canada, the numbers would significantly exceed what you see in the Netherlands. Once you normalize that death is an acceptable solution for the problem that some people are having – people who are not otherwise dying – then people see it as a solution, instead of other things that might help.”
MAiD for psychiatric suffering has been legal in the Netherlands since 2002. Once “virtually nonexistent,” with only one or two cases per year between 2002 and 2010, the number of psychiatric euthanasia cases has risen sharply, “with a disproportionate increase among young adults and, more recently, minors,” Dutch doctors reported this month in the Psychiatric Times. “The Dutch model, once presented internationally as careful and balanced, is now attracting attention for a different reason: growing uncertainty about whether psychiatry has crossed a boundary it cannot coherently justify,” the authors wrote.
Gaind has no doubt that it has. Even the brief submitted to Canada’s special join parliamentary committee on euthanasia three years ago by psychiatrist Scott Kim estimated that suicide-by-doctor requests in Canada could be, at a minimum, 2,500 to 5,000 annually. It will likely be far higher than that, especially because Canada does not have the Dutch requirement for “due care” mandating that euthanasia applicants must have actually attempted effective treatments, and the Canadian “intolerable suffering” standard is subjective.
“Groups such as Mental Health Research Canada have warned youth mental health is in serious decline, with a ‘generation at risk’ of rising rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal thinking, and major gaps in care,” the National Postnoted. “Given those factors, the approval rate for requests for MAiD for mental illness in Canada could be 50 percent or higher, Kim estimated.”
“These are people who are not even 30 years old,” Gaind said of the Dutch youth seeking euthanasia. “These people are still in the developmental stages of their lives, biologically, socially and psychologically, struggling to find their place in the world, dealing with other issues that are stressing them out, including a mental illness. And somehow, in that state, we’re thinking that their wish to have their life ended by the state is potentially OK, even when it’s somebody who is too young to buy alcohol, or marijuana?”
“We can’t make predictions about whether a person’s mental illness will or won’t improve. We’re terrible at making those predictions. To say, ‘this is now a terminal psychiatric condition’ has no scientific basis. The whole concept is nebulous. In many cases, what people are seeking death for is not suffering that will never get better.”
