(Eighteen-year-olds are allowed to purchase cigarettes, so it would be tough for any government to argue that they don’t have the wherewithal to kill themselves by other means.) It needn’t be deemed a capitulation or chalked up to an insufficiently stiff upper lip. And that decision should be made by an adult, in consultation with psychiatric professionals. Obviously, whatever treatments are available-the medications now are numberless, and access to psychotherapy and cognitive behavioural therapy is increasingly open-should be tried before any decision to die is made. And so Deltell’s monochrome thinking presents me with a Catch-22: I don’t want to live, but the very fact that I don’t want to live means I can’t possibly consent to die.
#What is the least painful way to die full
As the Conservative MP Gérard Deltell, who is not a medical professional, said in a recent interview, “At what point does someone suffering from a mental illness offer his or her full and complete consent? It’s impossible.” Certainly, questions of consent are fraught when it comes to psychotic illnesses, but I have never experienced the breaks with reality that typify them. More subtle and more invidious is the idea that the mentally ill-that uniform mass of derangement and dissociation-are, by definition, incapable of deciding rationally to kill themselves. Their points are fatuous and easily dismissed: countries in which the mentally ill have for years had the right to die-including Belgium and the Netherlands-have not taken to euthanizing undesirables and, of course, no one is suggesting that doctors stop prescribing therapy and medication and instead advise their patients to take a long drop with a sudden stop. Slippery-slope fallacies (“What’s next? Eugenics?”) have been popular among conservative newspaper columnists in the lead-up to the release of the legislation, while concerned opposition MPs have taken to building straw men, suggesting that the government should help the mentally ill instead of killing them. The arguments against legalizing euthanasia for the clinically depressed are mostly specious. Suicide will remain one of the most common causes of death in this country (and the second-most common cause among young people), and it will remain as grisly and undignified as it ever was. But that won’t stop thousands of Canadians from killing themselves this year. It will not give those suffering from painful mental illnesses the same access-this despite a parliamentary committee’s recommendation to the contrary (the bill proposes only that an independent body be established to explore the issue). It will give those suffering from painful terminal and degenerative physical illnesses-those for whom “natural death has become reasonably foreseeable”-access to doctor-assisted suicide. I n April, Justin Trudeau’s government unveiled its new right-to-die legislation. They still don’t have the right to end their suffering with dignity they still don’t have the right to spare the people they love the shock of losing them, of knowing that they died alone in terrible pain.
Because it’s 2016, and in Canada, the suicidally depressed still don’t have the right to die. No one should have to stumble upon the still-swinging rope or the brain matter on the wall, but, inevitably, someone does. I backed out in part because, had I failed, I would’ve had to return to work and tell my colleagues why I was sopping wet.) (Once, on my lunch hour, I walked down to a frigid Lake Ontario, there taking off my coat and shoes with the intention of taking a terminal swim. Most suicidal people are aware of the risks, aware that whatever attempt they make on their own life is statistically likely to fail and cause them greater pain and humiliation, to compound their sadness and anxiety and loneliness and make life even more wretched and grey. Just 1 percent of wrist-cutters are successful. Around 40 percent of subway jumpers survive, mangled into considerably worse shape than before. Guns can misfire, ropes can snap, drugs can induce vomiting and leave you with little more than a sore stomach and a fucked-up liver. Setting aside the basic human impulse to survive, there are a great many practical complications that any attempt at suicide presents. The fact is, killing yourself is a fantastically tricky thing to do. You may understandably wonder why I’ve been unsuccessful in my pursuit of the void. I was diagnosed with depression, various forms of anxiety, and (very mild) obsessive-compulsive disorder at seventeen, and, despite nearly a decade of therapy and a dozen medications, have often thought of offing myself, to the extent that I’ve always simply assumed that, when I eventually went, that’s how I’d go (something that has made the classic job-interview question “Where do you see yourself in five years?” so tough to answer).
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