Unfortunately (fortunately) that's not how MAID works in Canada.
Even if you would get Permanent Residency in Canada and access to healthcare here, you would still have to apply for MAID with VERY stringent criteria applied to patients who suffer solely from mental illness.
The process requires you to show years (decades!) of unsuccessful medical treatments.
Unless you have tried every possibility drug and treatment available you would not qualify for MAID.
You need to prove that your condition can't be treated successfully and will not resolve over the years.
Considering that you are in your 20s it would take another 5-10 years at least of going through treatments, medications, medical trials etc until you can show that no treatment has worked.
I personally have nearly 20 years of unsuccessful treatments behind me and am not confident to qualify for MAID when it becomes available this year.
In addition to this:
You can't be suicidal.
Which disqualifies many, many patients who are currently hoping to apply for MAID.
If you have a history of suicidal ideation or attempts you'll be screened out.
You will have to be stable and non-suicidal for a few months, otherwise nobody will approve you for MAID.
The idea is that MAID is not an alternative to suicide. Suicide is considered a momentary lapse out of a crisis situation and not well thought out.
MAID is considered to be a conscience, well prepared and thought out approach that is only for those who absolutely cannot be helped with any available (or future) medical care.
Hey wljourney. You seemed to be gone for a while, right? At least I thought so. I'm glad to see you. I appreciate your insight into MAiD, and I hope you keep us updated on how your assessment goes if the expansion does happen.
Here's my rant about MAiD (sorry to hijack this thread a bit):
I would be surprised if MAiD MD-SUMC even passes come March. I really, really need it to. Even though I know I wouldn't qualify any time soon, it would comfort me to think that we live in a society that understands, at least theoretically, that eventually enough is enough. Maybe instead of living to 88 years old, I can peace out at 58, or 48. Unfortunately I'm one of those people who can't imagine being able to do it themselves, no matter how much they contemplate it. I can't go to school, hold down a job, drive, or even figure out how to take the bus by myself. (Although, I've actually had a social worker try to teach me to use the bus system here and--I'm not making this up--after having a conversation in front of me with a bus driver, she gave up and said she didn't understand how anyone did this either.) My boyfriend and I broke my motherboard trying to install a graphics card once--something the internet told us "anyone can do".* I tried to do a simple plumbing fix with the help of a YouTube video and ended up fucking up the sink
more. My point isn't that I'm a useless loser with no talents or abilities; that's not true. My point is: HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO TRUST MYSELF NOT TO BOTCH A SUICIDE ATTEMPT? Not to mention how hard it is for even competent people to kill themselves, for all the obvious reasons.
MAiD MD-SUMC gives the suicidal more of a voice. Since it's a legally sanctioned option, there's at least a little more freedom to talk openly about wanting to die. "If these treatments don't work, I hope to be eligible for MAiD one day" is hopefully less likely to get you sent to the psych ward than "if these treatments don't work, I hope I manage to hang myself". That said, it's always a gamble with those meddling mandated reporters.
Does anyone else think that the messaging around MAiD has been really confusing? The Orwellian redefining of "suicidal" certainly hasn't helped. They're coming up with the politically correct way to want to die, and everything else is "suicidality" and therefore bad. Who do they think they're fooling? When people say, "I don't think we should kill suicidal people", they're not going to be placated if the government says, "Oh, don't worry. If we killed them, that means we decided they weren't suicidal; they just consented to die." What the fuck? This just confuses and angers people. I listened to a video from Dying with Dignity where an assessor (I think) said that during a MAiD assessment, if they think a person is "suicidal", they may decide involuntary commitment is appropriate. Great! Love the risk. It's thrilling. I hope they're only talking about someone literally threatening to go home and hang themselves after a rejection. But who fucking knows what any of this opaque shit means.
"If you have a history of suicidal ideation or attempts you'll be screened out. You will have to be stable and non-suicidal for a few months, otherwise nobody will approve you for MAID." Really? Like, what on earth does it mean to want MAiD but not be suicidal? What surreal world do we live in? I've been thinking a lot about this for over a year and researching what it is you are supposed to act like as a model applicant, but there's little info out there. Probably because nobody public ally knows yet, really.
@wljourney says we have to be non-suicidal for a few months, but what on earth does that even mean when you have to want to die to eventually decide on MAiD? Am I supposed to go into remission for a bit to demonstrate that I am of "sound mind", before the drive to die comes back, on queue? Who am I communicating this trajectory of my attitudes about suicide to and who's recording it? My doctor? The MAiD assessors? I worry about assessors scavenging social media for dirt on applicants. "On July 24, 2011, you tweeted, and I quote: 'wish I was dead lol'. Application DENIED." Or even: "You're a member of a Facebook group about the right to die? Oh ho ho, thought you could pull one over on us, dissident? DENIED."
"The idea is that MAID is not an alternative to suicide. Suicide is considered a momentary lapse out of a crisis situation and not well thought out. MAID is considered to be a conscience, well prepared and thought out approach that is only for those who absolutely cannot be helped with any available (or future) medical care." Here's another confusing part: the fact that you're supposed to be able to refuse some treatments that you find unacceptable. How will this work in practice, since we know damn well they won't care if I say I'm uncomfortable with the risks of antidepressants and ECT, and that therapy has made me feel worse? If I had cancer I could say, "Fuck no! I'm not getting gruelling chemo and radiation just to--best case scenario--look over my shoulder in fear of the cancer coming back for the rest of my life!" But if I'm in immense mental pain I'm just expected to risk my health and sanity with these horrible drugs and primitive seizure-via-electricity "treatments". I did EMDR therapy because I knew I needed more therapy for my MAiD resume, but I had to guess what evaluators might be impressed by, and I still don't know if I made the right choice. I did a self-taught CBT course, but there's no way I could stomach more gaslighting like that with another person. It's too bad the mental health industry is obsessed with CBT; it's torture.
Then there's "irremediability". That's where the "no hope with future medical care" part comes in. MAiD critics are right that it makes no sense to say a mental illness is irremediable. It's an impossible standard. I understand that the argument is that chronic illnesses are already a sanctioned reason for MAiD, and it can never be said that it's certain the suffering is indelible then, either, but that just shows how stupid a concept it is. Will two doctors judge my suffering as "irremediable"? Lol. Lmao. Of course not. Will they think so in ten years? Twenty? If I don't do another round of medication roulette because of my horrible trauma from psychiatry, does it mean the decades of suffering count for nothing? What if psychiatry had a crystal ball and could predict who would recover enough to find life worthwhile, and who wouldn't? What if it was guaranteed that, in ten years, life would be worth living for a given individual (by their own standards)? Well, they would mandate that person endure another ten years of suffering, of course, with no choice to throw in the towel! That's a ridiculous and inhumane standard. And we have no such crystal ball; there's no guarantee for anyone, and just as there's no bringing someone back once they're dead, there's no taking back a lifetime of suffering once it's been lived. Here the state is forcing us to gamble with our quality of life indefinitely, when some of us are begging to leave the casino.
I read a bunch of the interviews with people in the know that Dying with Dignity has up. I read that the assessments are sometimes going to take
years. They're keeping you in suspense
for years? How much do you have to interact with them over that period of time? Are they checking in with you every few months? What the hell? Are they going to keep talking to someone for two years and then at very end of that period tell them they've been disqualified? This is so cruel and bizarre. It makes me wonder if any of this is posturing for the benefit of people who are terrified of MAiD. They will also only ever talk about MAiD for mental illness in the context of a 65 year old (at the youngest, it seems) who has tried everything, including ECT. I would love to know what the minimum age is going to/would be, in practice. Why even bother with the pretense that it is 18 and up? Making it so vague and up to the discretion of individual MAiD providers is a real double-edged sword.
I almost wish that, instead, there was a list of treatments to make your way through to guarantee eligibility. That way I could just save ECT for dead last. But then, it would proabaly go something like this: Try multiple drugs from different classes of antidepressants for a year each, then add antipsychotics and repeat. Then add every type of therapy in combination with every type of drug. Then do sixty electroshock treatments over the course of ten years. Should take roughly 45 years and tens of thousands of dollars in therapy.
Imagine thinking that's a better fate than death.
It's infuriating to hear people fear monger and spread misinformation about MAiD, sharing their hyperbolic memes when I'm over here agonizing over how the fuck I'm ever going to convince the powers that be to kill me
one day in the next thirty years. And that's if it actually passes and sticks around! "Canadian therapy dog" with a noose in their mouth. A young woman at the doctor with a broken leg--"have you considered euthanasia?" Yeah, right. We live in an absurd hell world. Ever feel like the hell you're in was orchestrated just for you? Someone on Xitter was saying that autistic people are going to be "death marched" into MAiD on the basis of being autistic and I (not impolitely) corrected them that neurodevelopmental disorders are not considered mental disorders, and don't qualify. They blocked me.
*I actually think the "anyone can do it" is just BS, to be fair.
