IMO, a society that reaches for suicide as a solution is going to be a society that consistently fails its most vulnerable.
IMO, a society that reaches for suicide as a solution is going to be a society that consistently fails its most vulnerable.
Source? According to my understanding of the Canadian law, loneliness and poverty are not eligible conditions.
https://apnews.com/article/covid-science-health-toronto-7c63...
"Equally troubling, advocates say, are instances in which people have sought to be killed because they weren’t getting adequate government support to live."
What is eligible is pretty broad according to the article. "The law was later amended to allow people who are not terminally ill to choose death, significantly broadening the number of eligible people. Critics say that change removed a key safeguard aimed at protecting people with potentially years or decades of life left.
Today, any adult with a serious illness, disease or disability can seek help in dying."
There are many shocking anecdotes in that article, including the one it opens with. They don't all speak to "loneliness" or "money" but when I first read it last year I found it pretty shocking. Maybe you won't, but I think it's worth a read. Especially troubling to me are all of the disability advocates who disagree with the law:
"Landry said she shares the “grave concern” voiced last year by three U.N. human rights experts, who wrote that Canada’s euthanasia law appeared to violate the agency’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They said the law had a “discriminatory impact” on disabled people and was inconsistent with Canada’s obligations to uphold international human rights standards.
Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, described Canada’s law as “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”"
Far left: https://jacobin.com/2023/01/canada-medically-assisted-dying-...
Center left (citing multiple troubling cases reported in public media):
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/06/canada-...
Academic literature:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/palliative-and-suppo...
And Canadian media:
https://globalnews.ca/news/10023956/maid-prisons-canada/
https://globalnews.ca/news/9888810/suicidal-bc-woman-medical...
https://globalnews.ca/news/9784867/ontario-quadriplegic-moth...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/maid-access-debate-contenti...
A "bad apple" sort of scenario but disturbing nonetheless:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-maid-rcmp-investig...
Finally:
"Dr. Sonu Gaind, psychiatrist-in-chief at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, expressed concern about how the report describes people who accessed MAID whose natural deaths were not reasonably foreseeable. According to the report, 3.5 per cent of all MAID recipients — 463 people — did not have reasonably foreseeable deaths."
A small percentage, true, but it will grow absent efforts to limit these situations.
And that's one issue I have with such programs - one of the symptoms of depression is suicidal thoughts / ideation, which tends to disappear when depression is successfully treated. And depression also manifests itself in people with other illness. At the very least, these kind of assisted suicide programs should screen for depression in individuals opting for the program, and deny it to those depressed. They should instead be alternatively treated for depression.