Wibbly-Wobbly Ramblings

She Sought Help in Crisis and Was Suggested MAID Instead | The Tyee

Experts say Kathrin Mentler’s experience is indicative of a slippery slope when it comes to health care for mentally ill and disabled patien

The Tyee

Kathrin Mentler knows British Columbia’s mental health system inside and out.

She knows it academically because she’s studying to become a counsellor with the goal of working as a peer support worker. She also knows it personally because she’s experienced rounds of depression and anxiety throughout her life.

Mentler says she has accessed suicide prevention services dozens of times while experiencing mental health crises. She has also attempted suicide more than once and woken up in an intensive care unit, overwhelmed with gratitude for the hospital staff who kept her alive.

“I live with chronic suicidal thoughts but that doesn’t mean I never feel joy in my life,” she says.

This spring Mentler found herself in crisis and took herself to Vancouver General Hospital’s Access and Assessment Centre to get help. [...]

One third of Canadians are apparently fine with prescribing assisting suicide for no other reason than the fact that the patient is poor or homeless.

The results were contained in a recent Research Co. poll probing just how comfortable Canadians were with the current state of the country’s MAID (medical assistance in dying) regime.

Starting in March 2021, Canada became one of only a handful of countries to legalize assisted suicide even in instances where a patient does not have a terminal illness. Ever since, a Canadian can be approved for MAID simply for having a “grievous and irremediable medical condition.”

Research Co. found that 73 per cent of poll respondents favoured the current regime, and only 16 per cent opposed it.

Pollsters also found not-insignificant numbers of Canadians who favoured assisted suicide in cases where no medical condition of any kind was present. [...] The practice of referring or recommending assisted suicide has also spread well beyond the traditional boundaries of the health-care system. Notably, MAID is routinely practised within the Canadian prison system, despite similar measures proving deeply controversial in Belgium, a pioneer in assisted suicide legalization. [...]

Madeline Can’t Afford To Live With Her Illness. She May Choose To Die Instead

For the past 20 years, the 54-year-old Vancouver woman has amassed $40,000 in debts trying to treat myalgic encephalomyelitis and other ailments. When her money runs out, she says a medically assisted death may be her only option.

www.chatelaine.com

Madeline was eight when her body started to rebel against the things she wanted it to do. She remembers being struck with blinding pain in her legs. She crumpled to the floor in the hallway of her family home and sobbed. Her parents took her to a doctor, who delivered a possible diagnosis: Her right leg was shorter than her left, and her spine curved from scoliosis. She never received treatment or therapy, and she does not know why. Madeline, who wanted to be an actress when she grew up, got used to dancing on sore legs.

Just before she started grade 5, she got mononucleosis. After that, she kept getting sick—colds, ear infections and coughs that dragged on. In her mid-teens, Madeline began to struggle with fatigue and weight gain. After high school, she moved to Quebec to study theatre. There, a new symptom arrived: chronic diarrhea, which sent her running to a toilet up to a dozen times a day.

Once she graduated from university, Madeline felt like her career as an actress was beginning to take off. She met with an agent and got her first professional headshots—black and white images showing off her impeccably straight teeth and dark eyes. She moved to British Columbia and starred in community theatre. That’s when she got mono again. Her health spiralled downward: body aches, an endless series of bladder and ear infections, exhaustion.

A doctor suggested a diagnosis: chronic fatigue syndrome, or myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). It’s a poorly understood condition that some researchers believe arrives in the wake of a virus like Epstein-Barr, which can cause mono. It’s unclear why ME only occurs in some people and what, if any, genetic factors contribute. With ME, the body never seems to recharge to full strength, leaving a person struggling with debilitating exhaustion; postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), which causes light-headedness; a racing heart; and other symptoms. With no cure or treatment, ME leaves many people confined to their homes; one study found that a quarter of people with ME are home-bound and, of those, about 15 percent are also bedridden.

In the two decades since her diagnosis, Madeline has not set foot on stage. Unable to work, she receives provincial government assistance for people with disabilities. But the money falls short of what she needs. Each year, she has fallen thousands of dollars further into debt.

Today, she is among the more than 1.4 million Canadians with disabilities who live in poverty. Many, like Madeline, receive some government support; despite that, 40 percent of Canadians with disabilities live below the poverty line. And people with disabilities often need more basic goods and services just to survive—things like mobility aids, home care, accessible housing and transportation, prescription drugs and health care services, not all of which are fully covered by Canada’s publicly funded health programs.

There is, however, one government-funded service available to some people living with disabilities: medical assistance in dying (MAID). Last year, the Canadian government voted to expand MAID laws to include people suffering with illness whose death is not imminent, like Madeline. This has put her in a quandary: She has government funding to die in comfort, but not enough to live at the same standard.