Some truths about M.A.i.D.

Please don’t fuck this up for me.

Recently in the media there has been a story circulating around how a woman requested Medical Assistance in Dying because she couldn’t find a place to live.

I’ll say this once and once only, YOU CANNOT REQUEST M.A.i.D. because you are homeless. If all it took was being homeless to request M.A.i.D. it would be simple for me in the Vancouver area housing market. All I’d have to do is move out of my apartment without having a place to move to, then I too could apply for M.A.i.D. instead of having to wait until March of 2023. But it doesn’t work that way.

Currently to obtain M.A.i.D. you currently have to have a terminal disease that will result in your natural death in the foreseeable future, or you need to have a condition that affects and impairs your quality of life.

You cannot request M.A.i.D. if you have genetic cognitive developmental issues, or other types of cognitive impairments that would prevent informed consent.

You and only you can request M.A.i.D.. You cannot take your 98 year old granny into the vet and have them put down like a house cat. You cannot have your child with Down Syndrome put down. You cannot have your wife with Tourette’s syndrome put down.

You, AND ONLY YOU, can make the request for M.A.i.D.. No one else can.

As the law is now, you cannot even make a request for M.A.i.D. for use in the future if you should become cognitively impaired at a later date.

Even when the rules are changed in March of 2023 to allow M.A.i.D. for mental illness, the person requesting M.A.i.D. will have to be able to comprehend what it is that they are requesting. You will not be able to simply show up at your doctor and say that you want M.A.i.D. because you’re feeling a little sad at the moment. You need the approval of two separate physicians and then there is a mandatory 90 day cooling off period. And then even with the approvals and the passing of the 90 day cooling off period, you still have to find a physician will to carry out the procedure. This is nothing like taking your elderly cat into the vet and having them put down because you’ve grown tired of the cat.

I’m fucking dreading the process for requesting M.A.i.D. as I’m worried that the bar is going to be too fucking high for me to pass.

“Is he a cutter”?

-no-

“has he ended up in hospital due to previous suicide attempts”?

-no-

“Has he been going to non-stop therapy since 1980”?

-no-

“Has he been on pharmaceuticals all his life to control his emotions”?

-no-

“Sorry then, he’s far too happy to qualify to die”.

There appears to be a whole fucking cottage industry of these people who throw around terms like “ableism” and “eugenics” and who seem to indicate that if you’re not willing to commit suicide then you really don’t deserve an “easy way out”.

One account that I came across claims that an assisted living home in Northern Ontario is handing out M.A.i.D. request forms to all of the residents. THIS IS NOT HOW M.A.i.D. works for fucks sake.

I would like to think that the media in Canada was better than this, but here we have https://twitter.com/CTVW5 and https://twitter.com/Avis_Favaro running a series entitled “CTVW5 DEATH WISH”……. yeah, that sure sounds like it’s going to be fair and balanced reporting, doesn’t it?

Won’t go too far into the story, but it seems that a mentally competent woman requested M.A.i.D., and was granted M.A.i.D.. I still can’t fathom what the story is here. Yes, she had to shop around to find sympathetic doctors, but as someone who has encountered doctors who thought that I was telling lies and exaggerations about my childhood abuse and trauma, I can see the need to shop around. Some doctors will let their personal biases and opinions become part of their diagnoses. I can see some doctors outright refusing to prescribe the procedure for religious or spiritual reasons. And those are two reasons that should never be allowed to be considered in any medical decision.

And the whole “Anti-MAiD” crowd doesn’t get any better from there.

If they’re not screaming about “eugenics” or “ableism” then they’re running on and on about how the government has concluded that it’s easier to kill the disabled than it is to feed, or house them.

I don’t follow the religious “anti-MAiD” crowd as I don’t really care what their imaginary friend has to say. If their imaginary friend tells them that MAiD is bad, then they’re welcome to not undergo MAiD.

What concerns me about the “Anti-MAiD” crowd is that they’ve seem to have attracted various psychologists and psychiatrists into their fold.

And what concerns me even more about these psychologists and psychiatrists is that some of them actually believe in the invisible sky daddy or other deities from ancient folklore and they take the “teachings” of these imaginary friends into consideration.

And this would be okay, but these good doctors should really know fantasy from reality.

I have yet to meet a psychologist or a psychiatrist who actually gave a sweet fuck about the war going on in my brain. If they can’t medicate a problem away, and if they can’t convince the patient that the patient is responsible for their own pain and suffering, then they don’t want anything to do with that patient and they’ll simply bump the patient off to someone else.

Outside of pharmaceuticals to numb and blunt emotions, there really isn’t anything that modern psychiatry can do to “fix the brain”. And Psychiatrists and psychologists will do anything possible to hide that fact. Other parts of the body can be fixed or replaced. But the brain is very unique in the sense that unless it learns emotions properly while it is growing in the most plastic stages of its development, it will never learn those emotions properly later in life.

I suffer from Major Depression, Severe Anxiety, lack of confidence, lack of interests, the inability to form relationships, and a multitude of other issues brought on by family genetics, living conditions as a child, sexual abuse as a child, the complete mishandling of that sexual abuse by the Canadian Armed Forces when I was a child, and a life time of shouldering the blame for what happened on Canadian Forces Base Namao.

This isn’t stuff that is going to go away if I simply wish it away.

This isn’t stuff that I can simply work on for the next 20 or 30 years of my life.

And I think that’s where psychiatrists and psychologists who are involved with the “anti-MAiD” movement have secret agendas. They don’t want to admit to the public that people like me are retirement funds, or monthly payments on the brand new Lexus.

If I undergo MAiD, then there are no more $300.00 sessions.

If I undergo MAiD, then there are no pharmaceuticals to push.

If I undergo MAiD, then there are no prestigious write-ups in the psychology magazines.

I’ll be very blunt and honest. If you want to keep people like me from requesting MAiD for childhood traumas and neglect, then as a society you better be willing to ensure that people like me don’t endure childhood traumas and neglect.