I really don’t understand why there is so much fear and disinformation surrounding Medical Assistance in Dying for mental illness.
Shawn Watley recently wrote an article for the MacDonald Laurier Institute which was really nothing more than a Henny Penny Chicken Little “the sky is falling” screed against Medical Assistance in Dying.
You know what, fine, if Dr. Watley thinks that he can fix everyone and save everyone, then he should stop wasting time and get his magical cure-all elixir approved by Health Canada and on to pharmacy store shelves across Canada.
It’s one thing for people like Dr. Watley to tut-tut persons wishing to obtain M.A.i.D. for mental illness, but it’s something completely different for those with longstanding mental health issues that wish to pursue M.A.i.D. to have to endure prolonged suffering just for the sake of vanity causes for doctors like Dr. Watley.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Dr. Watley is of the “you simply haven’t tried hard enough to fix your own mental illness” crowd. People like this seem to form the majority in mental health care practitioners. According to these type of doctors, unless you’ve literally popped every type of pharmaceutical, and have tried every type of therapy, you just haven’t tried hard enough.
I can only wonder what wonderful advice Dr. Watley could offer to someone that had their brain fucked with by a military social worker when they were a child living on a Canadian Forces base.
If a person can’t enjoy life, can’t find pleasure in life, keeps fighting with the demons of child sexual abuse, child emotional abuse, child physical abuse, has fought major depression and severe anxiety all of their life, why should this person have to keep existing of they no longer wish to exist.
Why should people like myself have to continue suffering just to keep Dr. Watley and his ilk of like minded physicians happy with the idea that they “saved us” from the evils of death.
My brother died of a drug overdose back in early August of this year. A drug overdose that was no doubt brought on by the years of mental suffering due to growing up in our father’s extremely dysfunctional home and the sexual abuse that we endured for two years on Canadian Forces Base Namao from 1978 until 1980.
I am envious of my brother. He no longer feels pain. He no longer has the memories. No financial worries. Nothing. It’s all gone and it’s all over for him. The babysitter can no longer bother him, Captain Father Angus McRae can no longer bother him, our father, Warrant Officer Richard Wayne Gill can no longer bother him.
The world has gone on existing without him.
Me?
I’m just sticking around long enough to clear my name, which hopefully won’t be too much longer. Hopefully my class-action against the Canadian Armed Forces is wrapped up around 2027, and hopefully Medical Assistance in Dying is legalized for mental illness by 2027, as I would love nothing more than to never be bothered by my memories of the physical and mental abuse at the hands of my father, the mental abuse at the hands of Canadian Forces military social worker Captain Terry Totzke, the sexual abuse at the hands of the babysitter and the base chaplain, Captain Father Angus McRae, both from Canadian Forces Base Namao, or the years of diagnosed but untreated major depression and severe anxiety.
But, I have a feeling that people like Dr. Shawn Watley don’t really care about my mental health. I think that they’re more concerned with the appearance of caring than they are with realizing that not everything is curable and not everything can be treated and that a person must have full and complete autonomy to make choices for the own lives otherwise they are just being punished and forced to endure and existence of very little meaning but of constant mental anguish.
I agree! I have never understood how anyone thinks they have the right or knowledge to determine how much another person can endure! Nobody lives in your mind but you! i will never tell you when you’ve had ‘enough! Love ya, nephew!
LikeLike