Maids clean up messes around the house, but in Canada, MAID cleans up after that country’s mess of a health care system. Just ask 37-year-old Vancouver resident Kathrin Mentler, who was offered the chance to kill herself because there weren’t any psychiatrists available to treat her chronic depression.
There are slippery slopes and then there are elevator shafts going straight down to immediate doom — and that seems to be exactly where Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) is leading increasing numbers of reasonably healthy Canadians.
In force only since 2016, MAID originally provided the option of suicide to terminally ill adults. Since then, the law has been amended to allow those suffering from mental illnesses to have the government shove them off this mortal coil, starting in 2024.
Because, apparently, the way to treat people with suicidal thoughts, like Kathrin, is to hand them deadly doses of sleeping pills.
Mentler tried to check herself into a Vancouver hospital in June to get help with “debilitating feelings of hopelessness and suicidality,” according to the Daily Mail. What she received instead was notice from a clinician that Canada’s “broken” healthcare system had created a shortage of psychiatrists.
“Have you considered MAID?” instead, the clinician asked.
“I very specifically went there that day because I didn’t want to get into a situation where I would think about taking an overdose of medication,” Mentler later told Canada’s Globe and Mail.
Mentler listened to the clinician explain how MAID would be more “comfortable” than a solo suicide that might not even work. With MAID, Mentler could enjoy “sedating benzodiazepines among other drugs.”
Technically, the Ottawa-approved deadly dose of sedatives isn’t even legal yet for “patients” like Mentler — but why let little things like the actual law get in the way of providing life’s final solution as her first choice?
Mentler — again, I must remind you, a young woman with a history of chronic depression — left the medical center worse off than when she entered it:
The counselling student says she left the centre soon after, not wanting to think about the encounter. The next day, she says she awoke wanting to scream and cry, and posted about the exchange on a private social media account to a group of friends who echoed how troubling they found it to be.
Vancouver Coastal Health spokesman Jeremy Deutsch defended the clinicians’ actions, saying they followed protocol. “During patient assessments of this nature, difficult questions are often asked by clinicians to determine the appropriate care and risk to the patient.”
Mentler said that gauging someone’s suicide risk “should not include offering options to die, which is what it felt like.”
Sadly, today’s news comes as no surprise at all to Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Readers™. You might remember this story from November about a struggling man named Amir Farsoud who was offered “MAID As an Alternative to Poverty.”
A commenter on the CityNews video I posted back then wrote that “As a disabled resident in Ontario, I feel like our current government (FORD) is hoping people will feel hopeless and desperate enough to consider MAID.” They starkly concluded, “I have never felt my life more threatened living in Canada as I do now.”
Threatened… by the medical healthcare establishment.
British Columbia euthanized 2,515 people in 2022, up 24% from the year before, according to the inaptly named Ministry of Health.
Stage Four lung cancer? MAID. Permanently disabled and unable to care for yourself? MAID. Chronic pain? MAID. Down in the dumps? MAID. Are you one of those icky poor people? MAID.
I remember when Canada was known as such a nice country.
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