Mental Illness is Not a Death Sentence

In 1982, in the Kelowna General Hospital, I had my first clinical pastoral education training. This was a specialization is psychology and psychiatry. The first day I was thrown into a circle of “suicide survivors”. It was quite a trial by fire. The good thing was that one was only supposed to listen and not talk. The stories were varied and all quite difficult to hear. Since then, I have lost count years ago of how many people I have known who have attempted suicide, whose families have been shattered by suicide or are now contemplating suicide as a seemingly rational end to their life.

Many times, in these pages, in the last few years, I have written about mercy killing and euthanasia in Canada. A few years ago, I referred (not very originally) to the slippery slope. Slippery slopes are very hard to prove on a philosophical level but, in reality, they are all around us. We have already seen the slippery slope with the introduction of MAID. And to no one’s surprise, courts have ordered any safeguards to be stripped away, not just in the granting of mercy killing but the strong promotion of it by the very gatekeepers who should be protecting the vulnerable.

In this brief article, I would like to highlight the danger of extending mercy killing as an option to the mentally ill. To all of you who are reading this, you know that one of the crosses that clergy bear is working with the wide array of mentally ill people. Though we are pastorally trained, we are definitely not psychiatrists. Seeing the incredible struggle the mentally ill have, I can certainly understand the feeling of despair that many have. They see no solution. They see no ongoing assistance. They feel trapped in an unknowing and un-caring environment even though they may be accessing any number of professional agencies and help. It certainly makes the priest or deacon feel helpless as well.

One of the sterling qualities of our society is that we do not give up on individual people. Prisoners are not executed or locked away forever. Individuals are given second chances and we expend incredible social resources to aid the mentally ill. How incredibly and brutally ironic it is then to suddenly switch gears and say to this too large a subgroup that their suicidal tendencies are now valid and that their lives should be taken by the very health care workers who should strive to work and care for them.

This suicide ideation has always been seen as something at complete odds with the nature of reality. They would not be better off dead, the world would not be better off with out them. They are not the crushing burden nor the millstones around their families’ necks. Extending mercy killing to them as our government is bent on doing is a direct attack on this reality.

If we say people are not competent because they are attempting suicide, how can we possibly say that you are competent to have another person kill you. Instead of striving to find ways of palliating the mentally ill person’s disease and social struggles, it is inherently evil to say to them, “Your struggles are useless, you have no worth, your despair is valid.” Once again,

we see that the pro-death forces in our society are attacking yet another subset of the weak, the vulnerable, the ill and the isolated. Competence is essential in this debate and those who would kill themselves are not competent. We must speak up for the confused and the illogical, the demented, the deranged and the despairing. When Canada

allows a woman who because of her mental illness

and social status that cannot find a place to live to

instead to kill herself shows the depths to which

we have fallen. We need to reach out to them, we need to speak out to the government, we need to raise our voices to the willing and the unwilling.

Fr. Tom Lynch (PFLC National President)