#assisted death

[niconebula]

I need you guys to listen so bad, but I’m at least glad people on Twitter are starting to talk about this. The government of Canada is expanding Medically Assisted Death to cull the poor and disabled, and now suicidal and mentally ill (these are usually interchangeable of course here). It is EUGENICS and every single disabled rights organization is against it.

Disability payments are $1,200 a month. The average one bedroom apartment rent in the Greater Toronto Area (greatest pop. area by far here) is $2,000 a month. People with mental illnesses are on months long waitlists to get even a single publicly funded session. Weeks to get privately funded care which costs at least $200 a session. There is no housing here for disabled people. We are in one of the worst housing crises in the world right now.

Doctors are now offering MAiD unprompted to young suicidal people. This woman is 21, a health practitioner literally suggested she kill herself.

This is one of the worst Disability Rights Violations we’ve ever seen in Canada. The government is killing us because it is cheaper than funding healthcare, cheaper than giving people housing and food and basic human rights.

[mapsontheweb]

A heatmap of people in the UK who go to Dignitas in Switzerland for an assisted death

[dissociatingdumbass]

Fuck Canada

[user-needs-new-hyperfixation]

Major trigger warning: Personal story about suicidal ideation verging on an attempt, dissociation, and fears about MAID under the cut.

I’m realizing that an underlying panic about the changes to MAID in Canada has been really, really messing with my head. It’s November, the SAD has set in, other aspects of life have been incredibly stressful, and seeing all the hot takes about MAID has tipped me into irrational fear.

And it freaks me out so much that I’m having a hard time applying myself to researching it, to sorting out the sensationalist takes from the truth and the hopefully stringent protections that will be put in place. I’m scared to look, even though I suspect what I would find would be at least a little reassuring. I did manage to do a little reading just now, and boy oh boy do I not like that this is only a few months away and still reading like this:

I just know, the closest I ever got to a suicide attempt, I was dissociating. I was utterly not myself. It’s been almost three years since then and I’ve never stopped being a little bit afraid, because until then I thought of suicide as ultimately a choice; tragic and desperate, but a choice nonetheless. A choice I would never make. Then that day happened. Sitting alone on my bedroom floor with a means of attempting in my hands, not inhabiting my body. Outside myself, and too far within myself, and not myself.

When I somehow came out the other side unharmed, guided by, of all things, David Tennant’s performance of Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy that I had no memory of hitting play on, on repeat through earbuds I had no memory of putting in, I knew that anything I did in that state would not have been me choosing it. But even in that darkness, had anyone else been present, I could have appeared normal. I could have looked and sounded like I was in my right mind. I could have signed the dotted line with a smile.

And the idea, hopefully unfounded though it is, that I could be in that state again someday, and maybe reach out for help this time, only to have a doctor just...send me cheerfully off into the undiscovered country? When what I really want is to live, and to thrive? That panics me, no matter how incredibly unlikely it probably is. 

[kamari2038]

Unusual political post... the MAID (medical aid in dying) situation in Canada

(TLDR skip to links at bottom) This is not a blog where I usually discuss political things, mostly because (1) off-theme for a fandom sideblog and (2) most of you are more politically active and well-educated than I am, so I don't see a need. So I'm just gonna make one singular post about this, not becauase it's the single most pressing issue (ongoing genocide in Gaza, rampant global warming, imminent threats to American democracy, continued LGBT discrimination, etc....) but because I knew absolutely nothing about this, and now that I've heard I'm very upset about it.

I always thought Canada had a great free universal healthcare system, which I think on some level it does. But apparently this is funded in part through cutting costs by encouraging their most underprivileged to end their lives rather than improving their quality of life. I'm not talking about terminally ill patients. They expanded MAID to include those with disabilities, and are soon set to expand it (though thankfully it's been delayed) to both mentally ill people and "mature minors".

I'm not going to back and forth with anyone about whether or not, in theory, this policy could be good if it were applied equitably and with effective safeguards. But that is NOT what is happening in practice (*at least not 100% of the time, exact proportion is difficult to assess, as could be debated what constitutes effective safeguards and/or appropriate circumstances). People with disabilities who are not receiving the care or support necessary for basic quality of life will go to a hospital and be offered as a choice of "care" to simply be euthanized. Meanwhile the government cuts costs and finds MAID subjects in general to be a great source of organ donors.

I'm not really an expert about this but just wanted to call attention to it, these links have more information:

How poverty, not pain, is driving Canadians with disabilities to consider medically-assisted death - National | Globalnews.ca

Quadriplegic Quebec man chooses assisted dying after negligence during a 4-day ER stay leaves horrific bedsore | CBC News

'Disturbing': Experts troubled by Canada’s euthanasia laws | AP News

Who can die? Canada wrestles with euthanasia for the mentally ill (bbc.com)

Assisted suicide in Minnesota? Critics point to Canada as cautionary tale. (startribune.com)

27-Year-Old with Autism and ADHD applies for MAID and her father can't prevent it

Number of assisted deaths jumped more than 30 per cent in 2022, report says | CBC News

About the coming (delayed) expansion of the law:

In Canada, Assisted Death May Soon Be Available for the Mentally Ill - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Opinion | Canada considers a risky expansion of doctor-assisted euthanasia - The Washington Post

Canada’s assisted dying regime should not be expanded to include children | Opinions | Al Jazeera

Some Motivations (besides autonomy):

Medically assisted deaths could save millions in health care spending: Report | CBC News

Health-care costs in Canada dropped after assisted dying became legal - National | Globalnews.ca

14% of Quebec's organ donors in 2022 were people who chose medically assisted death | CBC News

Who should get your organs? How assisted death raises hard new questions - National | Globalnews.ca

I'll include this more positive one for a balanced perspective, there is some valid discourse about it so I don't want to minimize that:

Slippery Slope Or Wise Demise? The Pros And Cons Of Medically Assisted Dying (forbes.com)

[misplaced-misfit-in-the-void]

I wish euthanasia was available in my country because I'd choose it without any second thoughts. If people who are deadly physically ill can get assisted suicide why can't deadly mentally ill people get it too?

Bpd is like the worst type of cancer. Most people who have bpd end up killing themselves even those that get help. Bpd is for life, so is trauma stuff too. I think it would be very humane to let deadly mentally ill people get euthanasia too.

[alwaysbewoke]

[mapsontheweb]

The Legal Status of Death in the United States

by u/Perezvon42

[allthecanadianpolitics]

"I always thought legalizing euthanasia was a no-brainer. 

It always seemed to me like an individual choice people ought to have, akin to legalizing abortion or same-sex marriage. 

If someone is in such pain that they decide to end their life, I thought, who are we as a society to tell them they can’t? 

There’s also a harm reduction component. If someone is dead set on ending their lives, shouldn’t we give them a relatively safe, effective option under medical supervision? It would be cruel not to. 

This was the rationale behind the 2015 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Carter v. Canada, which determined prohibition of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was unconstitutional. 

But the legalization of MAiD has brought to the fore some disturbing moral calculations, particularly with its expansion in 2019 to include individuals whose deaths aren’t “reasonably foreseeable,” which opened the floodgates for people with disabilities to apply to die rather than survive on meagre benefits. 

I’ve come to realize euthanasia in Canada has become the ultimate neoliberal policy — we’ll starve you of the funding you need to live a dignified life, demand you pay back pandemic aid you applied for in good faith, and if you don’t like it, well, why don’t you just kill yourself? 

The problem with my previous perspective was it held individual choices as sacrosanct. But people don’t make individual decisions in a vacuum. They’re the product of social circumstances, ones often out of their control.

Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, told the Associated Press that Canada’s MAiD policy is “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”

This sounds hyperbolic, but there are endless examples of people with disabilities who were offered euthanasia rather than live a life of pain and exclusion. And with the impending expansion of MAiD to include people with mental illnesses, the problem is only going to get worse."

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[skeletoninthemelonland]

Graveleaper sketches

[werewolf-transgenderism]

happy halloween :)

[ID: a digital drawing of Ed and Stede from OFMD in a modern AU. Stede has his arms around Ed, who’s got a gentle grip on one of Stede’s forearms. they’re looking at one another very softly, and they’re dressed up for halloween: Stede is wearing gold, sparkly high waisted pants with a scaly pattern and white fluttery fins to make him look like a mermaid, and a matching pair of over-ear headphones. Ed is dressed in all black jeans, cardigan, tshirt, and fingerless gloves, with a black knee brace, bronze cat collar, purple cane, and black cat-ear headband. He’s wearing black cat-eye eyeliner. the drawing is over a rectangular pastel teal background with a few gold sparkles on it.]

[actualfrog]

Doodles of a vague modern AU

[spenglernot]

THEY EDIT FINE THINGS WELL: OFMD KISS AND KNIVES SCENES (S1 E9 & S2 E3) COMPARISON

Marveling at the OFMD editors who did so much more than just reuse Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Op. 15: VII. And Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes No. 5 from the season 1, episode 9 kiss scene in the season 2, episode 3 knife pulling scene.

Unedited audio from both episodes plays simultaneously in this comparison video. Take a look and a listen at what happens, with Gnossiennes No. 5 from 0:15 to 0:52. The music is playing twice, but you only hear it once because it matches perfectly. The way the verbalizations and dialogue work together are the kill-me-now gut punch taste-of-orange frosting on the best cake ever.

It's beautiful.

[cinematicnomad]

THE TERROR ▸ 1.09 the c, the c, the open c

[luciuscodedswedeboy]

Lucius 🤝 Izzy 🤝 Auntie

“I’m trying to help this idiot but they’re in love”