Writing from the collision point
I am writing as a Canadian, a psychic-medium, a writer, and someone who has lived inside the collision between spiritual experience and psychiatric labelling. I am not saying that every person diagnosed with mental illness is secretly psychic. I am not saying that every voice, fear, altered state, or unusual perception is spiritual. I am saying that the category called mental illness is not clean or complete enough to justify a total ban on medical assistance in dying for every person placed inside it.
Some of what I witnessed was treated as illness. Some of it had pattern, moral information, spiritual correspondence, psychic activity, and repeated experiential confirmation that did not fit neatly into the language of disease. From inside an experience, a person may understand it as spiritual contact, negative interference, metaphysical pressure, or conflict under duress. That understanding can coexist with medical care. It should not automatically be mocked, flattened, or accepted as unquestionable fact.
A rights question, not a shortcut
Psychiatry can describe distress, reduce distress, and sometimes save lives. It cannot honestly claim to have mapped the whole field of consciousness, anomalous perception, spiritual emergency, psychic sensitivity, soul distress, or negative spiritual encounter. When science has not caught up, the witness is not automatically false. It may mean the institution has more to learn.
That is where MAID becomes a rights question. The relevant question should not be only whether a diagnosis is psychiatric. It should be whether an adult is capable, informed, voluntary, stable in the decision, free from improper pressure, and enduring suffering that cannot be relieved under conditions they find acceptable. A rights-based framework assesses the person. A discriminatory framework excludes the entire category.
I understand why people worry about psychological suffering: it can change, and capacity can fluctuate. But physical pain and physical illness fluctuate too. A good hour does not erase years of intolerable distress, and a smile does not prove freedom. At the same time, a request for MAID must never become a substitute for housing, disability support, therapy, medical care, spiritual care, community, or a life made materially bearable.
True consent needs real alternatives
From my spiritual perspective, consent and personal authority are sacred. True Law is not institutional convenience. It asks whether a person’s will is actually their own, whether poverty, housing failure, family pressure, neglect, spiritual attack, untreated illness, or coercive despair is making the decision for them. If those forces are present, the answer is deeper assessment and better support, not automatic dismissal—and not automatic approval.
Spiritual language must be treated with both respect and restraint. “Spirit told me” cannot replace capacity. “Heaven is real” cannot replace informed consent. A belief in negative entities cannot, by itself, justify MAID. Assessors should understand that voice-hearing exists on a spectrum, that spiritual crisis and mental illness can overlap without being identical, and that some symbolic language may express trauma or danger. The safeguards still need to be strict: a capable adult, informed consent, voluntariness, repeated assessment, long-term consistency, review of alternatives, meaningful support, and protection from coercion.
My position
MAID for mental illness should exist under extremely strict safeguards as a final rights-based option for competent adults whose suffering is enduring, intolerable, and not relievable under conditions they can accept. It must never be casual death, despair-management, or a response to a society’s failure to provide care. Canada cannot say “you must stay alive” while allowing a person to fall through poverty, isolation, untreated distress, spiritual invalidation, and bureaucratic abandonment.
The moral failure would be to pretend suffering counts only when it appears on a scan, tumour marker, X-ray, or body in late-stage decline. Some of the worst suffering is invisible. Some of it is spiritual. Some of it is the exhaustion of translating soul pain into a language the system will accept.
I am asking Canada to respect life enough to understand unbearable suffering honestly: provide housing, income, therapy, disability support, love, community, medical care, and spiritual respect. And when every acceptable alternative has failed, do not trap a competent adult behind a psychiatric label. To me this is not pro-death. It is pro-consent, pro-dignity, pro-truth, pro-Charter, and pro-spiritual honesty.