TORONTO — David Slater is urging members of Parliament to consider the consequences of a proposed ban on medically assisted death for mental illness, saying his late wife wanted the option before she died by suicide. Slater said Diane McDowell, 71, was not eligible for a medically assisted death, known as MAID. He believes it should be an option for mental illness. "She had kept it in remission," Slater said of his wife's depression. "But when the time came, it wasn't going to go back. She had passed the point of remission."
Justice Minister Sean Fraser introduced legislation in late October that would ban people with mental illness as a sole underlying condition from accessing MAID. The bill is expected to be passed into law in the coming months. Fraser said he made the decision in the absence of consensus from the medical community and erred on the side of caution. "And you do your best to, in the presence of a wide range of opinions, take decisions that have the potential to preserve life where possible, without being inconsiderate towards people who don't see a path for themselves," Fraser told The Canadian Press.
The minister said he was heeding concerns from many psychiatrists who said there was no way to parse out if someone could get better with the right treatment. He also said he spoke to people who would not be alive today if MAID had been an option. Fraser read McDowell's obituary and was moved by the tragedy. He recently lost a close childhood friend after a more than 20-year battle with mental illness. "I'm not blind to the struggle that people have when they live with mental illness with deadly consequences," Fraser said.
Slater said he knows his wife's life would have ended either way, but with MAID, "the dignity with which she lived her life would have been maintained." He recalled a conversation they had about a month and a half before her death, when McDowell said, "I don't want to die, but I don't want to live like this." Slater paused as tears spilled from his eyes. "And that's MAID in a nutshell." Some experts have warned that restricting access to MAID for mental illness would result in people dying by suicide instead of surrounded by family on their own terms.
McDowell managed depression with medication and therapy for decades before it overwhelmed her in retirement. She was a founding partner at a litigation firm and worked there for more than 30 years. Slater said she was known for her grace, empathy and professionalism. The couple did not have children. "We have holidays," Slater said they liked to quip. They spent winters sailing the Caribbean and summers in Toronto. Several years into retirement, McDowell asked her family doctor to go off her depression medication and began tapering her dose.
They were on a boat in Grenada when she woke up one morning and told Slater she had to go home. "Something is not right," he recalls her saying. He said that was the beginning of a more difficult journey. She went back on medication, but it did not help. None of the treatments her doctors tried in the coming years worked, including transcranial magnetic stimulation, electroconvulsive therapy or ketamine. "It came on like a ton of bricks. It was shocking," Slater said.
He recalled waking one night to the sound of their brass headboard banging against the wall. "She was shaking so hard that I thought she was actually having an epileptic fit," he said. He later learned she had had an anxiety attack. It sometimes took eight or nine hours for her surge of panic to subside. "They say the actual attacks are usually like only four or five minutes, but it's the getting over them that takes a huge drain," he said. Six months after Grenada, McDowell spent a month in the psychiatric ward at Toronto General Hospital.
Not long after she was discharged, Slater recalls his wife not getting dressed. She was someone who would not even answer the door in sweatpants. Things she once loved became reminders of her lost joy. Gardening for hours in her Toronto backyard, slipping on a pair of shiny loafers and sailing through the Caribbean were all out of reach. Fraser said this policy decision was not "an accounting exercise," weighing the fatal stakes of either withholding or granting MAID. The legislation is expected to be passed in the coming months.