Intersectionality Mental Health, MAID, and Suicidality with Rebecca Deutsch
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Intersectionality Mental Health, MAID, and Suicidality with Rebecca Deutsch
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Bernadine Fox sits down with Rebecca Deutsch, PhD candidate in Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies at York University, for a conversation that refuses to stay on safe ground. The topic is Medical Assistance in Dying and the still-unresolved question of whether Canadians whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental disorder should have access to it.
This episode was recorded before the June 17, 2026 release of the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying report, which recommended indefinitely excluding people with mental illness from MAID eligibility. A dissenting opinion from three senators noted that more than two-thirds of witnesses called were publicly opposed to expansion and that people with lived experience were not prioritized. That critique lands directly in the middle of everything discussed here.
Rebecca brings lived experience of suicidality and loss alongside months of close discourse analysis of the MAID MDSUMC policy documents. What she found in that language tells you a great deal about whose suffering counts. She traces how "suicidality" gets invoked as a threat in the policy, used to separate valid requests from illegitimate ones, and what that framing does to people navigating both realities at once.
The conversation moves into the structural: Canada's history of eugenic practice running through asylum institutionalization into the present, where MAID expands while housing, community support, and meaningful care remain inaccessible. Rebecca describes a case where a woman cancelled her MAID request after community funding allowed her to leave a living situation that was making her disability unmanageable. The request was not for death. It was for conditions she could survive in.
The through-line across all of it is who is in the room when these decisions get made. Psychiatrists, lawyers, and doctors shaped this policy. No one with lived experience was consulted. No Indigenous elders were brought in. Rebecca and Bernadine are clear: MAID without housing, community, and the genuine participation of affected people is not a compassionate policy. This is one of those episodes that stays with you.
This is one of those episodes that stays with you.
Music by Shari Ulrich, Tom Odell, Fearless Soul
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