Claire Brosseau is desperate to die.

She is 48 years old and has had a life she calls an “an embarrassment of riches.” She has a vast network of friends, a devoted family, the steadfast adoration of a small dog. She has performed to raucous laughter in some of North America’s most prestigious comedy clubs and festivals, acted in movies, written brutally funny television shows. She has traveled, shopped, danced and known herself to be deeply loved.

She also suffers from debilitating mental illness that decades of treatment have not tamed. Sometimes she is so crushingly sad that she sobs until her bones ache. Sometimes she feels as if she were standing on a ledge, flipping minute by minute between being sure that if she jumped she would actually fly, and wanting to hurl herself as hard as she can onto the ground.

She has tried more times than she can count to die by suicide. She has overdosed on drugs and cut her wrists. Once she deliberately ate peanuts to trigger her severe allergy, hoping to die of anaphylaxis.

In 2021, Ms. Brosseau, who lives in Toronto, learned of a coming change to Canadian law that would allow people who suffered with an incurable medical condition but were not near death to ask a doctor to end their life.

Brosseau has joined the legal challenge that was launched by the euthanasia lobby group, Dying With Dignity, challenging the legal restriction that prevents euthanasia for mental illness alone. Nolen reported:

In April 2024, Ms. Brosseau got an email from Dying With Dignity Canada, an advocacy organization, with a question. The group was planning to go to the courts to argue that the exclusion of people with mental illness from access to assisted death was discriminatory. They had one plaintiff — a war correspondent whose last 30 years had been a hellscape of PTSD. They wanted to know if Ms. Brosseau — who had been in touch with them from time to time for updates on the law — would be another.

She agreed immediately.

She assembled thousands of pages of medical files. She labored, with her fractured memory, to tell the lawyers preparing the case the story of her 34 years of illness.

Two physicians she had never met, but who already routinely conducted assessments for people seeking assisted deaths, one of them a psychiatrist, were assigned by the legal team to assess her. Both concluded that she would be eligible under the guidelines for chronic conditions — as a person with an irremediable illness that caused her persistent, intolerable suffering, who had the capacity to make sound medical decisions — if she were not excluded by her diagnosis.

Meanwhile the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition is promoting Bill C-218, a private members bill that is sponsored by Tamara Jansen (MP) to prevent euthanasia for mental illness alone from ever being implemented. (Link to the Bill C-218 campaign article).

EPC produced a social change film. Part of that film concerns euthanasia for mental illness. Please share our short video: No MAiD for Mental Illness (Video Link).