Too Poor to Live, But Not Too Well to Die

ETA: This perfect line from British MP Florence Eschalomi: 

"Freedom in death is only possible if you have freedom in life."

In March 2024, Canadians with mental health problems who haven't found significant relief from their condition will be able to get Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). 

As I wrote recently of the mental health crisis, 

"We no longer lock people up in asylums; instead, we give them less than they need to survive, and they end up living in tents that randomly get bulldozed into the trash by government officials. We're back to the pre-asylum days where people who couldn't work because of a mental health condition have to resort to begging in the streets. In just a few months, they'll be eligible for MAiD." 

Of course this is not to suggest that all homeless have a mental illness, but that many people with a mental health condition end up homeless because of a lack of supports. 

According to Stats Canada, 

"In the database, the underlying cause of death is defined as the disease or injury that initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death. As such, MAiD deaths are coded to the underlying condition for which MAiD was requested, . . . In the case of a disability or mental health condition, deaths are coded to the underlying disability or mental health issue that MAiD was granted for." 

Cultural Differences of ASD

I was once introduced to a new colleague who made very direct, sustained eye contact, and I thought to myself as I spoke with him: he's on track to be in admin. He just seemed the type to make connections and get ahead and would likely end up at the board office. But then, after talking to him a few more times and seeing him in moments of awkwardness, I thought, "Oh, he's autistic." That didn't change my reaction to him at all, of course, but it did help me figure something out.

That interaction was a lightbulb moment that helped me understand the many many times someone gloms on to me as if somehow I'm the most interesting person in the room, then, after a few conversations in which nothing appears to go wrong, they completely ghost me. They thought, because of my sustained eye contact boring into them, that I must be someone important, an alpha even. Then they figured out their error and shunned me, embarrassed by their own mistake. I'm fine with someone changing their mind about hanging out because that happens to the best of us, but the absolute worst part of it, worse that literally being pointed and laughed at by other adults, is when they suddenly understand that I'm on the spectrum and start talking to me like I'm a flippin' space cadet. 

So, just last month you wanted to take me to lunch at some fancy place, and now you've concluded that I'm practically brain dead. Curious. It's always startling how abrupt that transition is for people. And how reliable.

Then mix that in with "you can only do that because you're autistic" like writing every day, which is a thing that writers do, but if you can't motivate yourself to do it, then the reason I can do it despite clearly being inferior to you must be my hidden superpower of being autistic. So things I can't easily do are laughed at openly and the things I can do are discounted. Lovely.

It's not tragic, but it is trying. These little things can eat away at people. Surely we know it's not right to behave this way with others, though, right?? 

A few studies show that people notice something different about people with autism in the first few seconds of an encounter (h/t Callum Stephen). In one study (Sasson et al, 2017), they filmed a variety of people, some with ASD (level 1) and some neurotypical (NT), in a 60 second mock audition. The study participants were assigned to one of five groups to watch the videos and assess each candidate on likability, intelligence, attractiveness, trustworthiness, etc.: audio only, visual only, audio-visual, static image, and transcript. Only in the transcript option were people with ASD rated as highly as NT interviews. Even the still image set them apart. (Is that why there are no good photos of me: Internalized ableism??) The study concluded,

Chris Hedges on Our Current State of Paralysis

Hedges writes on Substack now, if you haven't been able to find him lately, and his piece today is excellent. 

He starts by pointing out the growing rich-poor divide that is seeing the top earnings increase by almost 90% in the last decease in the states, while the lowest struggle to find an apartment they can afford. The government is doing nothing about poverty, climate, infrastructure, health care, and violence by police or fearful neighbours. He says, 

Democracies are not slain by reactionary buffoons like Donald Trump, who was routinely sued for failing to pay workers and contractors and whose fictional television persona was sold to a gullible electorate, or shallow politicians like Joe Biden, whose political career has been devoted to serving corporate donors. These politicians provide a false comfort of individualizing our crises, as if removing this public figure or censoring that group swill save us. Democracies are slain when a tiny cabal, in our case corporate, seizes control of the economy, culture and the political system, and distorts them to exclusively serve its own interests.

This analysis helps to explain how many corporations have so easily walked us back to pre-New Deal years, stripping away workers' rights, ignoring environmental regulations, focusing on basic facts while eroding the critical thinking of the humanities in public schools and universities, and removing useful health protections in hospitals. We're already not a democracy, as Hedges has said for years, invoking Wolin's inverted totalitarianism. Today he quotes research from professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, 

On UW's Mental Health Recommendations

After another suicide on the campus of the University of Waterloo, the university compiled 36 recommendations to try to alleviate the mental health crisis and held (and taped) a forum as well. It really says something about our lives that one of the recommendations is about the process of communicating suicides to students. At my school board, when I was a union rep, we had long conversations on this same topic. Suicide is now common enough to elicit developing a standard operating procedure for WHEN it happens.

We are clearly in the midst of a profound mental health crisis everywhere, not just in the universities. But because we're still on shaky ground trying to determine the cause of the problem, it's so hard to find the best solution. I had a good discussion with my class about Johann Hari's Lost Connections, and they were quite defensive at the suggestion that anxiety and depression are anything but biological conditions. People with these conditions are "actually sick," they insisted. Of course they are. But we can be sick without the cause of the illness being an inborn chemical imbalance. Clearly we can get lung cancer from living in a city where we swim though polluted air on our daily commute. So, like particulates physically affect our lungs, loneliness, trauma, ongoing stress, a lack of control over our environment, losing hope for the future, and perfectionism physically affect our brains. The effects can be seen in an MRI. It's no less real and no less an externally imposed condition in our brains than pollution is in our bodies.