As we wait with bated breath for the Federal government to react, officially, to the AMAD hearings on doctor-assisted suicide for people with mental illness, I’ve been reflecting upon language, and how it shapes reality. Change a word here, a phrase there, and suddenly you’re in a whole new moral landscape, wondering how you got here — and how you may have contributed to the gradual shift towards a world in which people with mental illness may be offered death, rather than therapy, as a solution to difficult and stubborn “treatment-resistant” life problems.
I feel sick when I remember the first time I heard ASSISTED SUICIDE referred to as “MAID”. What!?? Like you’re picking up the phone in a fancy hotel and calling for “maid service”? Like asking for “the maid” after you drop your glass of red wine on the expensive patterned carpet or the white leather sofa? I thought to myself at the time (in 2015) WHOA! If that catches on, we’ve lost the battle. And now, a decade + in, I can see how right I was. I personally resisted the shift. I kept on calling it what it actually is, until I didn’t. We give in. It’s easier to say. It’s easier to type! My one tiny resistance I’ve held onto is typing it in all caps, instead of the two-caps-small-i-third cap format that is now considered “correct”.
But no matter how you type it, it’s still assisted suicide. It’s a doctor or nurse agreeing with a patient that their case — their life — is hopeless, that nothing but pain and horrible struggle lies ahead and eventually death will win anyway, so why go through all of that — just end it now. Painless, quick. It’s over. Say your good-byes, depart “on your own terms”, drop the wineglass on the floor and don’t worry about it — someone else will clean up after you. It still makes me feel sick.
Am I alone here? Have other people felt that their brain has been twisted inside out on this issue?
Ava Duvernay, filmmaker and activist, writes in a post called The Narrative War, “The first rupture of democracy isn’t really between people and power. It’s between language and what words are willing to acknowledge or betray. … It shows up through familiar words … and it asks us to nod along.” While Duvernay is talking about ICE in Minneapolis, the parallels with Canada’s doctor-assisted dying regime strike me as relevant. We have become accustomed to words like ‘compassion’, ‘choice’, ‘suffering’, ‘treatment’ and of course ‘dignity’.
MAID is not suicide, they say, it’s a “treatment choice” made by a “suffering patient” with a “grievous and irremediable medical condition”. Canada’s history of eugenics — popular in the 1930’s — is factual and established, but the word “eugenics” is no longer permitted in the MAID curriculum, because doctors don’t want people to associate them with the bad old days when they routinely sterilized people with intellectual disabilities so they wouldn’t reproduce “their kind”; or worse, when members of their profession participated in the Nazi project of “T4 euthanasia”
Eupehmisms — even the word euthanasia itself — are everywhere. Plain language is over-ruled because it might be upsetting, shocking — or enlightening, leading to public opposition or demands for better regulation and/or oversight and/or reform or repeal of the system. Duvernay says, “”Knock down, drag out vigilance over language is a necessary form of democratic defense. Our attentiveness to what’s being said and the words WE OURSELVES use is critical. Notice how what we say can both obscure and authorize – often without us even realizing it.”
In an article in the Globe and Mail in May of this year, the Editorial Board stated that “Politicians do not rely on euphemism to be polite. They do it to deflect attention from what is actually happening. …They will do it because they believe it works for them. It’s up to everyone else to make sure it doesn’t.” As citizens, we have a responsibility to speak the plain truth and not let people get away with glossing over troubling realities. That same article drew readers attention to an applied psychology article which demonstrated the truth that “Employing euphemistic labels … reduces the perceived severity of moral transgressions and, as a result, also reduces third-party motivations to punish transgressors,”
Again, I quote DuVernay, who says “the narrative war depends on our fatigue. It depends on the assumption that language is secondary to survival and that none of this can be stopped anyway… so why try. But disengagement is exactly what allows these stories to harden. It counts on the idea that we are too tired to push back or too overwhelmed to ask better questions or too busy surviving to notice the story being performed. But we can always choose otherwise.”
Robyn Urback, in an article published last week in the G&M, states that “Collectively, [Canadians have] come to accept what’s happening, casually sipping our coffees while the man on the other side of the café window literally signs away his life. ” She says, “Because … notions of compassion, freedom, autonomy make us feel better about what is, really, a malignant indifference toward our fellow man. That malignant indifference is taking the lives of the most vulnerable, and it’s slowly eating away at this country’s soul.”
Post Script — I actually meant to end this post with the following: “Who knows, perhaps the Carney government will be advised not to go ahead with this expansion and a course correction can begin. For this evening, I choose hope.” But I must have pressed the publish button without saving the sentence.
Then 10 minutes after pressing that button, the story leaked: The AMAD committee recommended AGAINST expanding the criteria! Hurray! My hope was justified!!
Now, let’s make sure the government listens!
Remember, as Robyn Urback pointed out, our tendency as Canadians is to shrink away from accusations of “discrimination” and to reflexively defend “bodily autonomy” without thinking about other bodies that may be affected by our self-absorbed thinking; and we’re very reluctant to admit that we may have “… erroneously helped some of our own citizens to kill themselves.” Let’s fight those tendencies in ourselves and others. And let’s write to members of the AMAD committee, thanking them for listening and for doing the right thing!