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Assisted suicide for mentally ill people isn’t intended to put a stop to “grievous and irremediable suffering” then, as its supporters claim. Rather, it causes different suffering by taking a robotic understanding of what it means to be human to its natural – which is to say, its engineered – end.

Maybe that’s expected. Liberal societies have deep respect for every individual’s right to hurt themselves. But all this autonomy and self-determination comes at a social cost that we can only ignore if we don’t recognize people as social creatures. Costs have already been borne by those countries where people access assisted suicides because of mental health issues.

In Belgium, a daughter didn’t learn of her depressed mother’s assisted suicide until the day after she died. The daughter is furious, but the mother willed it. Doctors approved the assisted suicide of a 25-year-old woman because she felt she couldn’t “have a goal” in life. Her parents, surprisingly not furious, supported her suicide – after all, she willed it – but one can imagine other parents being furious. In the Netherlands and Switzerland, some doctors help patients kill themselves because they didn’t want to depend on loved ones, but some of their loved ones must be less grateful that the death was “dignified” than angry that it wasn’t prevented.

The Supreme Court has heard similar cautionary tales. Mere anecdotes, Canadians are told. But how has doctor-assisted suicide ever been justified, if not partly through the anecdotes of those who desire it? Supporters of assisted suicide for the mentally ill don’t oppose anecdotes any more than they oppose suffering; they disregard anecdotes from people who exercise their personal autonomy to object to the harmful way that their loved ones exercised theirs.