Canadian actress Claire Brosseau is in so much pain from “unbearable,” long-term mental illness that she has petitioned a court to grant emergency permission for medically assisted suicide to end her “unrelenting suffering.”
The Montreal-born 49-year-old, who is also a writer and comedian, made her case Monday outside the Ontario Superior Court of Justice after she and her lawyers filed an emergency motion with the court to request an exemption from the country’s right-to-die law that excludes people whose sole condition is mental illness.
“Every morning I wake up I don’t think I’m going to make it through the day,” Brosseau told onlookers from the courthouse steps, flanked by her lawyer, Michael Fenrick, and Helen Long, CEO of the advocacy group Dying With Dignity Canada.
Brosseau has for the most part withdrawn from the world, she told The New York Times last year. Numerous therapy modalities, 25 or more medications, guided psychedelics and numerous electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) sessions have not helped, she said, and her condition is only getting worse. She writes extensively about her experience on the Substack “I Don’t Rememoir.”
While medically assisted suicide has been legal in Canada since 2016, a person seeking it must have a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” such as a serious illness, disease or disability; be in an irreversible, advanced state of decline, and be subject to unremitting, unbearable physical or mental suffering that no treatment can mitigate, according to Health Canada’s website. The person’s condition does not need to be fatal or terminal.
Brosseau says she meets all the criteria but is too physically healthy to access medical aid in dying (MAID, in Canada). The law was expanded in 2021 to allow eligibility for severe mental illness — provided the person was of sound mind and not under external pressure — but that has been bumped several times. The delay is set to expire in March 2027. That’s too far away for Brosseau, who has been treated for severe bipolar disorder since she was a teen, attempted suicide on numerous occasions, and is currently retired after a successful entertainment career.
“I want to be clear about what these delays mean for me personally,” Brosseau said. “Every month of delay is another month of suffering that I am told I must simply endure.”