Canadian army-veterans diagnosed with PTSD offered euthanasia

Canadian veterans who have been diagnosed with PTSD as a result of serving in Afghanistan have been offered assisted suicide as a cure for their mental health problems.

19-year-old Kelsi Sheren, a Canadian army veteran who served six months on the frontline in Afghanistan witnessed a harrowing death of fellow comrade which has left her with PTSD. She described it as her “first exposure to watching someone die”.

When she arrived home to Vancouver, Canada she tried multiple therapies. She said she “couldn’t really feel anything. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t tired. I was just enraged.”

Sheren said she was offered a number of medications designed to mellow her out or put her to sleep which she found did not help. It took several other therapies before she felt a change.

She has now made it her mission to help other veterans facing similar struggles, and who have been offered euthanasia by authorities.

‘It’s unacceptable,’ she says, ‘and it’s one of the most infuriating things to come down from the Canadian administration in the last decade’.

Assisted suicide has been legal since 2016 in Canada and has expanded to over 10,000 cases in 2021. Critics of euthanasia have warned that assisted suicide has become easier to access.

It has been reported that people with autism have been euthanised in the Netherlands, and in Australia officials are debating whether to introduce procedures for children as young as 14.

The director of campaign group Patients’ Rights Action Fund, Matt Valliere, has said that this sends the message that “people with certain disabilities are better off dead.

“Every expansion of assisted suicide and euthanasia simply adds additional subsets of people with disabilities to the group of those who qualify or makes it easier, quicker, or cheaper for them to get it.

He adds, “people who need support are shunted into a ‘utilitarian death-funnel’.”

In the countries in which it is legal, the number of people opting for assisted suicide have been steadily rising.