Denver, Colo., Aug 5, 2017 / 04:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- With awareness of mental health conditions on the rise, how is the Church called to respond to those who do not simply wish to end their lives, but push for the right to do so legally?
Adam Maier-Clayton was a young Canadian activist who suffered from a variety of mental health issues and began campaigning for just such a law after his symptoms worsened.
The 27-year-old, who spent the final years of his life promoting such activism, from childhood had suffered from anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. He had been to therapy and tried medication.
However, his symptoms worsened drastically at age 23, when he experimented with marijuana. He spent about a week in and out of the hospital, his father told the BBC, and began suffering severe physical pain. Any cognitive activity, such as reading, writing, or even sustained conversation, would trigger the pain, which had no evident physical cause.
Adam’s new symptoms were ultimately attributed to a somatic symptom disorder. The condition is little understood, but the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5) notes that it is often co-morbid with depressive disorders.
As a result of this condition, Adam developed suicidal thoughts, according to the BBC piece. For someone in his situation, this is far from unusual, according to the DSM-5.
“Our first response to somebody who is suicidal really needs to be compassion,” Dr. Jim Langley of St. Raphael’s Counseling in Denver told CNA of suicidal tendencies. “For someone to want to take their own life, they must be suffering to a large degree. The drive for survival is very, very strong in us.”
In June of last year, Canada passed Bill C-14, the country’s right to die legislation. The law allows adult persons perceived to be at the end of their life whose deterioration has been deemed irreversible to request euthanization. The Church is opposed to all forms of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide.
Adam began campaigning for a change to the law, so that its provisions would be extended to people with mental disorders. He expressed frustration with the crippling nature of the disease.
However, finding a new way of life accommodated for the illness is key to finding meaning amid the suffering, Langley emphasized. That meaning is important in recovery and developing the ability to bear the suffering and thus continue living.
“Somatoform disorder can take all sorts of different forms,” he said, “but when it happens it definitely can incapacitate people in things that mean a lot to them… I’d be working with him to find more useful things that he could do with himself, whatever that is. It might even be raising awareness about somatoform disorder.”
According to Langley, “People who in general have meaningful relationships can overcome all sorts of different pain. My guess is, even if he had parents who were supportive of him taking his own life, he must have felt like he had fallen out of his community.”
Adam, however, became devoted to advocating the legalization of physician-assisted suicide for those with mental conditions perceived to be unbearable. His parents supported him in this effort.
“The legislation literally forces people to kill themselves in an undignified manner,” he said on his YouTube channel.
However, the logic of a “death with dignity” by suicide is flawed, according to Dr. Greg Battaro of the CatholicPsych Institute.
“Where they’re claiming the right to choose to die, based on the dignity of the person, is an error in their logic. It’s because precisely of the dignity of the person that we don’t have the right to choose how we’re born or die. The dignity of the person is greater than what they presume it to be.”
Adam ultimately took his life using an illegally imported drug mixture April 13, 2017, after checking into a motel room that morning.
“My son deserved to die with dignity, with his family and his friends beside him, in his own, comfy bed,” his mother, Maggie Maier, says in her closing remarks in a YouTube video, having just read the letter he had written her before taking his life.
In that eulogy, she noted that had she and Adam’s father been present, they could have been criminally prosecuted. She characterized her son as having been forced to take his own life by himself by Canada’s law.
Battaro also described the legalization of euthanasia as a “complete and utter failure of the medical system and of the government in providing the hope that people would need to actually get better.”
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) refused to comment for this story. Both the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the U.S. and the KidsHelpPhone in Canada did not respond to CNA’s request for comment.
The Center for Disease Control’s guidelines on media coverage of suicide warn against “(p)resenting suicide as a tool for accomplishing certain ends” or “(g)lorifying suicide or persons who complete suicide,” as such coverage is “likely to contribute to suicide contagion.”
“Such actions may contribute to suicide contagion by suggesting to susceptible persons that society is honoring the suicidal behavior of the deceased person, rather than mourning the person’s death,” the guidelines state.
A video accompanying the BBC piece contains speakers who suggest that the exclusion of mental health cases from the Canadian law stems from a stigma around psychiatric issues.
However, legalizing suicide will not serve to fight existing stigmas around mental issues, as the advocacy of Adam and his parents suggested, but will only legitimize that aversion to mental issues further, said Battaro.
“It’s taking that avoidance to the extreme,” according to Battaro. “We’re just going to make these people disappear.”
Additionally, the “moral stigma,” as Langley described, around suicide can often save lives.
“Sometimes, it’s just the desire to not want to make an immoral decision that keeps people alive, if they’re suffering from a mental illness,” he said, although we must also keep in mind that their pain is often so great that moral decision-making is impaired.
How can suffering be redemptive?
In Adam’s case, Battaro said, “(t)here was a total absence of understanding of anything good coming from suffering. Helping somebody process the meaning of their suffering would help move towards a different conclusion. There’s really almost nothing as unbearable as suffering without meaning, or purposeless suffering.”
Both Battaro and Langley emphasized the need to find purpose, meaning, and redemption amid the suffering of our lives.
First, as Christians, we believe that our suffering is redemptive as it is joined to Christ’s suffering on the cross, Langley said.
“If you look at the cross, that is the perfect answer to the problem of suffering. Jesus is up there on the cross, and he’s saying, ‘Me too. I suffer too.’”
But what does this purpose, this meaning of suffering look like? How do we lift our view past the notion that pain is meaningless and to be avoided at all costs?
According to Battaro, “we’re talking about the invitation to join to the suffering of Christ, and to be united to him in his suffering. We see that our human concept of fulfillment is really limited unless we open it up to the Resurrection, that understanding that death is not the end, and there’s something past it, but it’s only through the doorway of suffering that we enter into the Resurrection.”
But communicating this redemptive image of our mental and physical anguish to those who do not share our beliefs requires conviction on the part of Christians, Battaro said.
“The first thing we need to do is work on ourselves, change our own understanding and pray for the grace of faith so that we can really believe in the hope of redemptive suffering ourselves, and not live lives which are catered to avoiding every ounce of suffering we can,” said Battaro.
This redemption of suffering can be found in even the hardest of cases, according to Battaro.
“For most disorders, even the one that Adam suffered from, there’s hope.”
Mental illness and euthanasia – what’s it like where it is legal?
The proposal to include mental illness in the criteria for euthanasia and assisted suicide is not new. Such provisions already exist both in Belgium and the Netherlands.
In the Netherlands, from 2010 to 2015, euthanasia in the case of psychiatric disorders grew from just two cases to 56.
From 2014 to 2015, 124 cases of euthanasia in Belgium involved patients with a “mental and behavioral disorder.” Five persons diagnosed with autism were killed.
According to a piece from February 2016 in the New York Times, most of those euthanized in Belgium for psychiatric reasons suffered from depression or, even more prevalent, loneliness. The depression cases were often co-morbid with issues such as substance abuse, dementia, or physical pain.
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Glad they expressed an objection, and bless them, even though I have my doubts about how strongly they feel it.
Hopefully they’ll encourage priests to share this info with us in the pews. That hasn’t been a thing in the past & many Catholics I know believe that IVF is prolife because it can result in a birth.
If Catholics think IVF is prolife why do we expect Pres. Trump to know any better?
Hope so too. But over the last four decades or so, I’ve never heard a single pro-life homily, except from unique figures like the late Father Richard Neuhaus and the late Monsignor Phillip Reilly. And I’ll also concede a pro-life very early morning homily from whichever priest joins us on the bus to Washington for the annual March for Life. Speaking of which, decades ago some would march with a sign that read, here are your people, where are our bishops?
Nonetheless, in more recent years a few have trickled in.
Everything we do in life is a source of witness. I wish I could remember this when I occasionally cuss.
What lies behind this debate over IVF is not merely a bioethical dispute about embryos or medical technique, but a profound philosophical crisis — the triumph of moral relativism over the classical and Christian understanding of truth, being, and human dignity.
Relativism is not new. It has a history — indeed, it has the history of humanity’s fall. The first relativist was not a man, but the Devil. His argument in Eden — “You will not die … you will be like God, knowing good and evil” — was the prototype of all later moral subjectivism. The serpent’s logic introduced the fateful idea that good and evil are relative, that truth is negotiable, that divine law is a matter of interpretation. This primordial “hermeneutic of suspicion” toward God’s word continues, refined and intellectualized, in every age.
The Sophists of ancient Greece were its first human spokesmen. “Man is the measure of all things,” said Protagoras. Against them rose Socrates, insisting that the soul must conform itself to truth, not truth to the soul’s desires. This same battle — between the arrogance of the self-measured man and the humility of the truth-seeking man — is the one we still fight today.
In Christian philosophy, neither Plato nor Aristotle reduced being to thought. The mind was to receive, imitate, and participate in what is. Truth, therefore, was objective, ontological, and binding. But with Descartes — “I think, therefore I am” — a seismic reversal occurred. Being was subordinated to consciousness. The “I” became the measure not only of truth but of reality itself. This idealist revolution was the philosophical fall of modernity, giving rise to the many descendants of Cartesian egocentrism: pantheism, atheism, Marxism, and, in the moral order, the sexual revolution.
From this genealogy arises the modern “culture of death,” in which even life itself is defined by utility, convenience, and control. IVF, therefore, is not just a medical act; it is a metaphysical declaration. It asserts that human life may be produced, selected, frozen, or discarded at will — that man may be both the artisan and the arbiter of being. It is the culmination of the Cartesian project: not “I think, therefore I am,” but “I produce, therefore I am.”
The bishops are right to condemn IVF, not only because it destroys innumerable embryonic lives, but because it corrodes the very notion of what it means to be human. Each embryo is not a potential human being; it is a human being with potential — a person who already is. When human life becomes a byproduct of technique, children cease to be gifts and become commodities. Love yields to manufacture; procreation becomes production.
This is why IVF, for all its apparent compassion, represents a deeper spiritual crisis than abortion itself. Abortion kills; IVF redefines. It teaches society to see life as raw material, to accept that the most sacred mystery — the transmission of life — can be mastered and mechanized. It turns the womb into a laboratory and the act of love into an industrial process.
In this sense, IVF is the emblem of the technological relativism of our age — the same relativism that began in Eden, found its philosophical expression in the Sophists, and took metaphysical root in Descartes. Its logical end is the abolition of man, the transformation of the human person into an object of design.
The bishops’ warning is therefore prophetic. To reject IVF is not to reject science; it is to defend the ontological dignity of life and the integrity of love. If man is no longer born of the gift of persons but of the will to power, then even the family, the first temple of human communion, becomes an artifact. Against this new Babel, the Church stands as the last custodian of the truth that life is sacred because it is not ours.
Paolo thank you for this well-crafted comment.
It was a pleasure to read.
That relativism was the devil’s action from the beginning is an eye opener in this age of post-Fiducia supplicans which relativises mortal sin for Ecumenical New Church.
Kind regards
CN
I agree. A well expressed thumbnail history of vanity to which we might add the current relativism of “diversity” and subjectivism of “discernment,” that is discernment without humility. And we know how easily we forget true prophesy. Benedict began his papacy with a reflection on the poison of relativism, and the first day of Leo’s pontificate began with his validating cultural prerogatives for interpreting Fiducia Supplicans.
Thank you, friend in Christ, for your kind words. The problem of Western civilization, as Peter Kreeft might say, is that we have lost the forest—the meaning, the poem—for the tree—the signs, the characters of the poem. Descartes saw only the tree; postmodernity has destroyed it altogether. Nietzsche and the deconstructionists do the opposite of Aristotle: they use the hammer, not the trowel. The remedy, as Don Bosco saw in his dream of the two pillars guiding the ship of the Church, remains the same—the Eucharistic Kingdom and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
“Catholic bishops criticize Trump’s IVF expansion: Every life is ‘sacred and loved by God’”
And, yet, so many of our bishops are ambivalent about the moral horror of abortion. Case in point: Cupich’s wanting to give a lifetime achievement award to a Catholic politician who was an outspoken supporter of killing unborn, defenseless babies. And furthermore you could count on both hands the number of bishops who came out publicly against his doing so. But when it comes to Trump and IVF, the bishops suddenly find their voice. We’re not having any more of your fecklessness
Here’s what I have to say to all our bishops and to Pope Prevost: Stop the politicization of Christ’s Church. The Church does NOT belong to you; it is Christ’s.
Indeed notice the lack of outrage of the bishops at Cardinal Cupich’s efforts to honor Democrat Senator Durbin, who favors allowing the killing of unborn babies or their silence over the pro-abortion policies of Presidents Biden, Obama, etc. ; and notice how the Pope honors Cupich by naming him to an office in the Vatican; and notice how the Pope wants open borders in other countries but keeps his own little country with some of the most strict anti-illegal aliens laws in the Western world. How applicable to all of them is
Matthew 23:13
For the Vatican’s laws and practices against illegal immigration see
Vatican Promises Stiff Penalties for Illegal Aliens Crossing its Border
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2025/01/16/vatican-promises-stiff-penalties-for-illegal-aliens-crossing-its-border/
IVF is expensive. Are taxpayers going to get saddled with much of the cost? Achieving a viable pregnancy might cost $50,000. If you expand this to a million cases,you will be talking billions of Dollars. Where is that money coming from?
Welfare/food stamps are expensive. Public schools are expensive. Vouchers are expensive. Health Care is expensive. Not many Catholics object to those things. IVF is just one more thing I guess the tax payers will have to dig deep to fund.
The same place Medicaid surgical gender mutilation money come from. Taxpayers.
Over the years, my wife and I have paid a lot of taxes. It’s discouraging to think what our tax dollars go to.
Since we sometimes disagree, I wanted to say, “Hear, hear!” Living in Oregon for 35 years has been especially discouraging on the tax front. Taxes are very high here (and 5-10 billion more just passed a few weeks ago), and most of them are wasted: corruption, ineptness, horrible agendas, lousy public education (ranked 45th in the nation for decades), etc. It’s maddening.
Guess your state hasn’t quite mastered the make everything free NY practice of just sending the bills to the generations of the future.
It’s discouraging indeed Mr William.
And much borrowing
Going seamless garment on us? Movement in the right direction is not to be welcomed unless every aspect of their governance meets your approval?
When have more enlightened than thou progressives ever cared about cost?
I am definitely opposed to Trump’s efforts to increase access to IVF.
However, I see the action of the USCCB as typical – send a letter to the president, or congress.
As much as I oppose Trump’s action on this, he is not our chief teacher of the faith, and sending a letter to him does not fulfill the teaching function of the bishops.
They need to teach the evil of IVF in their diocese, and have their priests do the same.
There are people in my parish who think that IVF is a good thing.
A lay person explaining to someone why IVF is not a good thing does not have nearly the effect that a priest would have saying the same thing from the pulpit.
If only the clergy had been onboard with the promotion of NFP and opposing contraception, we might not be in this situation. I gave up trying to teach NFP when the priests refused to support my efforts and assured people that contraception is okay if your conscience said so.
So, Democrats say…We must kill children in vetro. If children survive our attempts to kill them, we must kill them immediately after birth. We must also allow hundreds of thousands of children to be trafficked and work as slaves. Bishops say the democrats must be honored with lifetime achievement awards for their efforts at killing and trafficking children. OR, we at least must overlook the killing because trafficking children is such a good practice.
Republicans say…We must make it easier for childless couples to conceive via IVF. Bishops immediately write a letter condemning the republicans.
Got it.
One of my college roommates had four children. Two went to Notre Dame, one to Catholic University of America and the last to Loyola. My friend and his wife are fervent Catholics and brought their children up similarly. Two of his fully Catholic-educated children had four children – two each all of whom were born as a result of IVF (to my friend’s consternation). The tuition for “Catholic” education just at the university level for all four probably cost him no less than $400,000.
Exactly, DR. Until we properly teach Catholics about IVF (or at least attempt our very best) how do we expect someone like Donald Trump to get it?
One has to wonder if this expansion is additionally a Trumpian gift to his Log Cabin Republicans who need IVF to fabricate their families. Two men can now borrow/hire an egg/s (from a female friend or relative perhaps); each man may even donate their own sperm to have “half-siblings” (split -cycle) and so perpetuate the “romantic mystery” that each of them are the “fathers”, and then hire a woman (another friend or an industrial ally) for the gestational period, while the two men sit back until birth, when they will place both their names on the birth certificate, the whole case being sealed (in many states) so that the child will never know its biological or birth mother (since the child may actually have both). I would have liked to see the bishops take the opportunity to call out this pre-meditated, psychological, child abuse.
It’s a shame when adults purposely deprive a child of a parent but these days an IVF or surrogacy child can use DNA testing to track relatives down and hopefully information on their parent’s identity.
So. Yet again.
The Catholic Church, identified as the USCCB in America, has apparently satisfied itself as to its’ apostolic mission by publishing the referenced letters of the four bishops. There is nothing here to suggest an evangelical purpose. There is nothing to suggest a clear exhortation for the moral education of the Catholic Laity. Check the boxes; file for any future need or evidence.
The American institutional Catholic Church is in spiritual stagnation, blissfully mis-understanding the primacy of its’ real purposes, and quite detached from the needs of the Laity and its’ potential in behalf of the secular world. For this world sorely needs bishops who do less “Ruling”, and a great deal more “Teaching”. Exemplify, and require of pastors, specific dogmatic instruction (such as a homily like the above note by Paolo Giosue)
Bishops need to effect real moral knowledge and living by their community. The killings by Catholic persons and hospitals in their dioceses, whether by IVF, by killing from organ/tissue harvesting, by hidden euthanasia, etc. must be acknowledged and stopped.
Well said and amen, Roger Miller.
Oh … now we hear the bishops with their prophetic voice. I seem to recall that then-USSCB president Archbishop Gomez had a strong pro-life letter to Biden in 2021, but Cardinals Cupich and Tobin prevailed on Bergoglio (do you think that was a hard sell?) to make Gomez stand down and withdraw the letter. Well, aren’t we all happy they have finally found their voice. Oh, yeah, that’s right! Biden is no longer president. The USCCB never skips a beat when it comes to “speaking truth to power.” Oh, maybe they do skip a beat … all depends on whether the president is democrat or republican.
Yes. Now “hopefully” the child can track down the mother that never met the father; the mother who perhaps is a lesbian who thinks she’s a man yet bears children for money – an excellent reunion!
It’s important Inigo. Your parent is still your parent. Inherited health issues are another concern, too. Knowledge is a good thing. And so is forgiveness.
mrscracker – I recall many of your comments to my comments and you always avoid the issue or change the subject in our conversations until the conversation ends in silly tautologies (“Your parent is still your parent”). I need no reminder about the importance of knowledge and forgiveness which I add to truth and honesty. You do your work and I’ll do mine. And as always, I will let you have the last word… you wouldn’t have it any other way.
More kudos to Paulo Giosue for his wonderful concentrated comment above!!
I’m definitely filing that one away for future reference.