Death doctor promotes euthanasia for mental illness.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Jean Marmoreo, who is a family physician who practised in downtown Toronto for 45 years and became one of Canada’s first euthanasia doctors in 2016, wrote an opinion article that was published in the Globe and Mail on October 9, 2026 supporting euthanasia for mental illness, as a sole criteria.

Marmoreo's article fits the general position of the death lobby who have "drank the kool-aid" and view killing people by poison as just another procedure. Marmoreo states:

I was among the first physicians in this country to provide medical assistance in dying when it became legal in 2016. For more than 10 years, I have helped people die with the dignity this country promised them. So I am firm in saying that when Ottawa this week said it planned to bar those whose sole underlying condition is a mental disorder from requesting an assisted death, it wasn’t prudence dressed up as caution; it was politically driven cowardice in the face of controversy surrounding an individual’s Charter rights of bodily autonomy.

Marmoreo writes what the death lobby always write, that is to refer to the law as preventing someone from "requesting an assisted death" rather than stating the truth, that the law is preventing a doctor from killing a person, when their sole underlying condition is a mental disorder.

The euthanasia lobby writers use this tactic to change the issue to "freedom of speech" (request) rather than the doctor having the right to kill, which is more controversial.

Marmoreo then refers to killing people, whose sole underlying condition is a mental disorder, as being a "Charter" issue. This statement assumes that the Supreme Court of Canada, in Carter, decided that people have the right to be killed, even if their only condition is a mental disorder.

Marmoreo also follows the euthanasia lobby talking point, that killing people whose sole underlying condition is a mental disorder will prevent suicide. Marmoreo writes:

I have known too many patients who deteriorated and ended their own lives alone, without safeguards, without support, without the humane and legally supervised option that a person with a physical diagnosis would have been granted without a second thought. Canadians don’t keep statistics on “botched suicides,” but we should.

Suicide is always a tragedy and I understand that the Supreme Court of Canada, in Carter, falsely decided that legalizing assisted death will enable people to live longer because they would not "need" to die by suicide if medical homicide is an option.

But the concept that medical homicide is better than a self-killing is problematic, even with the use of the scare tactic of describing violent suicide deaths.

Finally Marmoreo goes on about how doctors are careful when they kill patients by lethal poison. Marmoreo then states:

I have watched hundreds of good deaths, enough to know that one delivered at the patient’s request, after careful and rigorous assessment, is not an act of harm, but of mercy. 

Even if it would only result in "one" death delivered at the "patient's request" it would still constitute an act whereby a doctor or nurse practitioner kills a person based on a "irremediable" medical condition. Should doctors and nurse practitioners ever have the right to kill people?

Further to that, how can Marmoreo, who is not a psychiatrist, assume that the person who is killed actually had an irremediable medical condition? Leading psychiatrists across Canada have stated that it is impossible to determine if a person's mental disorder is irremediable. 

Treatment and care for people with suicidal ideation and mental health conditions is compassionate. Killing is not compassionate.