I'll preface this by saying that:

(a) I have suffered from severe mental health issues in the past and struggle with better-controlled ones to this day,

(b) I was pretty explicitly suicidal for several years (I still have the note I wrote on my desktop as a reminder; it's something I keep close to my heart as a thing that is precious to me),

(c) I very, VERY strongly believe in the idea of mental health as a health problem and not a moral one, largely because of my own experiences, and

(d) I agree with you that the failure to recognize (c) is a far larger problem than even poorly-justified assisted-dying would be.

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All that being said, though, I think there's legitimate reasons for concern here. I absolutely would have said my life was unendurable and that it could never improve, and I would have said that persistently for a long period of time (for around two years, so a substantial chunk of the approval period here). And the claim that my life wasn't going to improve was, in retrospect, a fairly reasonable belief - my life was in bad shape and even if I could talk to myself at the time I'm not sure how I'd ever justify the way it worked itself out.

But it did work itself out. Things did turn around, in a way I could never have predicted. My life improved, and in the years since, I have overcome basically every personal issue I thought I never would. That's not to say my life is perfect, by any means, but it's better than - and I use this phrase in its full literal sense - I could have imagined at the time.

I suffer(ed) from basically the same spectrum of conditions this woman does. I was roughly the same age. I had tried medical treatments that, while transformative in terms of the way I looked at mental health, had not offered sustained relief (and to this day have never found a medication that works effectively for me).

I have no doubt her desire for relief is sincere, because I have no doubt that mine was too. She's quoted in the article as saying:

> People think that when you’re mentally ill, you can’t think straight, which is insulting

I can't speak for her. But I think if someone had told me this during the depths of my own worst battles with it, what that would have sounded like to me is "you're not really in this much pain". In that sense, I agree (and would have agreed at the time) that it would be insulting.

But, again, while I can't speak for her, I was empirically not thinking straight, in the sense that my perceptions of the world and of myself were distorted. I was trapped in a system of mental processes that rounded "my life is really bad and I can't see any way it gets better" to "my life is unbearable and it is impossible that it ever gets better". I was, objectively, wrong in my predictions of the future and my judgements of myself, and that's not someone else talking, it's me, with the benefit of greater experience.

I didn't have the options on the table that she does. But if I had, and things had continued for more years the way they were? I might have taken them. I'm not sure. I know I had a plan for how I would end my life painlessly. I never got to the point of quite executing it, but that was as much a statement about how hard it was for me to do anything at the time than it was a statement about how much pain I was in. And my life came within hours and a lucky roll of the dice of going further down into despair.

When I think I might have made that choice, and I think I would have been incorrect to make it, it's hard for me to feel entirely comfortable with her choice as the correct one. Perhaps it's a choice she nevertheless should have the right to make (I think you can make pretty good arguments for that), but the choice you have the right to make, and the choice you should make, and the choice that deserves social endorsement, are different matters.