"Actress with crippling mental illness plans to die by assisted suicide A successful Canadian actress and comedienne, with family and friends who adore her, says she will die by assisted suicide because she cannot overcome her mental illnesses. Claire Brosseau, 48, was diagnosed with manic depression when she was 14 years old after she went on a drug, alcohol, and sex-filled spree. Brosseau would later be identified as having anxiety, chronic suicidal ideation, an eating disorder, a personality disorder, substance abuse disorder, PTSD, and a slew of other mental health conditions. She attempted suicide countless times and has been treated by psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors across North America, she revealed in an open letter published to her Substack earlier this year."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/health/assisted-death-mental-illness-canada.html
When a person dies before understanding their suffering, something fundamental has failed long before the final decision. The tragedy is not the death itself. The tragedy is dying before understanding oneself.
Cases presented as proof that emotional pain is “untreatable” actually prove something else: the dominant mental-health model avoids truth. It avoids childhood. It avoids mourning. Instead of guiding people to sit still with their feelings, understand them, and consciouly feel them in their original context, it pathologizes, labels, medicates, and manages. Despair becomes a condition to be handled, not a message to be understood.
When feelings are not contextualized, they don’t resolve. They intensify. Endless diagnoses accumulate where meaning should have been found. Eventually, assisted death is framed as compassion—when in reality it closes the book on a story that was never allowed to be read, understood, and consciouly felt.
This is not evidence that emotional pain cannot be endured. It is evidence that people are not guided through the necessary work of consciously feeling and mourning. Once emotions are understood and consciouly felt in the right context, they begin to subside. That is how emotional liberation happens.
I am living proof of this. Emotional pain can be endured—if it is faced, understood, and mourned rather than bypassed, projected, or transferred into scapegoats or poison containers. Pain does not destroy people. Unfelt, unrecognized, and uncontextualized pain does.
Until the mental-health system chooses truth over avoidance, despair will continue to be medicalized—and, increasingly, terminated rather than understood.
1) Why most therapies fail.
Mainstream therapy often pathologizes suffering instead of contextualizing it. Labels pile up, medication follows, but the core task is avoided: helping a person stay present with their feelings, trace them to childhood origins, and consciously experience what was once forbidden. Without that, symptoms are managed, not resolved. The result is lifelong treatment with little inner change.
Understanding feelings in their historical context is not optional. Fear, despair, rage, and emptiness make sense once they are linked to early powerlessness, betrayal, or abandonment. When feelings are understood, not suppressed or “reframed,” their intensity naturally subsides. That is how emotional integration happens.
2) Diagnostic accumulation is a red flag, not an explanation.
A profile listing manic depression, anxiety, personality disorder, PTSD, substance abuse, eating disorder, and chronic suicidality does not demonstrate complexity—it signals systemic failure. When everything is wrong, nothing has been understood. Diagnoses become substitutes for meaning.
3) Assisted suicide is being used to close the book on unresolved trauma.
In cases like the one described, the mental-health system did not guide the person through mourning; it kept her functioning, labeled, medicated, and fragmented. Assisted death then appears as a “solution” to endless suffering that was never properly addressed.
Stating this plainly is not cruelty. It is honesty.
4) Choice vs. endorsement.
People will make their own decisions under unbearable pain. Laws in some countries permit that. Acknowledging this reality is not the same as celebrating it or treating it as therapeutic success. When a person dies before understanding their suffering, something fundamental has failed long before the final decision.
Bottom line:
This is not evidence that emotional pain is untreatable. It is evidence that the dominant model avoids truth, avoids childhood, and avoids mourning. Until that changes, despair will keep being medicalized—and, increasingly, terminated rather than understood.
“Recovery From Self-Betrayal: What is addiction really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.
The drug business would not flourish if there were not so many people who, in refusing to acknowledge their wounds, are in a permanent state of self-betrayal.
Thus, people work to get rid of symptoms instead of searching out the cause.
There are plenty of means to combat symptoms of distress: medications, sermons, numerous "treatments," "miracles," threats, cults, pedagogical indoctrination, and even blackmail.
They can all work for a while, but only because they reinforce the repression and reinforce the fear of resolving it."
Alice Miller
No comments:
Post a Comment