...“She was like, ‘I can call the on-call psychiatrist, but there are no beds; there’s no availability,’” Ms. Mentler said. “She said to me: ‘The system is broken.’”

But it was the clinician’s next comments Ms. Mentler found particularly distressing.

“She said, ‘Have you ever considered MAID?’” Ms. Mentler said, adding that she was so bewildered by the question that she didn’t initially understand what the clinician meant. “I thought, like a maid that cleans a room?”

Ms. Mentler had not considered MAID before, but told the clinician of her past attempts to end her life by overdosing on medication. She said the clinician replied that such a method could result in brain damage and other harms, and that MAID would be a more “comfortable” process during which she would be given sedating benzodiazepines among other drugs...