DEATH WISH

A group of Canadians with crushing mental illness are suing the federal government for the right to physician-assisted death. The ethics are muddy, the country is divided and the world is watching Canada's next move. Inside the crusade for a polarizing cause.

- Luc Rinaldi

CLAIRE BROSSEAU first fantasized about dying when she was in kindergarten. She was a dramatic child, prone to throwing tantrums and screaming until she passed out. When her parents admonished her, asking why she wasn't more like her sister, she imagined eating peanut butter, to which she was allergic, until she asphyxiated. It'd be better for everyone ifI was gone, she thought.

Brosseau's malaise intensified as she got older. When she was 11, her family moved from Toronto to Montreal. There, as a teenager, she began cycling between exuberant highs and all-consuming lows.

She quit sports and student council, skipped classes, started drinking and smoking heavily and put on 50 pounds.

She grew envious of her friend's mother, a woman with schizophrenia who'd killed herself by jumping in front of a train. So, one day, Brosseau walked to the railroad tracks on her way home from school. She tried to psych herself upif someone else was brave enough to end their suffering, she thought, she could be too. But as train after train passed, Brosseau reconsidered. She was terrified of the pain she'd suffer if she survived and of the heartache she'd cause her family if she didn't.

Brosseau's parents took her to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed her with manic depression, now known as bipolar I disorder, a condition characterized by extreme mood swings. With therapy and medication, she coped, and found that throwing herself into a career as an actor helped.

"I became a performer because I figured, if I'm going to suffer, I want to get paid for it," she jokes. In her 20s, she studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, the storied New York theatre school that trained Jeff Goldblum and Diane Keaton.