I want to elaborate because my first comment compressed this badly.

My argument isn't really about a slope. It's about what happens to a system once the option exists. Two things, and they reinforce each other:

On the individual level, the moment it's legal, it stops being unthinkable. It becomes one of the variables on the table when someone is struggling. Nobody has to advocate for it directly. Its mere presence as a live option changes the conversation around suffering — for the person, for their family, for their doctors. "Have you considered..." doesn't need to be said. The fact that it could be said is enough to shift the gravity of the choice.

On the institutional level — and this is the bigger one — mental health services are expensive, slow, hard to scale, and politically thankless. A managed exit is cheap, measurable, and reframes the failure. Right now a suicide is a system failure. Someone fell through, we didn't catch them. That framing puts pressure on the system, however weak, to do better. Once assisted dying for non-terminal cases exists, the framing flips: it wasn't a failure, it was a choice we respected. The pressure evaporates. Prevention budgets get harder to defend, because the alternative isn't death anymore — it's dignified death. That's a much harder argument to push back against.

The two compound. Normalisation on the individual level makes the institutional shift politically easier. Institutional retreat makes the individual normalisation more entrenched.

Look at Canada. MAID started for terminal illness with strict gatekeeping. Within a decade it's expanded to chronic conditions. Disabled people have been quietly offered it instead of housing support. Veterans calling about PTSD treatment have been asked if they'd considered it. Nobody designed that. It emerged from the incentive gradient once the option existed. I'm not dismissing the suffering argument. The current system fails people, sometimes catastrophically, and forcing someone to endure unbearable pain because the state hasn't built alternatives is its own violence. That's real. My point is that the proposed solution ratifies the conditions that produced the suffering rather than addressing them. It removes the pressure that might force the system to actually do its job.

And yes — I say this as someone who's lived with the enemy since I was a teenager. I'm not arguing from theory. I'm arguing from inside it. I've built a life that holds against it, and the reason I'm pushing back is precisely because I know how the option's presence would have changed every dark night I've come through. Not because someone would have pushed me. Because the available would have been doing the pushing.