Why do we let depressed young women choose euthanasia?

Why do we let depressed young women choose euthanasia?

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Once, we told stories of rescue of women in danger.

Now, we hand them a prescription for assisted suicide.

Two young women from the Netherlands, Jolanda Fun and Zoraya ter Beek, recently gave media interviews explaining their respective decisions to pursue euthanasia, despite being physically healthy.

Fun, who planned to end his life on his 34th birthday late last monthh, has struggled with depression for years. Most of the time I feel very bad…, he told The Times, a British newspaper, in an interview published on April 14. Sad, downcast, gloomy. People don’t see it, because that’s the mask I put on and that’s what you learn to do in life.

In the Netherlands, euthanasia has been legal since 2002. (The legislation was passed in 2001 and went into effect the following year.) Fun began exploring the possibility two years ago, when a councilor mentioned it. For Fun, who has parents and a brother and a boyfriend, death still seemed like a better reality than staying alive.

My father is sick, my mother is sick, my parents are fighting to stay alive and I want to get out of life, he told The Times. This is a bit strange. But even when I was seven, I asked my mother if, if I jumped off a viaduct, I would be dead. I have been struggling with this my whole life.

Meanwhile, 28-year-old ter Beek, told The Free Press that he plans to die by assisted suicide this month. Ter Beek, who is autistic and suffers from depression, has a boyfriend whom she loves and shares her house and cats with. His psychiatrist told him: There is nothing more we can do for you. It never is [going to] get better, ter Beek told The Free Press, saying those words triggered his decision to end his life.

Ter Beek and Fun are not alone in their decisions. (So ​​far, no media has confirmed that any of them have died.) In 2023, 138 Dutch people chose to end their lives due to psychiatric suffering, according to Spanish newspaper El País, which reported a 20% increase from 2022. The trend is undeniably on the rise : The Netherlands had just two deaths by assisted suicide for mental health reasons in 2010 and 68 in 2019, according to the Times.

In general, euthanasia has grown in popularity in the Netherlands over the past two decades. More than 9,000 Dutch people opted for euthanasia by 2023, reports El País, which noted that euthanasia deaths accounted for more than 5% of all deaths in the Netherlands last year.

Canada, which initially legalized assisted suicide in 2016 for those with terminal illnesses and later for those with serious and terminal illness, is similarly experiencing an upward trend. More than 13,000 Canadians died by assisted suicide in 2022, a 31% increase over the numbers in 2021. In 2017, the first full year that assisted suicide was legal in Canada, 2,838 people chose to die that way.

Canada was scheduled to follow the lead of the Netherlands and allow assisted suicide for mental health reasons this year, but due to concerns about the strain on the medical system, has postponed it to March 17, 2027.

If you value life, you should be worried.

Already in the United States, 10 states and the District of Columbia allow assisted suicide under certain circumstances. If mental health continues to deteriorate in the US, as sadly seems likely, we could face the defense of allowing suicide for the mentally ill.

Of course, mental illness is a real illness, and your suffering can be acute.

But there is a reason why we fight so hard against suicide, we try to help and encourage and provide medical assistance to Americans struggling with depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses.

Not only do we love them and want them to stay in our lives, but we also know that as long as someone is alive, there is hope that they can be cured, in whole or in part, of mental illness and can live. happier life, less burdened with predatory negative emotions. This belief is difficult to maintain when you are struggling with depression, so it is even more critical that the non-depressed in society advocate loudly for the value of life.

Also, many who have suffered from depression or other mental illnesses, as their health has improved, are thankful that they did not commit suicide. I’m so thankful I didn’t take my own life, Olympic medalist Michael Phelps said in 2018 when he spoke about his history of depression.

In a 2023 Washington Post essay, Billy Lezra described a planned suicide attempt.

I’ve been drinking whiskey mixed with plain Coke all afternoon to get up the nerve to jump in front of the train, and I was drunk enough that my plan felt within reach. He was 23, Lezra wrote.

Two months earlier, my mother had tried to take her life and I had interrupted her attempt. This experience, compounded by years of depression and addiction, made me yearn to stop feeling myself. It’s not that I wanted to die, exactly, it’s that I didn’t want to live.

But then a woman with pink hair and a titanium lip ring asked Lezra to take her photo. When the photo was taken, the train was gone and now, seven years later, Lezra is still alive.

Lezra doesn’t remember the pink-haired woman’s face, but what I’m left with is a deep, sharp feeling of gratitude.

The stats back up Lezras’ experience. About 90% of suicide survivors will not ultimately die by suicide, according to Harvard University’s TH Chan School of Public Health. This suggests that many depressed people do, in fact, improve, at least to some extent.

And what does it say about us as a culture that we allow people to end their lives, that we publicly support it?

As Western civilization further divorces itself from its Christian roots, it is perhaps not surprising that there is a renewed interest in suicide. The belief that God gives life and that it is not ours to take is less widespread. In modern thought, where the individual becomes a free agent encouraged to pursue his own truth and happiness, obedience to the timing of a Creator is as unfashionable a virtue as it gets, especially when that obedience includes suffering chronic

In the absence of Christianity, suicide and euthanasia become, perhaps, the ultimate and extreme claim (if mistaken) of human choice and human dignity: My life is mine and I can end it when I want. In this way, individual freedom is reduced to a kind of death cult, wrote John Daniel Davidson in Pagan America.

How bleak.

In addition to embracing individualism in our time, we constantly talk about kindness, but it is often a loose kindness, never deployed in difficult times. Sometimes true kindness is fighting for someone when they can no longer fight for themselves.

Laws often shape rather than reflect cultures. If the Netherlands had not legalized assisted suicide, perhaps both Fun and ter Beek would be trying new doctors, new treatments and other ways to ease their real suffering.

Instead, the laws of their governments tell them that their lives may not be worth living.


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