Assisted dying: a failure of psychiatry
by Kevin Yuill, spiked:
Aurelia Brouwers’ Twitter account announced her death in simple terms: ‘Dear friends, today, January 26, 2018 at 14:35, Aurelia, surrounded by friends, is peacefully sleeping. She is finally free.’
Brouwers was a 29-year-old Dutch woman, who suffered from a range of mental-health issues, from borderline personality disorder and anxiety to chronic and complex post-traumatic stress disorders. On 6 December, she learned that her request for euthanasia, after an eight-year-long struggle, had finally been accepted. She called it ‘the best present I could have’.
[…] At what stage do psychiatric professionals admit defeat and sanction the death of a patient? In the Netherlands as it stands, nine per cent of requests for euthanasia due to ‘unbearable’ and ‘hopeless’ psychological suffering are granted, although it is rare that the patients are as young as Brouwers. Brouwers had decided long ago that her treatment was not working and that her suffering was too great to bear. And her doctors eventually gave her the green light. But when is psychological suffering deemed ‘unbearable’? When is it adjudged ‘hopeless’? These seem to be incredibly subjective criteria.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
