The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

https://www.politico.eu/article/noa-pothoven-euthanasia-that-wasnt-suicide-mental-illness-anorexia/

by DoreenMichele • 7 years ago

144 118 7 years ago

hestipod4• 7 years ago

I have said this more than once here, and hate how much it defines my life so imagine people might be annoyed by seeing it again, but I have been suicidal for a long time because of medical errors and the ensuing heath/life issues. I don't want to be. Nobody who is wants to be. Some people SAY they want more than anything to be gone but at the end of the thread, if you pull hard enough, they just want the suffering, whatever it is, to end. I have been in and out of discussion forums on the topic and I have met countless people like this young woman who are desperate and in pain and cannot get enough help that actually makes a difference to go either direction, into or out of life. Many of them have tried everything they can access and have no realistic chance for improvement, but society has decided its not your right to stop if it becomes too much. These people often end up using desperate and dangerous methods and fail/end up worse off. I've also seen the aftermath where their families react in anger to those who discuss the topic freely and blame them for their loss, as if the person wouldn't have ended their life were it not spoken aloud, when the truth is being able to and being understood is the only peace most of them have had for a long time.

I know all the arguments, and even used some of them when I was younger and more naive. Now that I am here I see things differently. Someone I cared very deeply about reached the end of their rope this past winter and nothing and nobody short of locking them in a box was going to stop them, and even then they probably would have found a way. I keep thinking I should have realized how imminent it was and done "something", but for the life of me I can't think what, as they had tried the things available and nothing helped. What they needed was more than society was willing to give and that's the case for the majority of people I have seen go. Very few are lost no matter what with no conceivable way to survive...its just not available to them. Yet that same society tells them they cannot opt out. At what point do we stop trying to make people stay alive and suffering and give them safe and sure ways out? It's not an easy question. One that isn't as simple as "legalize suicide" and done. But there is a cultural idea in the West that it's NEVER the answer, that it always gets better, and those things are not true either. As I feel the day creeping closer for me I know I will have to deal with it alone and afraid, secretly, and with my best homemade effort, since there is no other way out of this life, and I cannot seem to solve the problems that would allow me to stay in it. I'd just ask people to put themselves in the shoes of people in such a situation, and think about how it would feel if you were at the literal end of your rope and people fought to keep you here and suffering. Nobody would want that...but like so much in life we don't extend such truths to others.

ndiscussion• 7 years ago

Just wanted to say that I respect your freedom. Life can be far more cruel than most people can imagine. Life for most people seems to be really happy-go-lucky, and anything else is an existential threat that must be blocked out.

I see your plight, and I give you the freedom to feel how you feel (not that you ever needed it from me...)

hestipod4• 7 years ago

Nail on head. For the majority of people, if it makes them feel afraid, threatened, confused...then it is something to be ignored or attacked. That's a sad truth I have learned through this experience. The empathetic and caring people are, despite most people imagining themselves as one, are not the majority by a longshot.

wdb• 7 years ago

You can't imagine how thankful I am towards the two doctors that approved my mother's euthanasia in The Netherlands. I could not bear to see my mother suffer for much longer. I wished my father was able to get euthanasia while his Alzheimer's was getting worse many years ago. Of course, I am sad that my parents passed away but I am happy that my mother wasn't unnecessary suffering.

chris_wot2• 7 years ago

As a guy who felt suicidal, the abysmal abusive treatment of the authorities has forever negatively affected my life.

hestipod4• 7 years ago

Sorry you had to experience that. It is not uncommon from talking to lots of people in this situation.

lisper• 7 years ago

I don't want to be. Nobody who is wants to be. Some people SAY they want more than anything to be gone but at the end of the thread, if you pull hard enough, they just want the suffering, whatever it is, to end.

As someone who was once suicidal (but got past it) I can totally vouch for this.

And that's the problem: suicide is irreversible, so it's a good idea to have a protocol in place to make sure that all the other possibilities really have been exhausted before folding up the tent. I'm alive today because I was able to entertain the possibility that I might be wrong about death being the only way out even though at the time I was pretty damn sure I wasn't. And I am mindful of the fact that just because I was wrong doesn't mean everyone in a similar situation is.

It's a tough problem.

candiodari5• 7 years ago

Not euthanasia, but how would you call it ?

I mean sure, was she given a lethal injection in a clinic ? Well, no. Is this not euthanasia ? Why the hell not ?

1) the girl is in fact dead

2) because she wanted to die (after being locked up in youth services for years, including months in an isolation cell)

3) the "original event" is that she was ("probably") raped at school. Repeatedly. She has never divulged what actually happened.

4) according to her own words, she has been locked up in ~30 different institutions in something like 6 years. In at least a few cases against her will and against the will of her parents. [1]

In one case, this was done because she could not immediately be treated by a psychiatric clinic, where youth services then saw fit to lock her in an institution (without school, without access to family, ...). She was not suicidal before this, and became suicidal here.

In several other cases she claims it was because psychiatric or youth services "help" did not find her cooperative or make enough progress and then sent her to be locked up, because that's just what they do (loosely translated from her post linked below). She also claims she met a great deal other youths that were in a similar situation (not able to be treated, and then locked up instead).

She claims she was put into an isolation cell for months, constantly scolded by the employees of youth services, punished unfairly and arbitrarily and that generally she left youth services' care in much worse shape than she entered, when looking for help.

5) she was assisted in committing suicide, even if that was not active suicide, but rather starving herself out.

She's written a book about it. "Winning or learning" (Winnen of Leren) by Noa Pothoven. Dutch book. About experiencing trauma at a young age. About the enormously negative influence the Dutch help system had in her life. No translation available.

[1] https://www.hsleiden.nl/binaries/content/assets/hsl/lectorat... (in Dutch)

jrace• 7 years ago

I would call it allowed suicide. She was not assisted in dying, nor was her death painless or merciful. She was merely not stopped from allowing herself to die.

yjftsjthsd-h• 7 years ago

I believe the technical term is "manslaughter".

a1369209993• 7 years ago

Based on your description, I'd call it "murder", though I suspect a lawyer would have more techinical terminology - and probably also bad news related to bullshit waivers and/or the Dutch legislature.

Phrases like "tortured to death" are somewhat excessive, but mainly because it sounds more like gross incompetence and depraved indifference than active malice.

I haven't bothered investigating enough to have a opinion on whether your description is accurate though.

tinco• 7 years ago

Because euthanasia is a good thing, a mercy that you allow your fellow human being suffering the harshest of cruelties the world forces upon us, and this was not a good thing.

Euthanasia is saying we love you and there's nothing else left we can do to help you. What happened to this girl seems to be the opposite.

ajross3• 7 years ago

Is this not euthanasia ? Why the hell not ?

Because it's a suicide. We already have a word for what happens to people who die after refusing food.

In fact the only reason the word "euthanasia" is being considered at all is because before she died she ended up in an end of life clinic that also provided assisted death services to other patients.

This is exactly like accusing someone of having had an abortion because their miscarriage was diagnosed at Planned Parenthood. (A scenario, I point out, that now seems a whole lot more likely given the horrifying way this is being portrayed in the right wing press)

drilldrive• 7 years ago

Hmm, a miscarriage is not an intentional act, whereas there is intention in this case. It is moreso analagous to someone at planned parenthood not authorizing an abortion but providing either direct or indirect assistance for the woman to perform the abortion herself.

rejschaap• 7 years ago

"Not euthanasia, but how would you call it ?"

I would just call it incredibly sad.

It is not euthanasia as defined by Dutch law. Which is something a lot of the media reporting the story are getting wrong. And is the main point of this article.

It is also not euthanasia in the more literal sense of a "good/merciful death". Slowly starving yourself to death is not a good way to die. It is pretty much the opposite. If her request for euthanasia was granted she would have died in a much more humane and peaceful way. Unfortunately for her it was not possible to be euthanized.

anvandare• 7 years ago

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

- David Foster Wallace

The essence of Liberty is the ownership of one's own life. You owe it to no one - not even a hypothetical Future Self - to stay alive at all costs. Just as all humans have the right to live with dignity and without pain, we have the right to die in the same manner. I hope that's acknowledged one day.

cm2012• 7 years ago

If your happy but very drunk friend wanted to tapdance on the edge of a tall building, would you restrain them if necessary? Or if someone high on shrooms was trying to drink bleach?

A suicidal mind is often one caught in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality, even if it comes from internal wiring going haywire instead of external substances.

Preventing someone from killing themselves is in their best interest most of the time for that reason. Suicidal impulses are most often fleeting relative to normal lifespan.

My wife tried to kill herself a few times when we were younger - I wrestled knives from her hands and had to get a safe for pills (which she agreed to in her better states). With therapy and medicine, she is very, very happy to be alive now.

DoreenMichele9• 7 years ago

There are many people for whom life is a living hell with no hope of escape other than to end it. Insisting they live amounts to serving as their warden and torturer.

If it isn't someone you are personally willing to take some responsibility for, as you did with your wife, then I think it is wrong to insist they live.

I'm quite open about my long history of being suicidal and the various underlying reasons why. People on the internet often want to tell me "chin up, tally ho, here's a suicide hotline number." They generally don't want to do anything whatsoever to help with any of the actual underlying problems.

In fact, they usually make me feel like they are merely using me as their "good deed for the day" to make themselves feel like good people. It generally pisses me off and makes me feel crapped all over.

I'm pro right to die, but this article casts light on how very complicated the issue is. I would be horrified to learn that "I got raped and now want to die" is some new standard for helping women kill themselves. I just can't even begin to come up with the words for how mixed my feelings are about this girl's story.

sneak4• 7 years ago

Part of personal agency is being free enough to opt out of rationality. It isn’t the purview of second parties to assume what we may or may not want in the future.

If I sign a DNR, it isn’t the place of anyone else to say “but he didn’t mean it like that”. Same for (what are assumed by observers to be temporary) suicidal ideations.

This strikes at the very core of personal autonomy.

baddox3• 7 years ago

A suicidal mind is often one caught in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality

The trouble is when this idea becomes circular, e.g. "anyone who would choose to kill themselves even though their life doesn't seem that bad to me must be in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality."

In other words, to apply your proposal would require determining whether someone is "in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality" without knowing or factoring in whether they are suicidal. That's probably easy enough in the two obvious examples you listed, but accidental deaths due to intoxication or recklessness are already a less tricky issue than what we normally refer to as "suicide."

h0l0cube3• 7 years ago

A suicidal mind is often one caught in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality, even if it comes from internal wiring going haywire instead of external substances.

Why do you make this assertion that a rational person can't be suicidal? DFW was definitely a very rational person, for instance. I'd recommend reading Good Old Neon for an insight into his character, and a good depiction of both a suicidal and rational character[0]

Suicidal impulses are most often fleeting relative to normal lifespan.

Key words there are 'most often', but I'm curious to know your evidence for this assertion.

With therapy and medicine, she is very, very happy to be alive now

This is a great result for her, and you.

[0] http://sdavidmiller.com/octo/files/no_google2/GoodOldNeon.pd...

BrandoElFollito• 7 years ago

What is temporary for you?

The examples you give are in the order of hours. Fair enough.

What if someone is in this state of despair for a week? A month? A year? Ten years? When do you draw the line of temporary?

4ntonius8lock• 7 years ago

Thank you.

The day I kill myself it will be a long thought out choice.

Not many people can handle that without disrespecting the perspective, or worse, wanting violence applied against my will.

The arrogance of some people to think they know best for me is amazing.

P.S. I'm not suicidal now, it's a family condition that will mean (likely) one day I'll be deteriorated to the point I will want to check out.

wayoutthere2• 7 years ago

There are two minds of this as best exemplified by Camus and Sartre. A core tenet of existentialism is that we are always free to make choices, even if we cannot always control our circumstances. We’re still responsible for making choices — even choosing to not choose.

Sartre was a believer in absolute freedom, and that suicide was a choice among many others that a person could make (and indeed, Sartre eventually did).

Camus, on the other hand, believed that suicide was the rejection of freedom. Once you commit suicide, you are no longer free to make any further choices. I tend to be more sympathetic to this view: I have an eternity to be dead, but a short time make choices good and bad.

AstralStorm2• 7 years ago

And what does Camus say you should do when your freedom is curtailed in unacceptable ways?

(Note: way beyond social contract.)

Barrin922• 7 years ago

In the particular case of depression and mental illness suicide is often itself a symptom of the disease. It's not so simple to just portray this as an act of individual choice or liberty.

If a mentally ill person is effectively treated the desire to kill themselves will generally subside, and at that point we know that it wasn't a rational choice but a biological symptom. The case here is much more difficult than say, assisted suicide for a terminally ill, old and frail patient.

it's not that they owe their life to us, but that we owe it to mentally ill people to care for them until they are in a state of mind in which we can be sure their decision to end their lives is not just an accident of brain chemistry. For a 17 year old girl the chance that her condition improves, even if treatment resistent at the current point at time, is actually still plausible.

rincebrain• 7 years ago

How do you define when the suicidal ideation is irrational, though?

Let's say you're having a persistent depressive episode, and have had suicidal urges and possibly even attempted it in the past. Let's further say that you've been attempting treatment consistently from multiple approaches, for extended time intervals, and none of them have yielded improvement. Is there a point at which the suicidal urges should no longer be considered irrational?

There's a viable argument that their urge to end themselves is a direct result of their condition (e.g. if we removed the condition, the desire would evaporate), but there's also a viable argument that their urge is an increasingly rational response to extended suffering with little hope of improvement.

Unfortunately, while I'd like to say the answer to this is more objective ways to quantify prospects for improvement, I don't currently know of much research on the horizon that would enable this, as too much of how our psychiatric care works is currently guess-and-check, and we don't even know where we'd look if we had good near-realtime monitoring for neural interactions.

(The above hypothetical does not reflect my life experiences - I've never been at risk of self-harm for the lovely malaise of depression that pervades my mind, but a few years ago, I was given a treatment which, for a little while, made me much closer to neurotypical functioning - but it stopped working after a few months, not because I had stopped receiving the treatment, and having acute memories of how pervasive this problem was, and how much nicer life could be, is probably the closest I've been to that particular precipice.)

pas3• 7 years ago

How many years of pain is acceptable until her condition markedly improves? How big confidence interval we can put on this?

And ... separating brain chemistry from rationality is an error. If her current state is 90+% determined by her brain chemistry, and our medicine and other treatments can't reverse it, then it's a rational option to solve it by giving up on that brain with its chemistry and all.

mikojan• 7 years ago

Kind of ruined that quote with the propertarianist hot take

alexhutcheson• 7 years ago

I’d highly recommend reading this piece by a psychiatrist for a (research-based) alternative perspective: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/25/in-defense-of-psych-tr...

fortdriad• 7 years ago

To take this a bit further:

As a psychologist what I've grown outraged by is the hypocrisy of current approaches to suicide, in that they are all focused on stopping suicide, but not the pain that drives it.

We talk about taking away guns and pills, putting up fences around parking ramps and bridges, monitoring social media, and so forth and so on. But we do nothing to address the psychosocial ills that drive the suicidal person to their state.

Labeling the suicidal as "mentally ill" does nothing but allow the living to wash their hands of the accumulated insults that drive someone to where they are, to feel good and then walk away from the most difficult issues to address. It places the blame on the person who is suicidal. It's not about protecting the suicidal, it's about protecting the living from guilt.

Sure, there are many people who obviously suffer from some sort of biological insult, but there is also a large grey area of those who have some kind of handicap, who are then thrust into horrific circumstances on top of that. And there are those who just get a bad lot in life.

These issues are spilling over into euthanasia in a way that's starkly highlighted by this case.

I'm not saying healthcare professionals should be forced into something they see as murder, or murkily close to it. What I'm saying is that as a society, our focus should be less on preventing people from accessing the means of suicide -- or euthanasia as the label may be -- and more on the sources of pain that drives them to it.

penguin_booze• 7 years ago

Could someone tell me from where this excerpt is?

DoreenMichele9• 7 years ago

There are many things to talk about here, but this is part of why I posted this to Hacker News:

The deeply shocking story on such a controversial issue was irresistible, and became a top news item all over the world overnight. Pothoven’s name was soon trending on Twitter in Italy. News reports repeating the false claims were published from Australia to India to the United States.

Yes, the article touches on many things, many of which are hot button topics. But the actual title of this piece is really about how the story was misreported in many countries due to it's controversial nature. It was click bait to the max.

I posted a long comment earlier and deleted it. I'm quite open about my history of attempted suicide, having been sexually assaulted, etc.

I think it is possible to heal. I don't know that I know how to really talk about that. I do know that the widespread meme that such things are simply unfixable is part of the problem.

There doesn't seem to be any good way to talk about that either. So I'm going to stop here.

incompatible2• 7 years ago

The interesting thing to me is that supposedly reputable news sites like The Washington Post [1] were taken in by this piece of disinformation, when it took the author "all of 10 minutes to figure out the truth". Have they sacked all their journalists and now just copy random crap off social media, or what?

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/05/an-anguishe...

DoreenMichele9• 7 years ago

Writing of all sorts is currently under enormous financial pressure. Many "journalists" are no longer on staff with adequate pay, but are underpaid freelancers with no benefits. Local papers are shutting down in droves. Etc.

It's a huge crisis and there's no good way to talk about it.

I do freelance writing and blogging and I've been dirt poor for years. There is a long history of me either commenting on how the world expects good writing for free, which simply doesn't work, or me complaining about my situation in specific. The reaction on HN is pretty consistently hostile. I've often basically been told to STFU and go get a real job.

I have yet to find some means to adequately convey that it's a system-wide issue. It's not just one whiny loser.

This is a global crisis impacting the quality of our journalism, and that impacts political freedom and many other important things.

lanevorockz• 7 years ago

Real story is even more horrific than just euthanasia. I think that to an extent the click bait value takes priority when it gets to the media. Whatever makes people click on it.

DoreenMichele9• 7 years ago

I don't agree. I would be vastly more horrified to learn that a minor was euthanized -- that an institution, in compliance with the law, put a young girl to death as a consequence of her being sexually abused.

That smacks of "Let's not bother to go after pedophiles. Their fine. Let's just start putting their victims to death to conveniently sweep this under the rug."

That's far worse than the horrifying stuff going on in the Catholic Church where a grown man can rape and impregnate his 9 year old step daughter and the church says he's all good, but the girl was excommunicated for getting an abortion to protect her life in the face of carrying twins while just a tiny child herself.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Brazilian_girl_abortion...

Sex crimes are particularly hard to deal with. People sometimes say they would like the death sentence for rape, but if you do that, you can count on rape victims being routinely murdered to silence them and protect the life of the rapist.

This is a hard, hard problem to solve. I would be terrified to learn that the Dutch government, which has a positive reputation globally for it's track record on women's rights, was fine with putting a child to death because grown men raped her.

I cannot possibly overstate how deeply dystopian and terrible that news would be.

rndgermandude• 7 years ago

Agreed.

Her having to kill herself by refusing nutrition, dying of thirst and starvation, because society decided it knows better than her whether she should live or not, that's truly horrifying.

To me it sounds like she was a terminally ill person: they tried everything for years to "fix" her problem, but failed completely and the condition even worsened.

She wasn't out of her mind and had a temporarily crisis, got help and regretted her previous suicide attempts; she had the goal of ending her suffering by ending her life for a long time, after having seen all the "help" others offered not working at all, she regretted the previous attempts failed, and was determined to try again and again until it worked.

And for a long time, she had to live in agony, just like a terminal cancer patient in countries without assisted suicide (most of them), was denied a way out repeatedly (not just the petition for euthanasia, but her failed suicide attempts that probably failed because of intervention of other people), and ultimately killed herself using one of the worst, horrifying, agonizing suicide methods imaginable, because that's what was available to her with other better options having been taken away already. The thirst and hunger, and feeling your body slowly break down, over days, must have been excruciating, and yet she thought that was better than continuing to live her life in the constant dread and agony she was in.

There certainly are a huge number of suicidal (at one point) people who are in temporary crisis, or have conditions that can be managed and improved (e.g. bipolar people often report that medication does help), but this wasn't that. This was us telling the cancer patient that they gonna suffer and wither and eventually die, with no hope for things to change, but no you cannot just end it now because it would make us feel bad about ourselves somehow, fuck you for even suggesting that.

markdown3• 7 years ago

This story kinda reminded me about Mark Rife:

“Last Thursday, a guy I went to college with, Mark Rife, committed suicide. As I understand the story, three years ago his wife Sarah died due to complications from a fall off a 75 foot waterfall. She fell; he dove in after her. Against all odds, they thought she had recovered. Life had returned to some degree of normal; but then six months later, she died in her sleep. Mark was devastated.
In a video he left behind, Mark describes leaving Sarah’s funeral, driving who knows where and simply wanting to die — but he remembered the time they watched the film Juliet and Her Romeo, a film he loved, and he remembered Sarah’s question: “Do you think Romeo would have still killed himself if he’d waited 1,000 days?”
So, Mark went on a 1,000 day odyssey, with funds from Sarah’s life insurance policy, to give him time to see if his choice would still be the same. Would he still want to kill himself? Mark traveled, explored, met knew people. He says he “followed every impulse.” Mark had been a pastor in Hawaii, and he left his life behind.”
Long story short, after 1000 days of living and exploring 22 countries around the world, Mark Rife decided that he DID want to kill himself. He didn’t want to live in a world without Sarah and he was out.

http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/the-1000-days-of-mark

Mark blogged every step of his 1000 days of travelling and seeking happiness. Tumblr deleted his blog the day he killed himself. To their credit, Vimeo left his video up https://vimeo.com/27856790

chris_wot2• 7 years ago

Is there an archive somewhere?

markdown3• 7 years ago

Nope. IIRC it was like a private diary and he only published it at the end just before he ended his life, so there wasn't time for it to get archived or cached before Tumblr deleted it.

hackerbabz• 7 years ago

Travel is not therapeutic or enjoyable to all or even most people. It can be very depressing and lonely.

I wonder if his decision would have been the same had he stayed in his home community with others who loved him.

bubblewrap6• 7 years ago

If he was a pastor, he probably believed in an afterlife, hoping to be together with Sarah again?

I also remember the story of a guy killing his family after a divorce, hoping to be together with his children again in the afterlife.

Lies can kill...

markdown3• 7 years ago

If he was a pastor, he probably believed in an afterlife, hoping to be together with Sarah again?

Only if he thought she was in hell. A pastor would know that you can't commit suicide and enter heaven.

mooseburger4• 7 years ago

This is the most aggressively anti-human thing I have ever seen, possibly even more than ISIS or cartel executions, because at least the perpetrators of those atrocities know that they are doing evil, even if they're unrepentant, which is more than can be said of the doctors in this situation.

I have been suicidally depressed, institutionalized. I'm better now. I suppose if I actually attempted to kill myself, but failed, paramedics that find me ought to let me go, or perhaps even finish me off if, say, I am in agony due to the method I used? Why wouldn't they, since after all, I've clearly chosen to die of my own free will? Yet, I now know that I was mistaken during my depression. Life is not about hedonism, not about maximizing pleasure experienced, which inevitably, inexorably, leads one to the conclusion that if there's just not a lot of enjoyment in one's life, and this has been persistent, then perhaps checking out is a good idea?

The path an individual life may take is unknowable, both to society and to an individual themself, even if the individual has attempted suicide. Negate this, and all human rights are instantly negated, as now all there is, is predicting who might be better off dead, as there is after all, no point in prolonging their existence, and they should be encouraged or gently nudged to at least consider the path of least suffering, because this will end their pain and decrease the overall suffering of the humanity. This is all because we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we and they know how their lives will play out. We do not, and no one knows, and therefore they must have certain rights, to maximize the near infinite potentiality of the individual human.

Society and government must not ever approve of this. I didn't believe euthanasia (and this is euthanasia, the real case is even worse than the original story) in the case of the terminally ill was a slippery slope, but then we get this case, seemingly out of nowhere, from an ostensibly enlightened, progressive, European country. I now see that making exceptions for the terminally ill is not safe, it just won't stop there.

And why is the approval of the laws and society sought anyway? Suicide is a mechanically trivial action. You can literally order poison hemlock off Amazon, no assistance is needed, and anyone committed to kill themselves obviously has no regard for their society, as they plan to deprive their community of any benefit they could have given it. Therefore, they should not expect society to sanction their ill-considered desires.

Dostoevsky predicted all of this 150 years ago. Read Crime and Punishment if you disagree with me, yet deign to consider yourself an intelligent, educated person.

microcolonel• 7 years ago

This is the most aggressively anti-human thing I have ever seen, possibly even more than ISIS or cartel executions, because at least the perpetrators of those atrocities know that they are doing evil, even if they're unrepentant, which is more than can be said of the doctors in this situation.

I think you'll find that ISIS executioners believe that they are doing the right thing.

mooseburger4• 7 years ago

No, not even they. A good thing is something you would visit upon all humanity, and while they may potentially wish to do so to all infidels, they would not wish to do it to their faithful.

voxic11• 7 years ago

Are you saying force-feeding people who don't want to be fed is ethical? I believe it's taught to be against medical ethics basically everywhere. This girl had been confined against her will already for 6 years. How many years of force-feeding would you have her endure as well? Go look up how force-feeding is done, I believe the summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture contained some descriptions.

DanBC2• 7 years ago

Force feeding is ethical if someone doesn't have capacity to make the decision and doesn't have an advance directive in place.

It's likely that she did have capacity to make that decision, which is why the courts didn't intervene.

mooseburger4• 7 years ago

Yes! Everything must be done to preserve a life. Imagine instead of starving herself, she had slit her wrists. Do you believe the correct case then is to allow her to bleed out? Because that would be the exact same situation, only with the tiny, inconsequential detail that a different method was chosen.

toomanybeersies• 7 years ago

Life is not about hedonism, not about maximizing pleasure experienced

Who are you to tell anyone what life is about?

I don't necessarily agree with the actions of her family and doctors, especially as she was so young, but is it really just to want to condemn someone to lifetime of reliving their trauma? Some people can never get over their past trauma, and they carry it their entire life.

It it just to say that they must live their entire life in pain until they die of some other cause, just so that their friends and family don't feel upset because they chose to end their own life? Or at some point, do we say "we did everything they could, maybe this is for the best"?

DanBC2• 7 years ago

There are ways of providing mental health services that are trauma-informed, that don't require vulnerable people to be imprisoned in stark rooms, stripped of their clothing and wearing anti-ligature clothing.

A robust package of intensive trauma-informed community mental health treatment could probably have helped her.

Here's a blog about it.

Rotten Apples, on Poisoned Branches, in Toxic Orchards: https://thediagnosisofexclusion.wordpress.com/2019/05/28/rot...

Out of Sight and Out of Mind: https://thediagnosisofexclusion.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/pro...

When the Help Hurts more than the hurting does: https://thediagnosisofexclusion.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/whe...

(and a bunch more on that site).

cf141q53252• 7 years ago

This is the most aggressively anti-human thing I have ever seen, possibly even more than ISIS or cartel executions, because at least the perpetrators of those atrocities know that they are doing evil, even if they're unrepentant, which is more than can be said of the doctors in this situation.

I feel the same about people lobbying against assisted suicide. I have no other word for people who willfully condemn people to literal torture then simply monsters. I dont see a meaningful distinction to some psychopath predator in the absolute detachment from other peoples suffering. Forcing terminal people to live for a few more month or even years enduring absolute agony is just wrong. There are no two sides to this or ways to look at it. They are getting tortured because you think they should be tortured. Your motivation and intention doesnt mean anything, this is the naked result, there is no reason to sugarcoat it.

You are not other people. I am glad it worked out for you, but the arrogance to think that you know and should decide what others should endure is mind boggling to me.

mooseburger4• 7 years ago

You don't consider it arrogance to believe you know for sure how that girls life would have developed?

dustfinger2• 7 years ago

I know this is an important topic, but it is not on topic. see:https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

stordoff• 7 years ago

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

The fact that this has prompted over 40 comments and good discussion would seem to suggest it is on-topic.

Furthermore:

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

dustfinger2• 7 years ago

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

Touché! Thanks for pointing that out. I agree and I won't complain in the future.

skrebbel• 7 years ago

I'm confused that there are no comments here yet about the actual topic at hand: international media willfully flat out lying about what happened. Basically, fake news in mainstream media.

Sure, the Daily Mail isn't particularly a quality newspaper, but a lie about an entire country's medical practices is quite a bit different than a lie about some aristocrat's love life. And even then, aren't eg BBC Radio or the Independent supposed to be quality news sources? The latter writes "A 17-year-old girl who was raped as a child has ended her own life through legal euthanasia in the Netherlands" [0]. What's going on here?

This is the kind of stuff that we're being told only fringe media do, the rogue blogs that will do anything that heats up facebook outrage, for ad impressions - the kind whose business model is to invent lies for maximum shares. This story isn't about euthanesia or suicide. It's about how the mainstream media took a note from the invent-outrageous-lies-blogs' playbook. About how it's totally OK now for BBC Radio 4 to report flat out lies, if only it gets people talking about BBC Radio.

This is a serious problem. While everybody is falling over each other to blame Facebook for undermining democracy, apparently the likes of the BBC and the Independent are slowly transforming into the real perpetrators. Sure, I know why: their journalists are paid by the click just as any other. But apparently any sort of fact checking went out the window there, and I wonder whether that's a viable business strategy in the long term. Why consume "quality" media if the quality is the same as the inflammatory rando blog post your aunt just shared on Facebook?

I recognize that journalism is under a lot of financial pressure, but if lies like these get willfully spread by people who should know better, what's left? How do we know that this Politico article isn't a lie as well?

I'm deeply troubled by all this.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/euthanasia-c... the headline I quoted is from the video. There's a little "oops we might've lied hihi" on the bottom of the article but they couldn't be bothered to fix the video because hey, clicks lol.

ahje• 7 years ago

This. When I first saw stuff about this popping up on various sites (including meme-sites, where it was posted with some kind of anti-immigrant agenda), I thought that it sounded to wierd to be true and decided to look it up. A few internet searches later confirmed it was, indeed, fake news being spread by mainstream media.

Calling this a serious problem is an understatement. It's an outright disaster, and it only adds to the already growing public distrust of the media.

Udo• 7 years ago

When I was about 17, one evening a friend from school with suspected borderline personality disorder called me and told me that she had "taken some pills, a lot of pills". I immediately went over to her house since it was in the neighborhood. She had already induced vomitting, but said that she was beginning to feel dizzy. Under the circumstances, we called an ambulance. Calling help was actually the scariest thing about the whole ordeal, because she suspected (I believe rightly so) that once you get caught in The System, you can get trapped in it for good. I remember feeling guilty about calling the ambulance, but it seemed too risky to not do it. In the hospital, it initially looked like our fears were confirmed. Treatment by the staff was horrid. However, after youth services interviewed my friend, she was let go, mainly because she was almost of legal age and because she affirmed many times that she regretted the suicide attempt. She ended up moving in with us for a few months, to get away from home and to sort everything out. It worked. As far as I know (we lost touch after school) she went on to live a full and 'normal' life.

There is no question in my mind that it would have turned out very differently if she had been just one year younger at the time. She would have gotten trapped in The System, no doubt exacerbating her suicidal feelings, both because the people in charge of 'protecting' these kids don't seem to be particularly kid-friendly, and because she was prone to clashing with authority figures (who, it goes without saying, tend to be petty and capricious). On more than one occasion my friend was told that she had engaged in an "illegal act" for attempting suicide - that's not helpful to say the least.

I have to admit though that I'm having trouble accepting suicidal ideation, especially in minors, without at least exploring treatment options. We as a society have an obligation to not make suffering worse, and we often seem to fail this basic test.

jillesvangurp• 7 years ago

For me reading foreign media writing about a topic that is entirely uncontroversial in the Netherlands, i.e. Euthanasia, is a bit weird.

I have relatives who are doctors and perform legal euthanasia as part of their job. I've heard their stories and they are without exception a combination of very sad and heart warming. This is not exactly the most popular part of their job and it usually comes at the end of a very long process. To give you the context, euthanasia is legal but it comes with a lot of strings attached. Basically it's only legal if a very strict protocol is followed. It's at their discretion to say no and not a right but a privilege for the patient. There are always second opinions involved. This protocol exists to both protect the doctors involved and the patients involved. It's biased towards a "no, unless". Not following it can land you in court with murder charges or lose you your medical license.

I also have relatives and friends who have died after volunteering to die this way; and I've had the conversation with my parents about their wishes when this becomes a topic for them. They are both healthy and fine now but well aware that this can change. They regularly attend funerals of people they know where the person died after euthanasia. This stuff is completely normal for several decades now and there is no political support whatsoever for rolling back the rules around this. Even moderate christian parties have pretty much given up on this topic as lots of their own members would choose this option. Most people don't actually like the prospect of a long painful death.

Simply put, euthanasia is a popular choice among patients and less so for the doctors that help them who are biased towards addressing the suffering. People actually notarize their decisions to agree to euthanasia and people like my parents have a lot of anxiety about ending up in situation where they'd want this but it would no longer be possible due to their degraded mental state.

Euthanasia is actually quite common elsewhere but you might be thinking of it in terms of the traditional euphemisms that exist to protect the doctor and relatives involved. More traditional ways of euthanasia that are common in other countries involve sedation, stopping treatment, or simply "allowing someone to die", which is a euphemism for drugging them into a coma and then deliberately not feeding them. Also there's the ever popular morphine overdose and a few other options where somebody puts their finger on the scale. It all amounts to deliberate acts that result in the patient dying. As this is highly illegal nobody talks about this openly. For the same reason it's hard to get solid numbers on this. But considering that everyone dies and that several of the leading causes of death are quite nasty towards the end, you can make some deductions.

What happened in my country was recognizing that this kind of thing was quite common and exposed the doctors involved legally in a way that felt very wrong and unreasonable as basically all they were doing was respecting the patients wishes. So, we fixed it to ensure it gets done properly or not at all.

Grue3• 7 years ago

That's splitting hairs. Not preventing a person from killing themselves is morally equivalent to being complicit in their death. I hate seeing when people who commit suicide get blamed for their death: they're mentally ill, they can't help themselves. People who could've helped them should be blamed instead.

balzss• 7 years ago

But there are times when no one could have helped. Finding someone to blame doesn't seem to be a thing that we should aim for. It can be even harmful in certain situations e.g. a mother/father who lost their child even though they have done everything they could to prevent that. That's tragic in and of itself. Finding someone to blame would only worsen the situation.

mlang232• 7 years ago

Everyone should have the right to terminate their life. We kill animals that lived with us as pets because we dont want to see them suffer, but we refuse to do anything and have someone starve themselves to death just because... well, I will never get it.

gnode• 7 years ago

While I am a strong exponent of individual freedom, I think people should be to some extent protected from making decisions which are against their own interest, especially when their decisions are permanent and pathologically affected. In some cases, I think it can be rightly determined death is in someone's interest, such as incurable suffering. Anxiety and depression, while often severely painful, are frequently possible to recover from.

We tend to euthanize animals when we can't justify the expenditure of treating them. We generally view fellow humans as having an inherent right to our best efforts to help them, rather than in terms of their value to us.

The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

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