Lisa, 40, is waiting to hear if she will be allowed to die. She is married and has two young children who don’t know she plans to end her life. There is just one more medication she has been told to try to treat her chronic depression, and then, she says, her request for euthanasia will be approved. The hardest part will be leaving her children, but she feels she has no choice. She plans to tell them, with the help of a grief counsellor, when she has set a date for her death.
“It’s not that I want to die, it’s that I don’t want to live this life anymore,” she says. “I’ve tried everything there is.”
Lisa, not her real name, is one of a small but growing number of people in the Netherlands choosing to end their lives on the basis of mental rather than physical illness. “My husband said, ‘As a human I can understand’, because he sees me suffering, and he can understand it’s enough,” she says. “But he said, ‘As a father of a child, it’s so difficult for me.’ Because he takes care of the boys now. And he says, ‘One day, you will not be there, and I will have to raise the boys on my own. That’s not how it should be.’”
It may be shocking to read that an otherwise healthy 40-year-old mother of two could be euthanised, but in the Netherlands, where Lisa lives, it is perfectly legal.
Euthanasia (where a doctor administers a lethal medication) and assisted suicide (where the patient administers it themselves) were formally legalised for psychological suffering as well as terminal physical illness in the EU member state in 2002. Cases were initially controversial and rare – according to the Regional Euthanasia Review Committees (RTE) annual reports, only four had been recorded by 2010. But they have been steadily increasing since. And over the past five years, they have risen sharply: from 68 cases in 2019 to 138 in 2023.
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