A physically healthy, 28-year-old Dutch woman has decided to legally end her life due to her struggles with crippling depression, autism and borderline personality disorder, according to a report.
Zoraya ter Beek, who lives in a small village in the Netherlands near the German border, is scheduled to be euthanized in May — despite being in love with her 40-year-old boyfriend and living with two cats.
Ter Beek, who once aspired to be a psychiatrist, has been dealing with mental health struggles throughout her life.
She said she decided to be euthanized after her doctors told her, “There’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better,” according to the Free Press.
“I was always very clear that if it doesn’t get better, I can’t do this anymore,” ter Beek said.
She is just one of the growing number of people in the West who have decided to die rather than continue living in pain that, unlike a terminal illness, could be treated.
More people are deciding to end their lives while suffering from a slew of other mental health problems like depression or anxiety amplified by economic uncertainty, climate change, social media and other issues, the Free Press reported.
Ter Beek said she will be administered the life-ending drug on her couch with her boyfriend by her side.
“I’m seeing euthanasia as some sort of acceptable option brought to the table by physicians, by psychiatrists, when previously it was the ultimate last resort,” Stef Groenewoud, a health care ethicist at Theological University Kampen, in the Netherlands, told the outlet.
“I see the phenomenon especially in people with psychiatric diseases, and especially young people with psychiatric disorders, where the health care professional seems to give up on them more easily than before,” she added.
Ter Beek plans to be cremated after she’s euthanized on the couch in her living room.
“No music,” she said.
https://nypost.com/2024/04/02/world-news/28-year-old-woman-decides-to-be-euthanized-due-to-mental-health-issues/
A young Dutch woman finally got her tragic wish: to die by assisted suicide.
ReplyDelete29-year-old Zoraya ter Beek's life was terminated last week after waiting three years for final approval for her euthanasia, which is legal in the Netherlands if the patient is deemed to be experiencing "unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement."
Ter Beek was diagnosed with autism when she was 21, and by the time she was 22, she wore a "Do Not Resuscitate" tag around her neck, The Free Press reported. She reportedly had been hoping to end her life since she was a child as she was bullied growing up and often felt like she didn't fit in.
"For me, autism is the major hiccup in my life," Ter Beek told the Free Press. "That bothers me the most."
While Ter Beek was physically healthy, she struggled with mental illness: depression, anxiety and an unspecified personality disorder, The Free Press reported. In school, she dressed as a goth to ward off bullies and seem scarier.
"The whole black look looked right, because that is how I felt on the inside," she said.
Ter Beek lived with her boyfriend, Stein, an IT programmer 10 years her age, but her parents didn't approve of the age difference. She had been estranged from her mother and three older sisters for six years, while her father died from cancer last year.
Stein worried about Ter Beek and encouraged her to seek treatment, so she tried various things to treat her mental illness, including 33 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, in which electric currents jolt the brain. But, after her last treatment in August 2020, her psychiatrist told her, "There’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never going to get any better."
"After we heard that, we all kind of knew what that meant," Ter Beek had said, solidifying her decision to apply to the Netherlands’ Euthanasia Expertise Center in December 2020. "I was always very clear: if it doesn’t get better, I can’t do this." (continued)
(continued) "My whole friends and my support system, we really did it together," she had told The Free Press. Ter Beek reportedly saw herself as an ambassador for the Dutch euthanasia program and believed there is proper protocol in place to prevent abuse of the system.
ReplyDelete"We’ve had this law for more than 20 years," she had told the outlet. "There are really strict rules, and it’s really safe."
Ter Beek opposed "suicide kits" being widely available for those waiting for or have been denied state-sanctioned euthanasia and did not support an update to the law that would allow those seeking assisted-suicide without prior medical intervention or the approval of the state, she had told The Free Press.
"I’m pro-death. But we need to be careful to protect people who’re in psychosis or depressed and not thinking straight," Ter Beek said. "If you go on the suicide kit road, you don’t know if somebody, maybe with the right help, could have chosen to live."
Suicide related to mental illness is on the rise, The Free Press reported. In 2010, there were only two recorded cases of medically assisted suicide that involved psychiatric suffering, compared to 138 in 2023.
Ter Beek had a back-up plan if her application didn’t get final approval. She planned to use a suicide kit she obtained from Exit International, which advocates for the legalization of voluntary euthanasia. But she ultimately didn't need to use her "escape plan," as she called it.
"Zoraya passed away today at 1:25 p.m. Or as she saw it herself: she went to sleep," a friend posted to X on May 22.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/healthy-woman-dies-assisted-suicide-age-29