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In 2016 ISIS attackers bombed the airport in Brussels killing over a dozen people. A seventeen year old girl was present but uninjured. This May she chose to be euthanized because of her psychological trauma. She was 23 and she had no physical injuries. The news of her death was just announced recently.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/10/2016-brussels-attacks-victim-granted-euthanasia-after-years-of-ptsd_5999805_4.html
This seems absolutely insane to me. I don't doubt she was suffering but she was only 23. A lot could have changed over the next 70 years. She wasn't terminally ill, she didn't have cancer, she wasn't paralyzed from the neck down. She was very sad and very scared and had attempted suicide twice. But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.
I used to disapprove of euthanasia but wasn't strongly in favor of making it illegal, even though it was never a choice I would make myself or approve of making for a relative. But cases like this have made me strongly opposed to it. It seems like the medical establishment can't be trusted to restrict it to only the most extreme cases. The people saying that allowing euthanasia is a slippery slope have been proven right in my opinion.
I believe she made the wrong choice but I strongly object to removing that choice. We should have exit rights to life. If you can't choose to end it all I don't think you can truly be free. My fiance is a psychiatrist that works at a public hospital where she sees some of the most chronically afflicted, she has stories and I'm aware that there are many common ways of being that I would choose death over. I trust no one but myself to decide what those states are. This is not because I trust the medical establishment but because I do not trust it.
She tried committing suicide twice and failed. Suicide isn't difficult. A couple helium balloons and she'd have had a painless death. Maybe she wasn't intelligent enough to use google? Maybe she wasn't rational enough? Or.. maybe she was crying out for help, but kept getting the wrong answer. Maybe, deep down inside, she hoped that the 'official' route would have some actual pushback. We'll never know.
I have a strong suspicion that this woman is dead because we live in a society where we put victims on a pedestal. She was a legitimate victim, and that led to heaps of attention and sympathy and pity from people around her. They likely did everything for her. Her PTSD became an excuse for everything. Soon people got tired of feeding into her victimhood. She became a burden. And she could recognize this. But she's basically been trained to see victimhood as a way to get attention. So she does a cry for help and has a lame attempt at suicide. This likely happened when someone pushed back on her just a bit. And then she got more and more attention, and it became a shield. For awhile. But how long can you really put up with someone like that? So she does it again. And eventually she's led down this path, having been rewarded every step of the way for being a victim. Maybe she saw this as the ultimate reward. The pinnacle of victimhood.
Who knows, I'm probably wrong.
What does this term mean? Is it intended to attribute any form of intent to her actions, as if 'some part of' her wants to be put into psychiatric care or weekly therapy? The rest seems to imply so. But what does that mean? Doesn't it make much more sense to say - she's just messed up and acting rather incoherently for various reasons, alienation from modern life, no coherent will or desire, etc, so even in 'committing suicide' she has no particular reason to actually kill herself but appear like it.
Like, can someone actually make an argument that the average suicidal person is, in any sense, doing a 'cry for help'? Why would that be true?
Or does it just mean 'she is doing a bad thing, and therefore we should help her, metaphorically'? In which case, what's the point of calling it a 'cry for help'?
Clearly her dying was dumb, and the people who 'assisted it' were dumb to do so, but she doesn't need to be, in some claimed sense, "actually seeking for inpatient psychiatric care, really, she's consenting i can just intuit it", but rather just doing something dumb.
This is where people usually go "what? you're saying she committed suicide because she wanted attention? that's cruel" when I've seen others make my point above in the past. And it's a terrible argument, something can seem mean and be true, but ... is it true? Attempting suicide 'for attention' can happen in some sense, but filing the paperwork for state-assisted euthanasia seems like a remarkably bad way of getting attention. As does suicide in general, honestly.
But presumably during all of this, she had a job, friends, activities other than the PTSD thing, where he was getting 'attention' of sorts. What happened to those? If she lost them due to the PTSD, then ... maybe the suicide was related to what caused that and not seeking attention. And if not, then how does on get to a position where one attempts suicide for attention but still has other stuff going on in life? It makes sense if there are other primary causes, but not like this.
Even if 'cry for help' just means 'she wanted friends and attention and the only way she could get that was to commit suicide', that doesn't really seem plausible, and makes even less sense when 'help' just means therapy/hospitalization. But 'wanted friends and attention' doesn't make sense as a significant explanation for most suicides (noting the obvious selection bias, everyone I know of who's committed suicide had lots of friends and regularly talked with many), so...
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