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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.
But she knew the path she was on was going to lead to hear death. At least in Canada, they ask you again before giving the final lethal injection, warning you there is no going back after it.
It seems she did successfully commit suicide, and in a way with a lot less terror than jumping off a bridge. Maybe (seriously) we should make people face that terror before they commit suicide (is that what you're proposing? "Show you really want it -- cut your hand off to prove it."), but I don't think so, personally.
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