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Severely depressed people are famously known for being well motivated and agentic.
You might have heard, most likely as a semi-serious observation, that the side effect profile of most antidepressants includes increased risk of suicide.
Ever wonder why? It is because depression affects multiple part of the brain, and antidepressants can start fixing some parts before the other. In other words, you accidentally fix someone's motivation and agency before restoring their mood, and you suddenly have someone who is very energetically motivated to kill themselves.
People often do not know their inner mental state. If you care to criticize this, then just about nothing in psychiatry remains standing. There is nothing, in principle, stopping a sane person from talking into thin air, and gibbering about the CIA watching him. Yet this is a reliable metric for psychotic illness. In a similar manner, what do you think the usual stereotypes are of how a depressed person looks and behaves?
The reason that psychiatry is not purely stamp-collecting is because said stamps allow us to mail cheques we can often cash. A diagnosis of depression usually leads to a treatment of depression. It's not perfect, in very rare circumstances, such as hers, literally nothing worked. If she wants to lie after all of that (and there is a lot of "all of that"), then she's earned the right to kill herself.
She's always had it, and never lost it. This was part of my point. It's the official approval that I disapprove of.
This is not the way in which I meant it. By outsiders I meant the general public, society as a whole, not her psychiatrists, who I'm sure knew what they were doing and tried their best. Because even if I grant that this was the right decision in this particular individual case, I still oppose it because of the example that it sets.
The picture that is shown is of a (physically at least) healthy 29-year-old, who has people who care about her. When someone like that commits suicide, it should not get a societal stamp of approval. Let alone that we should do it for her. This will cause the societal norm around suicide to shift.
I think that we shouldn't be giving the general public the idea that society approves of just stepping out of life if you're not feeling it. I grant you that that's not actually what happened in this case. But that is what it looks like. You know what the fancy words mean, but remember that to a layman, "depression" means "not feeling it".
And in fact, I've just found another depressed 29 year old woman who was euthanized. I forgot the name of the first one, googled "euthanized depressed 29 year old" and immediately found another. This made me go and look up the statistics. Here they are, in Dutch, but summarizing: in 2014 there were 14 cases of euthanasia for purely psychiatric reasons. This is the first year for which there is data, so presumably the first year this was even done. By 2024 this had grown to 219. Line go up fairly quickly.
Meanwhile, there were 1819 "traditional" suicides in 2024. So by now, for every ten suicides we're adding an eleventh. More than that.
This really looks to me like official approval causing the social norms to shift, in turn causing the psychiatrists too (who are after all also part of society) to be more free in granting approvals, causing the norm to shift further.
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