A 28-year-old Dutch woman has decided to die by euthanasia because she says she’s depressed.
Zoraya ter Beek lives in a small village in the Netherlands near the German border with her boyfriend and two cats in a nice home. She has scheduled her death date for May and spoke with The Free Press about her decision despite being physically healthy.
Ter Beek says she was studying to become a psychiatrist but was never able to finish school due to mental health issues, plus having autism and borderline personality disorder, the outlet notes.
She said her psychiatrist told her, “There’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better.”
“I was always very clear that if it doesn’t get better, I can’t do this anymore,” ter Beek said.
The Netherlands native reviewed the process, saying she’ll be administered a sedative before getting a lethal injection at home on her couch. “The doctor really takes her time. It is not that they walk in and say: lay down please! Most of the time it is first a cup of coffee to settle the nerves and create a soft atmosphere,” ter Beek explained.
She continued, “Then she asks if I am ready. I will take my place on the couch. She will once again ask if I am sure, and she will start up the procedure and wish me a good journey. Or, in my case, a nice nap, because I hate it if people say, ‘Safe journey.’ I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’m a little afraid of dying, because it’s the ultimate unknown,” she said. “We don’t really know what’s next—or is there nothing? That’s the scary part.”
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The Netherlands was the first country in the world to make euthanasia legal in 2001, the outlet noted.
“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 Free Press.
“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 continued.
There were 8,720 euthanasia deaths in the Netherlands in 2022, accounting for around 5% of all the country’s deaths, per DutchNews. This represented a 4% increase from the previous year.
Last year, officials in the Netherlands also expanded the availability of “life termination” for children between one and twelve years of age for reasons of “hopeless and unbearable suffering.”