Around a decade ago, a patient in the Netherlands went to his doctor with a request for euthanasia. He was in his 40s, suffering from depression and psychosis, and haunted by feelings of despair, which treatments had not relieved. As Dorothea Touwen, a medical ethicist who reviewed his case, later recalled, his physician agreed that no more could be done. So, as permitted by Dutch law, he received drugs to end his life — likely a coma-inducing drug followed by a medication that stopped his breathing.
For Touwen, who used to regularly analyze reports of death by euthanasia, it was one of the first times she’d encountered a euthanasia case for mental health reasons from someone so young. “When you’re 40 and otherwise healthy, there's so much life that you take away by deciding to want to die,” she told Undark. Yet, the man’s relative youth meant he also faced years of suffering if denied access to medically assisted death. The committee agreed that the doctor’s decision had been correct and had met the requirements of the law.
