Physically-healthy Dutch woman Zoraya ter Beek dies by euthanasia aged 29 due to severe mental health struggles
https://www.gelderlander.nl/binnenland/haar-diepste-wens-is-vervuld-zoraya-29-kreeg-kort-na-na-haar-verjaardag-euthanasie~a3699232/
by ____Lemi
43 comments
I hope euthanasia becomes more available and acceptable. Choosing to die and doing it with dignity should be a human right.
Her life, her right to die.
so sad that she had to endure all that. but… physically-healthy? hardly. what an absurd way to describe her situation. depression and anxiety have their root causes somewhere in the nervous system.
Combat the mental illness epidemic instead of allowing suicide. What a sick world.
Rest in peace. She ended her life with dignity and she used her end to show others that they don’t have to suffer for decades. It was her choice to make.
The article is behind paywall so no idea what her condition was.
Calling someone with mental illness “physically fit” is a very shitty thing to do. The brain and the glands are part of the body. They drive the behaviour. Evidently she wasn’t physically fit.
“phisically healty” and “severe mental health”.
Dude wtf? We’re not in ‘800 anymore, yeah?
She was not healthy and the fact that her disease is not studied enough to understand the cause of it and find a cure, does not make physically-healthy a correct term. The title is a clickbeit.
There is nothing more horrifying than the thought of being tortured with no way out
This is necessary and valuable
I’m sad she endured so much pain she saw no other way, I’m happy she could decide to stop suffering in a secure and dignified way.
so we’re really just praising suicide now aren’t we
one stressful day at work will give all sorts of body aches and stomach problems imagine having severe mental illness your whole life, i wouldn’t call that physically healthy
Why is everyone so pro-death on reddit?
You are not physically fit if you have severe mental illness. Body and mind are one.
Sad she had to make this decision, happy for her she was allowed to make it.
Hope her family friends could accept it.
Putting “physically-healthy” as the first words of the title is low-key influencing readers into thinking this is bad.
This thread is just so sad. The fact that people are defending this is reprehensible.
I completely support her choice. But I am wondering, was there seriously no other way to stop it? I know it’s mental health but there must be some way to stop it?
I have mental health issues. I have type 2 bipolar. I’ve been ready to die many times in my life. If I chose to end my life I wouldn’t have experienced my recovery, my peace and the happiness I feel on a regular basis. I respect her decision but I can’t agree that it was the right choice.
I don’t really know enough about her case to judge her, i don’t know.
But we have assisted suicide aka euthanasia in Switzerland too. I’ve got bipolar disorder and i struggle for more than 30 years with it, it’s a mood-affective disorder that makes my entire life in episodes between depression and mania. There’s no cure, all you can get is some stability with therapy and meds.
Now, this doesn’t qualify for euthanasia and i don’t have any intentions about this, but i can tell you, if i ever get something else that is serious like cancer, then i’d consider it.
Actually, the cases in Switzerland that were approved, these people did not just have mental health issues, they also had body health problems. In general, mental health problems alone don’t get the approval by the docs and state.
It’s very simple. Either your life belongs to you or it doesn’t. Either you can choose or you cannot.
You don’t owe anyone an explanation. I find it funny that People arguing aganist euthanasia because “they can be helped” always argue for banning euthanasia, rather than making sure help is available.
In the end, it’s the key issue here people other than you thinking they know better than you and this gives them the right to choose for you and then coerce you to accept their decision. That is the true face of opposition to euthanasia
Good for her.
I support euthanasia, but this sends a seriously bad message imo
>A spike in emulation suicides after a widely publicized suicide is known as the **Werther effect**, after rumours of such a spike following the publication of [Goethe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe)’s novel [*The Sorrows of Young Werther*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther).
Suicides occasionally spread through a school system, through a community, or in terms of a celebrity suicide wave, nationally. This is called a suicide cluster. Suicide clusters are caused by the social learning of suicide-related behaviors, or “copycat suicides”. Point clusters are clusters of suicides in both time and space, and have been linked to direct social learning from nearby individuals. Mass clusters are clusters of suicides in time but not space, and have been linked to the broadcasting of information concerning celebrity suicides via the mass media.
It is in the best interest of our societies to NOT normalize suicide. Granting that wish to someone suffering from a mental illness is questionable to say the least.
Pretty disgusting how many of you are all ‘you go girl!’. Wake up you fools.
Completely insane.
People protesting this are sick. Why do you get to decide whether another person lives?
I have a friend who’s tried every medicine, therapy, etc. possible and is still done with life. He wants it all to end and his friends and family have accepted this. You gave no fucking idea how much thought, time and pain has gone into his decision. I just want the best for him, and if that has to mean death, I support his decision.
This thread really rubs me the wrong way.
This reminds me of the clip I watched recently regarding another young Dutch woman that also died by euthanasia.
Her home life was rough and she therefore was taken away by the government at a young age and lived in institutions, even a prison for youth because there was no place for her elsewhere.
During one of those stays she was sexually assaulted. She said that everything felt permanently broken beyond repair (don’t know the exact words).
She has been gone for two years now.
She made a video adressing the government regarding the issues in institutions before she died.
May she and Zoraya rest in peace.
If that’s what she had to do, then it should be respected. I grew up in a very sad home. My dad was very verbally abusive. He never physically hurt me, but I endured years of being told I was worthless. It took me a good decade to finally figure myself out, another decade to feel okay about myself. Mental health is real. That’s why I resent my father to this day.. I see him every day now! I moved back home. He doesn’t realize what he did to me.. he never will. He’s old? He’ll die and I’m gonna be f*ed. Luckily, I decided to figure it out. I’m better now 🙂
This is a bit messed up.
goals
You can agree with it or not, but I think choosing life or death should be a personal decision. Not anyone else’s . I feel it is inhuman to let people choose terrible ways out because of prolonged mental suffering without outlook on improvement of their condition. Jumping from a bridge or high building or in front of a train when humane options are available for these people. Next to this, these are not overnight decisions and carefully thought out by mental health professionals.
Rip Zoraya.
To be honest, in my mind there is only one dilemma: if the mental state is altered how “good” is this kind of radical decision taken while you’re affected by that condition?
Good for her. My biggest fear is that I will be kept alive just because humanity can feel better about itself.
Hmmm …. this is tricky. So, to start this off, I believe everyone has a right to choose, since it’s your life. Still, this one feels hard to swallow. Well, if she felt she couldn’t get any better and believed this was her best choice, alright then.
Even after rationalizing this, I’m still shaking my head in disbelief. I guess since she was only twnety-nine, which is just a kid and she wasn’t terminally ill. Damn. That’s some sad stuff.
Wonder how her partner will deal with this trauma. I remember from the last thread people were concerned, imagine not being enough to prevent your partner wanting to die.
What stops us from finding better treatments for mental illness? Like, honestly, what is stopping us? I don’t see many people trying, but I see plenty of people who think promoting a glorified T4 program for the disabled is better than trying to find new ways to help them.
And I’m saying this as someone with severe anxiety and obssesive-compulsive disorder. My brain is beyond fucked up, but I don’t want to die, I want to get better, and I know it is possible, and I want to contribute to finding better treatments.
I’m sad for her, the article links to another one about her mental health and other struggles.
> Finally, in 2015, mental health care workers made the diagnosis: the Twente woman suffered from chronic depression, with an abnormality in the autistic spectrum.
What if with autism she got a special interest focus on this solution? I have autism too and have had intense focuses on things I think are the solution to something but actually harm me. And what if she never got the help she needed to deal with it? I know autistic life can feel depressing on its own without anything else. I have to respect her decision but I can’t help but feel that there could have been something that would have helped her see life as enjoyable. Maybe it wasn’t possible, maybe it needed to happen earlier in her life. I just wish there was an alternative so that people did not have to think about this “solution”. It isn’t really a fix, it’s just a total removal of the potential to feel a problem. I can’t consider it the solution to chronic MH struggles, and I don’t want to consider it a kindness either because how can they be happy after it if they aren’t there? It just makes me sad.
Do you think they also screen for bipolar? I worry about people who can suffer from that and be stuck in a depressive episode for too long, what if with the right medication they could have lived?
I just wish we could fix our mental health services before we started this, then if there is truly no help then this could be an option, but because our mental health services are never working as well as they could be and always fall short I just can’t see this option as “right”, because in a better world it could have been prevented.
If that makes sense? I admit I don’t know her full story though.
No need to mention “physically healthy” in the title. She was mentally ill, with no way to get better. Mental illness is illness.
It was called suicide back in a day
People act like the alternative is a happy life, when in reality, for people who have made their decision that life is unbearable and have exhausted all avenues of treatment, it is living in absolute misery for some time and then ending your life in a much less dignified way that’s much more traumatizing to everyone around you.
I think they use that wording – Physically healthy – because soo many people still dont really consider mental illness like for example clinical depression a valid illness. “oh you are sad? buu huu – Literally people do NOT grasp what its really like. They genuinely think you are simply feeling blue and with a little effort could snap out of it.
People who commit suicice are stigmatised as weak, bad, selfish etc – and the idea that someone suffering with depression could be in as much pain and be facing as real and tangible illness as someone with MS or cancer is STILL a foreign and bizarre way of thinking of illness to ALOT OF PEOPLE!!! the debilitation changes mental illness often bring with it, are every bit as tangible and real as say being very physically ill. But this is just for whatever reason something a huge part of society is cognitively disconnected from on some level.
So someone lives with clinical depression for decades – perhaps holding on to life exactly because they are not selfish and ARE infact literally living for others – the ones who would be sad and miss them if they ended the struggle and pain and misery. And then WHEN they finally have had enough and let go – there is allways an asshole someone talking about how selfish it was and how sad so and so is and dont they understand what they mean to other people…
seriously It really grinds my gears.
Is she cured?