Netherlands Activist Pushes Suicide Clinic for Depressed People

International   |   Wesley J. Smith   |   Feb 3, 2014   |   1:24PM   |   Amsterdam, Netherlands

Euthanasia and the Culture of Death are like the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors: No matter how much you feed it, the beast always wants more!

The Netherlands has been expanding the categories of the killable caste for decades. Back in 1991, a psychiatrist named Boudewijn Chabot assisted the suicide of a woman whose two children had died to fulfill her obsession to be buried between them.

The Dutch Supreme Court ruled logically that was just fine because suffering is suffering, and it doesn’t matter whether it is physical or emotional.

sadman5Now clinics are assisting the suicides of depressed patients whose own doctors won’t kill them. From the Daily Beast story:

In early 2012 a group called the Life-Ending Clinic went into operation for people whose personal physicians refused to terminate their lives or assist their suicides. The clinic has since tested the boundaries of “unbearable suffering.” Among those it has helped to die: people with chronic depression and those who have signed their own euthanasia declaration in the early stages of dementia.

“We consider it self-evident that someone who is terminal can turn to euthanasia,” Life-Ending Clinic Director Steven Pleiter told The Daily Beast. “Now we are entering a phase in which there will be more debate about patients who are not terminally ill, among them psychiatric patients and those with dementia.”

Even Chabot is worried:

Psychiatrist Boudewijn Chabot, seen as a pioneer of the euthanasia movement after his conviction in 1991 for helping a female patient die, told the Dutch TV program Nieuwsuur that the law “has gone off the rails.”…

Chabot warned that the emphasis on a long-term doctor-patient relationship is paramount when it comes to evaluating psychiatric problems. “There are a 100,000 chronic psychiatric patients” in the Netherlands, according to Chabot, and of those “a large segment struggles with and against a death wish.” If the Life-Ending Clinic wants to take on such a responsibility, he said, then it better “get ready.”

Hypocrite!Chabot knew the suicidal woman he infamously assisted only briefly, having met her at a Voluntary Euthanasia Society meeting. He helped kill her after meeting with her only 4 times over about 5 weeks, with no treatment every attempted.

If Chabot is upset, you know things are really getting bad! Here’s an example from the story:

In one highly publicized example last year, the clinic helped a 63-year-old man with severe psychiatric problems to end his life. After a very active career working for government, the patient in question could not face his upcoming retirement. In an interview with the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad the clinic’s psychiatrist, Gerty Casteelen said the man “managed to convince me that it was impossible for him to go on. He was all alone in the world. He’d never had a partner. He did have family but he was not in touch with them. It was almost like he’d never developed as a person. He felt like he didn’t have the right to live. His self-hatred was all consuming.”

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LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture who blogs at Human Exceptionalism.