Struggling woman with dementia euthanised in Netherlands
by Michael Cook | 4 Feb 2017 | 15 comments
The incident emerged when the Regional Review Committee released euthanasia case reports on January 1. This was Verdict 2016-85.
Here is what happened. An 80-year-old woman with dementia entered a nursing home because her husband could no longer care for her. When the woman was still lucid she expressed two wishes: (a) not to go into a "home for demented elderly" and (b) to be euthanised "when I myself find it the right time". Only the second wish was honoured.
She was unhappy in the nursing home and wandered the corridors at night. After seven weeks of this, the nursing home doctor decided that she must be suffering unbearably. Based on her previous statements, the doctor decided that euthanasia was appropriate.
With members of her family in attendance, the doctor approached to give her a lethal injection. The woman was agitated, so the doctor slipped a sedative into her coffee. This did not work, so she gave her an injection. With all these drugs, the woman dosed off.
But when the needle for the lethal injection appeared, she started to struggle. The doctor had to ask the family members to hold her down so that she could continue with the injection. The woman died soon afterwards.
The review committee said the doctor acted in good faith, but that she had erred in several respects. First, she was deceptive when she drugged the woman’s the coffee. Second, she should have stopped when the woman started to resist. Third, the wording of the advance directive was not clear enough and did not authorise the doctor to perform euthanasia.
The Committee recommended that the case should go to court to clarify whether the doctor acted properly.
Outside of the Netherlands, news of this case was received with consternation because coercion was involved. However, this was just one of many, many cases which raise questions about the euthanasia of patients and psychiatric disorders.
Verdict 2016-18, for instance, involved a very cranky man with early Alzheimer’s. The dementia clause in his advance directive was hand-written. By him? It is not clear how the doctors established that it was by his own hand. But they saw “no reasonable alternative”.
Verdict 2014-28 involved a man in his 50s who had suffered from burn-out for 20 years, with recurrent depression. He was gloomy, had problems with his eyesight and was increasingly dependent. He asked his doctor and his psychiatrist for euthanasia and they refused. He then applied to the Levenseindekliniek (end of life clinic) and their staff signed all the papers and euthanised him.
None of the reports are available in English. It would be very valuable if they were. The only ones which are reported in the Anglophone world are those which shock even the Dutch media.
We have introduced a new feature in BioEdge this week. It’s a new section called “In Depth”, where we plan to feature commentary, analysis, background and interviews.
This week Clark Hobson, of the University of Leicester, in the UK, argues that assisted suicide has a chance of becoming law in Britain through the courts, not through Parliament. In previous cases the courts have stated that Parliament must address the ban on assisted suicide appropriately. If it does not act, the Supreme Court might find that the ban infringes Article 8(1) of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR).
It’s an intriguing argument, one that will cheer supporters and dismay opponents of assisted suicide. Of course, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, has vowed to make withdrawal from the ECHR a central plank in the 2020 election, so there might not be much time...
Michael Cook
Editor
BioEdge
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