Dutch parents Omar and Cissy Dekker didn't fight to keep their only child alive; they walked beside her as she chose to die. In a lengthy piece for the Free Press, Rupa Subramanya traces how their daughter Iris moved from a painful adolescence marked by severe depression and a seizure that left her wheelchair bound to an intentional death at age 19—and how a modern medical system helped define her suffering as "treatment resistant." Iris tried nearly every intervention on offer—therapy, medication, ketamine, electroconvulsive therapy—while simultaneously applying for euthanasia under Dutch law, which permits it for "unbearable suffering" that doctors deem without the prospect of improvement.
Subramanya uses Iris' story to delve into "psychiatric euthanasia," which remains rare, at 1.7% of euthanasia deaths in the Netherlands in 2025, and how doctors' language—there's "nothing that could be done," Omar says they were told—can make death seem like the rational route. As psychiatrist Jim van Os tells Subramanya, a doctor's assessment that there are no more options is "the perfect setup for hopelessness and demoralization of a young person's suffering." Subramanya presses the Dekkers on "why they didn't consider giving it more time" and follows them through Iris' last days (with her euthanasia request still not granted, she opted for VSED—voluntary stopping of eating and drinking followed by palliative sedation). Read the full piece here.
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