In Search of Gentle Death: The Fight for Your Right to Die With Dignity by Richard N. Côté

Author:Richard N. Côté
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781929175369
Publisher: Corinthian Books
Published: 2012-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Dr. Boudewijn Chabot

Born in 1941, Chabot was trained as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and at the Institute of Psychiatry and Maudsley Hospital in London. In 2007, he was awarded a Ph.D. in medical sociology at the University of Amsterdam.

His first real contact with the realities of the right-to-die movement came in 1991. The NVVE had been trying unsuccessfully to find a psychiatrist who would consider a psychiatric patient’s right to a hastened death. Chabot, who had eighteen years’ experience in the fields of psychiatry and psychotherapy, volunteered to help. This led him to Hilly Bosscher.

After spending thirty hours face-to-face with Bosscher over a period of two months, Chabot was convinced that she was profoundly and unalterably depressed and that her suffering was not amenable to psychotherapeutic treatment. She had suffered twenty-five years of beatings by her alcoholic husband before she divorced him. At the age of twenty, the elder of her two sons committed suicide. Five years later, her other son died of cancer. On the evening of his death, Bosscher attempted suicide via drug overdose and failed. Since then, she had only one desire: to end her own life in a dignified way with a physician’s help and be buried between the graves of her two sons. She did not want to throw herself under a train because she remembered how distraught her train-conductor father was after removing the bloody remnants of a suicidal person from the tracks.

Bosscher had no appetite and a disturbed sleep, common symptoms of depression that occur in severe cases of mourning. However, none of Chabot’s attempts at mourning therapy worked. Bosscher consistently refused anti-depressive medication. She showed no signs of psychosis or personality disorder.

With or without Chabot’s help, she had resolved to kill herself. “Rope only offers a 70 percent chance of success, medication less than 50 percent,” she told him. “I want to be certain this time that my next attempt at a dignified death will succeed.”

Chabot was intensely concerned. Neither he nor the NVVE had ever encountered such a tortured soul. Furthermore, if he facilitated Bosscher’s self-deliverance, he could be charged with assisting a suicide, which was punishable with a jail sentence of up to three years and the loss of his medical license.

On the other hand, Bosscher did not want to live without her sons. She spent every waking moment wanting to die. Her only relief would be a dignified elective death.

Chabot asked four psychiatrists, a general practitioner, and a psychologist specializing in the treatment of psychological trauma to review her case. None of them met with Bosscher in person, but four of them (two psychiatrists, the general practitioner, and the psychologist) were convinced of her sincere and unalterable desire to die and had no realistic treatment options to offer. The fact that two psychiatrists insisted on mourning therapy and anti-depressants in a psychiatric ward, enforced by law if necessary, made Chabot’s dilemma and ultimate decision even more complex.

Bosscher asked Chabot for a series of

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