(The Atlantic) – A Dutch psychiatrist gave lethal injections to patients with mental suffering, some of them teenagers. Does that make him a hero—or something else?

Oosterhoff’s patient had no physical illness, fatal or otherwise; he concluded, rather, that she was “mentally terminal.” An administered death would be preferable, he thought, to prolonged suffering or the possibility of unassisted suicide. To comply with the law’s requirement of “due care,” he consulted another psychiatrist and convened a “moral case deliberation session.”

Telling me about his internal conflict at that moment, Oosterhoff’s previously casual tone became more intense. At the age of 70, he is no longer an adherent of the strict Dutch Calvinism he’d learned as a child, but he said he felt haunted by the idea of “final judgment” in the afterlife; his patient’s request for euthanasia made him think, God is testing me. (Read More)