Dr. Menno Oosterhoff leaned forward in his living-room chair, took a sip from his coffee mug, and told me about the first time he ended a patient’s life.
She was 18 years old and had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, an eating disorder, and autism. Despite years of treatment, she was still bedeviled by negative thoughts, and she told Oosterhoff, a specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry in the Netherlands, that she couldn’t stand any more suffering. He suggested deep brain stimulation, an invasive procedure sometimes used to treat severe OCD. She insisted that she wanted help dying instead.
