In the Netherlands, a 41-year-old man chose euthanasia to no longer suffer from his alcoholism. His struggle was recounted by his brother in the weekly Linda.
Journalist Marcel Langedijk has lost his 41-year-old alcoholic brother Mark. After years of admissions to hospitals and clinics, Mark saw no other solution than euthanasia to stop suffering. He recounts his fight and the end of his life in homage to his suffering and his choice.
“My little brother is dead,” wrote his brother Marcel, a freelance journalist, in Linda magazine. “My parents hadn’t done anything wrong, and neither had my sister. Her problem was in her head. A problem that no one has ever been able to discover ”.
“Psychologists, psychiatrists, general practitioners and other health professionals did their best to help him,” he says, but Mark couldn’t explain to anyone how he was feeling.
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End of life by lethal injection
Mark Langedijk’s request for euthanasia was approved by a support and consultation physician from Euthasia in the Netherlands, the medical body set up to provide expertise on this protocol, following the presentation of the journal. intimacy of Mark, in which he detailed the sum of his sufferings, during his 8 years ofalcoholism and 21 ineffective hospital stays.
Mark Langedijk decided that death was the only way to escape his alcohol addiction. At 41, he ended his life by lethal injection rather than continuing to live as an alcoholic. “So he set the date of his own death, (July 14), and joked, drinking beer and eating ham and cheese sandwiches in the hours leading up to his GP’s arrival at his parents’ home for administer the lethal injections, ”says Marcel.
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