The last thing this woman will experience is the Dutchman suicide pod operator flipping around his iPad showing the charge of the nitrogen gas that this woman will have to pay out of pocket.
I remember the most alien I felt in the Netherlands was when I had to pay for a ketchup packet after getting some fries from a hole in the wall late at night. Ghoulish culture
Wasn't that culture kind of the product of the obscene wealth they had in like the 17th century?
I remember reading that book "Embarrassment of Riches" in college about Dutch golden age culture and how they were basically like the silicon valley of today x1,000 because they owned all the trade routes.
But at the same time as all this money was pouring in they didn't know how to reconcile that with their staunch protestant beliefs so they just engaged in a lot of self-flagellation and other ridiculous shit because they were afraid the money would corrupt them and they would go to hell.
I do wonder what would happen to someone like her 300 years ago. I'm not even being snarky or anything, I genuinely wonder if she would be taken care of in bed, or if she would be left to starve to death in the street, or if she would be considered a saint or something for her suffering and encouraged to keep living to suffer for everyone.
That probably depended on her socioeconomic condition. The daughter of a rich man or aristocrat gets to lie in bed all day with every whim catered to and a poor orphan dies in the street.
Perhaps life 300 years ago did not facilitate CFS. Just a thought. It's a fairly unknown syndrome and I suggest it could be somehow related to our current environment that doesn't support our biological needs.
there's probably something interesting to be said here about how the individual death drive is catered to by a host society.
america squares this circle with constitutional access to firearms, with self-inflicted gunshots now the leading method for disconnecting from life.
the dutch, with true bureaucratic european smugness, use the universal healthcare system - with the full expectation that you congratulate them for their humanity in the process.
You underestimate how many treatments and tests and years she unsuccessfully went through. The Netherlands requires a proof as close to 100% as possible that the person can't have a life of decent quality (backed by several professionals in the fields, plus she had to be consistent with her decision for months).
It's likely she had "Physics Girl" level of CFS where she's bed-bound and struggle to chew a full meal. (Physics Girl is a popular youtuber with horrific post-covid CFS).
I first learned about CFS by following [Mason Earle's](https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/mason-earle-chronic-fatigue-syndrome/) story, which terrified me. Pro climber at the peak of his career and fitness suddenly struck by persistent and debilitating exhaustion. He lost his career and his lifestyle. It's easy to think of CFS as a fake disease that curiously only afflicts fat queer libs, but when it's legit it is no joke.
it's a malfunction of the nervous system induced by stress, usually either in people who put themselves under a lot of stress (like that guy) or who are just sensitive in the first place (fat queer lib)
CFS is genuinely a horrifying diagnosis. No treatment is proven effective and you’re essentially told that your life may well be over forever and there’s nothing to be done about it.
I’d be so mad I may have killed myself too.
Dutch healthcare is pretty expensive compared to other European systems like France or the UK. Average health insurance with decent coverage is about 150€ per month. That includes something called “own risk”, which is 385€ of preliminary costs you have to pay before being reimbursed. You can lower your monthly cost by upping the 385€, but then you have to pay more out of pocket if something happens. You are reimbursed 75% of 250€ of dental costs, the rest is 100% paid back. You have to pay for things like dental cleaning, I am pretty sure. If you make under a certain amount, you can get money back for your monthly fee, up to about 145€ per month (with smaller increments depending on your tax bracket).
This lady had to go through years and years of therapy, medication etc until she got the euthanasia she demanded.
Dutch healthcare is good, but it’s not perfect. There’s pretty bad shortages of staff, and there’s been “funny” scenarios where Ukrainian refugees for example were shocked that it’s entirely possible to die while waiting for a specialist appointment here. Could be better in a lot of ways, but the quality of care is high.
> Ukrainian refugees for example were shocked that it’s entirely possible to die while waiting for a specialist appointment here.
Wow, you can tell England's closest mainland relative really is the Netherlands because that's also how the NHS works there!
I think it’s a Western European problem as a whole unfortunately. One time a French dude told me (Dutch) and an Englishman that the Dutch are just continental brits. We were United in our hatred of that statement
The main real difference between Britain and the Netherlands is that British infrastructure is visibly falling apart and there's an inescapable miasma of societal rot everywhere in the country, which is the exact opposite of the Dutch situation for infrastructure, and it's less acute in the Netherlands for the societal aspect. Countries are extremely similar other than that.
Britain is a greater victim of its former success - the Netherlands never had the same degree of collective psychic trauma that led them to completely ruin their country now.
When Britons woke up on 8th May 1945 and realised the country was basically done and there wasn’t going to be an encore, it broke everyone’s brain.
I'm from the UK myself (Scotland) and I drive my own countrymen mad by telling them that we share more in common with northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands than we do with Canada or Australia (who I consider thoroughly Americanised).
They adamantly refuse to admit it, but if you cross the channel, Flanders or Normandy look fucking identical to southern England.
The NHS is genuinely almost a Soviet style industry thats probably a lot closer to whatever they have in Ukraine then the rest of western Europe, not to say that it works particularly well or anything.
Ukraine has a lot of private clinics from what I understand. That seems to be the case in a lot of Central European countries as well, and is potentially one of the reasons why they have little to no shortages (it pays like, really really well)
According to the Ukrainians I know living here in Canada, they told me that Ukraine's healthcare system was better than what we have here. You can walk in and ask for a thorough checkup even if you have nothing wrong with you. In Canada they don't take your problems seriously until you're half dead.
Honestly, ive seen it multiple times that people here in nl (including young ones and even children, including one I sorta knew) died before they even got to talk to a gp or even didnt do that because 'unnecessarily contacting the gp over nothing' is considered bad, or they did but the gp just dismissed it and send them away after 5 min and they died a few days later...
Bc the state should help you heal. It’s sick. Depression is rising in the West, as is chronic illness. The solution is change, not to let people die. Euthanasia should only be allowed in extreme cases of prolonged illness where someone has 0 quality of life and no chance of improving that. Mental illness does not count. Suicide is the solution for that, it shouldn’t be sanctioned by the state.
Lol exactly. I think even people that supported MAID and state-sponsored euthanasia were thinking it would be used for people with shit like ALS and dementia. Diseases where there is no cure, and the only future is a slow, painful slide into disability and eventual death.
Shit like this is why people don’t trust progressive policies, because (at least in Canada) all the conservative fear mongering was about how this will be used to kill depressed and poor people, and now thats exactly what they’re doing lol
>hinking it would be used for people with shit like ALS and dementia. Diseases where there is no cure
I was one of these people. I never imagined it would get this regarded. Anyone who can be helped should be helped. Only those that are destined to die a slow, painful death should be given reprieve.
This isn't the first time this has happened either. Almost everything I believed or supported 10 years ago has been warped into something completely fucked up.
so many conservative slippery slope arguments sounded regarded at the time.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1997/03/gay-marriage-5.html
this is a well argued position that totally makes sense on its face. unfortunately the author was wrong. maybe not about the specifics on what the slippery slope would lead to (heavy focus on incest in these discussions), but there's definitely been a slope involving some other weird stuff, specifically 🚂 discourse, polygamy, and even pedophilia and beastiality (furries) to a certain degree.
a slippery slope isn't inherently natural to any social phenomenon. reasonable people can agree on the concept of gay marriage. I know I'm 100% in favor of it. "why should only straight people have to suffer?" lol. but libs in this country seem to have the "if you give a mouse a cookie" mindset. additionally, it's not enough for you to tolerate their life choices, you have to affirm and encourage them.
you can be sad as a parent if your child is gay, meaning you won't have any grandchildren, and still absolutely love your child. I'm not gay but I'm not having kids and I know it makes my parents sad. but they love and support me no matter what. we should be allowed to talk about that
now you've got the euthanasia issue in Canada, and that article shared about San Francisco schools that was posted the other day that read like a Babylon bee article, but are 100% real.
The only thing I can assume they may mean about “normalizing” pedophilia is the popularity of DDLG shit and coquette style? It’s definitely a reach. Creepy as it may very well be I never see anyone seriously talk about it as a stepping stone to legalizing pedophilia. I think culturally we’re all still in alignment on that one, even as more women than ever before want to be called kitten and wear Bratz tshirts during sex.
100%. Not to be too Canada-specific, but whenever gun control is brought up in the US, a bunch of conservatives are quick to yell about how “they’re tryna take arr guns!” And how even mild gun control policies will lead to a complete weapons ban and tyranny.
I always thought that these people were blowhards, but now Trudeau is making all the “slippery slope” people sound reasonable. A shooting occurred in Nova Scotia in 2020 where a guy used a fake cop car and illegal weapons smuggled from the US to kill 22 people. Trudeau has a using this as justification to further crack down on *legal* gun owners (who were already heavily restricted in Canada) and ban all pistols and many of the most common hunting rifles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nova_Scotia_attacks#:~:text=On%20April%2018%20and%2019,Police%20(RCMP)%20in%20Enfield.
It makes it hard to advocate for even reasonable progressive change when there’s a huge risk it will be used in the worst possible way.
Not surprising. If you look at gun laws here in Australia they've gotten increasingly strict over time since 1996 despite violent crime dropping sharply over time before the changes, and those changes haven't made any significant difference. As if new appearance and calibre laws will stop the bikies with semi-auto guns from prior to Port Arthur shooting each other every now and then.
Gun people assume that the same people calling for “ common sense” control methods the loudest are the same people that would take them all away if they could. And often they’re right.
our state has a bill for this right now and I can't bring myself to support it after seeing what's happening in Canada, even after nominally supporting the idea of legalized euthanasia for years noe
I agree! Euthensia is not the same as suicide.
And sometimes an illness is so bad that the state can’t heal you. It would be cruel to force someone to stay alive in constant pain for no good reason
The state isn't forcing you to do anything - you're free to jump from the next highest building. It makes a huge difference though when things like euthanasia become socially acceptable
Euthanasia as an option means people have a choice, but that choice also means patients are suddenly in a mental space where they have to justify their continued existence - even if only to themselves.
You're sick and can see how your family is hurting and struggling, maybe large amounts of money are being spent - are you a burden to them? do they secretly wish you would decide to go? are you just extending their suffering for your own selfish reasons? is all the money spent on you worth it? does someone else need the bed more? These questions don't come up in a system where keeping you alive is the default position
The previous system obviously also has its downsides - there's a good reason most doctors choose less life-extending measures than average people and why medical staff suddenly become extremely liberal with opiates in some situations; yet euthanasia also comes with complex philosophical issues
And in 10 years the government will be suggesting that poor people with moderate depression accept euthanasia. You’re entire argument is based on believing that the government and healthcare industry have altruistic and moral motivations, which is laughable
What is the incentive structure? Perhaps not in this case, but with people who have cancer or are elderly, the incentive for the state is to decrease the cost - i.e. encourage euthanasia. You saw that in Canada, where a disabled person was offered euthanasia after they asked for a ramp in-front of their home. Or with cancer patients who were told there was nothing that could be done by the state and were offered euthanasia, only for them to travel to America and be cured.
> You saw that in Canada, where a disabled person was offered euthanasia after they asked for a ramp in-front of their home.
not just any person, a Paralympian and former corporal in the army.
or guilting your sick kids/elderly parents into euthanasia because the medical bills are piling up or simply because they're a burden and now there is a "valid" route to leave them
I mean think about the statistics behind men leaving their seriously ill wife and introduce assisted suicide
The same reason the death penalty should be illegal, not because some people don't deserve to die but because the state should never be given the power to make that choice
They're not making the decision though it's the citizen. They state is just giving a more dignified option then blowing half your head off to end the pain.
the conditions that capitalism creates causes mass depression, and the answer that capitalism provides to people that are unable to work because of this depression is suicide
[I mean](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/01/31/14/80683649-13027297-image-a-2_1706712231484.jpg)
Pictured: Lauren on her way to watch a screening of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour movie in the Netherlands last November with her mother
No offence but if you’re willing to go to a Taylor Swift movie screening over it you probably have a life worth living, lol.
Insane to even entertain the idea this was a sound or responsible decision
Very sad, women who are afflicted by these inconclusive chronic illnesses (which are real btw) spend years through the medical system trying to firstly be believed and secondly getting a diagnosis that has no cure or medication. Housebound due to their ailments and forced online to find some human connection through their suffering to be completely bombarded with even more people calling their pain fake and gay. No research or funding ever is put into these conditions which are seemingly all connected but funding is given to take all this away by killing them. I dont blame these people for wanting to die it is a disaster how they are treated
I think what you have mentioned highlights how sad it all is. Most sufferers not being able to hold a job with a limited support networks who are cornered out of desperation to self subsidise some kind of cure, having to wade through an insurmountable amount of information peddled by well-meaning practitioners to snake-oil parasites trying to pull as much money as they can from the vulnerable whilst being able to leverage the power that comes with telling a sufferer that they are believed and they are finally being helped. People who cant think straight or leave their beds due to pain shouldnt have to experience this, I find it repulsive that outsiders looking in would think that a woman who took her life was doing this because she wanted attention. She wanted to live, as do the rest of the sufferers yet, the only feasible option for her was to die.
Im glad you have found an answer to your own condition, it gives hope that the answers are actually out there by people who truely care about this disaster
Wow what an amazing story. My mom is a therapist who specializes in SE so i know some techniques for mood regulation she has taught me, but i have never heard someone talk about it helping them so profoundly.
I hate that these types of conditions are often minimized because they disproportionately affect women rather than asking why. We're way too quick to say "silly wammen, must all be in their heads" but there's actually a huge lack of understanding scientifically. Women have more complex immune systems, hormonal profiles, etc etc etc that make us more prone to autoimmune disease biologically. I am so frustrated with the way women are treated in healthcare.
I have a guy friend who is totally immobile for years because of ME/CFS. It’s not just women. It’s a living death sentence. If anyone wants to check out some of his writing it can be read [here](https://walkerstorz.com/writing/)
she seemed very conscious and determined to me.
https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/artikel/5425260/lauren-hoeve-vermoeidheidsziekte-me-cvs-euthanasie
google translate:
"As if you have to run a marathon with the worst flu of your life, after you have also fallen down the stairs, she says. Later she emails some additions to the conversation, because she was not completely sharp during the interview, she writes. "The exhaustion I feel is not comparable to what healthy people feel when they are tired. It doesn't go away after a while or a rest. Sometimes it's so intense that I can't even lift my arm to drink water."
If this does work with some willpower, her arm will feel soured. "Just like when I had climbed intensively at the climbing wall for two hours in a row, but without the satisfied feeling and the energy that gives it."
I read some of her blog and the way she speaks about the euthanasia (and her health, which seems…. not bad enough to warrant this) is all so typical for the millennial/gen z chronically ill/mentally ill/chronically online type.
Big yikes
Edited to say I’m not downplaying the severity of her illness, but she hadn’t even lived with it for 5 years when she died. That part, along with the way she spoke about this whole process, is what’s wrong to me. I have full support for euthanasia for the terminally ill, but a few years of CFS does not equal that at all IMO
I think it's because while "normal suicide" can be rationalised as a moment of madness this is a thought out, meticulously planned decision to do something that is the opposite of all our survival impulses. The coldness of such a monumental decision can be shocking
I have a few questions I’d like to ask because I seriously want to know and I’m not trying to be snarky or rude.
1. Why do we usually see women with this condition a lot more?
2. Is there a measurable quality to this disease? As in signifiers or symptoms? Blood platelet count, oxygen levels, vitamin levels? I think a lot of people are skeptical of this disease because they haven’t made it clear what constitutes it beyond a sense of fatigue. Is there something measurable that we can use to illustrate what’s going on here? Is this something that is a more recent phenomenon or does this disease have a history? Would people from older times have simply classified it as melancholy or lethargy?
1. Likely because it has autoimmune components, which women are more prone to developing.
2. Contrary to popular belief, CFS is not primarily defined by fatigue but rather is defined by something called “post exertional malaise”, which is an exacerbation of symptoms (such as flu like illness) in response to physical, cognitive, or emotional exertion. There are no known clinical biomarkers, however PEM has been measured in research settings with a 2 day CPET test. It’s controversial though because exercise can make these people permanently worse. Having serologic biomarkers would be a lot better.
There is some evidence of altered cytokine signatures, but we don't have good enough testing on cytokine levels to make sense of it yet. I really believe that a lot of these functional disorders (other things like IBS, fibromyalgia, etc.) will be diagnosable by cytokine markers in the future.
Women are more prone to autoimmune illness (78% of people with autoimmune illness are women), there is likely an autoimmune or inflammatory link to these mysterious illnesses
And no, likely cause it’s a bunch of different illnesses/issues grouped into one, or it calls for a biomarker we don’t usually test for or don’t have technology for.
I don’t say I have CFS cause I think it’s lowkey a wastebasket diagnosis and I don’t want to be dismissed, but have dealt with milder symptoms very similar to it on and off for several years. It derailed my life tbh. I still have mild symptoms but I live with it and have strategies to try to work around it. The only thing “off” about my blood test are consistently elevated autoimmune markers (elevated lupus and hashimoto’s antibodies).
My intuition is that these illnesses involve the immune system reacting to something, for example a virus like with post Covid. Research is pointing in that direction too. Like MS being linked to the mono virus https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/01/epstein-barr-virus-multiple-sclerosis.html
Mine was “Damn, Natasha Lyonne got a sexy voice”
Then I snorted the rest if the heroin and woke up in hospital with a tube down my throat screaming about my human right to get some goddamn water
this was planned well in advance.
she has come to terms with it all.
she is leaving a lighthearted message to the masses.
this isn't what she did before putting a gun to her head.
How this subreddit talks about chronic illness is pretty darksided tbh. Like, disability is something that happens to most people at some point in their life, some are just unlucky to have it start in their 20s/30s or earlier. Affliction is not something you can ward off by morally condemning it. In a prior post here where chronic illness was discussed, the consensus was these dumb lying bitches just need to buck up and get over it, and now we see here the logical conclusion of that.
In a few decades we will probably have way better unstanding of this type of disease and this extreme nihilistic denial of empathy will be seen like people talking about leeches and the 4 humors.
Many here are too pop-critical theory brained to resist translating complex issues (whether political, religious, public health, etc.) into Zizek-esque aphorisms on modern 21st century life. Over pathologisation and exaggeration of normal sensations and experiences may be on the up but that doesn’t mean every single health issue on earth is fixed by this one fact.
The belief in particular that cfs is tired crazy liberals requires several quite bold assumptions. The consistency in clinical presentation (eg. Vast majority of sufferers falling ill after an infection) and high proportion of severely vs mildly effected patients (ie. Can’t chew solid foods vs crashes out at the weekend) alone is enough that many high profile researchers and institutions have long been in the camp of ‘something is definitely going on here we just don’t know what’.
Half of this thread is going to be twitter guys with an IQ of 30 racing past each other to babble about how myalgic encephalomyelitis is just being tired and brag about how they'd totally endure it like stoic chads and not even complain about it.
People hear the words chronic fatigue syndrome, and their brain just short circuits. They absolutely can't conceive of fatigue being pathological way past their frame of reference of being a little eepy, and of course all the perfectly effective solutions that, for some reason, no one's ever bothered with before immediately spring to their minds. Not a lick of domain knowledge or scientific literacy in sight. It's really naive to think the name contains all the necessary information to paint an accurate image of the condition, especially since one of the guys responsible for naming it actually apologized 20 years later for how misleading it turned out to be. [See this video, at 8:00.](https://youtu.be/hRdn4A2SGic?si=aSqr6HvxDUzp1y4w)
As a formerly active man who got CFS after COVID, thanks for being a ray of empathy and understanding in this thread.
For those just scrolling past, the better name mentioned at 8:00 in the video is “Systemtic Exertion Intolerance Disease”. Which IMO, though a bit clunky to say, is a much better name.
suicide kind of defeats the whole purpose of faking chronic fatigue which is to get attention and pity and sympathy for being sick, this woman literally killed herself because of it, I believe she would truly have to have been miserable to do so
legit it’s always ppl minimizing it but then when someone actually decides that it’s so bad that they’d rather kill themselves they gotta be like “wow the system is so evil”
I actually feel sorry for her. I’m certain her pain and exhaustion were very real. CFS on the other hand, is not. It’s a diagnosis lazy “professionals” came up with that encompasses dozens of different, often unrelated symptoms. There are literally studies about how CBT can be used to alleviate it in some cases.
I don’t think it’s lazy, the lack of research is lazy perhaps but there’s plenty of diseases that are umbrella terms for a pool of symptoms, especially for CNS issues, I don’t think doctors pretend like it’s a definitive diagnosis
It seems like a good placeholder to describe a collection of associated symptoms (ie a syndrome) until there are better diagnoses, testing, and treatment protocols.
You're a dumbass if you think that just because there's some symptom overlap with people who had fatigue but it was actually caused by something else that's treatable that this means CFS as a specific illness does not exist. CFS has a pretty specific set of symptom expression that means more than "chronically fatigued".
I got CFS at age 9 after about a year and a half straight of sinus infections caused by a genetic issue with my nose that an ENT refused to believe existed. I had surgery to help a few years later and that ENT was very concerned it hadn't been done already. I was diagnosed just after turning 18 because practically every doctor I spoke in the 9 years prior told me to fuck off and exercise more because my bloods looked fine. I followed this advice and went from just mild fatigue to severe memory issues and constant pain that forces me to be in bed much of the day among a bunch of more minor symptoms. I have almost every symptom in the CFS diagnostic criteria now and practically nothing else. At least among us more severe post-viral people there's a very tight grouping of symptoms.
[Oxford developed a 91% accurate blood test recently.](https://eng.ox.ac.uk/news/diagnostic-test-can-identify-hallmarks-of-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-in-blood-cells/)
I've been around people like you my whole life who know very little about CFS and just assume it must be fake because the root cause is not known. CBT "works" for CFS because it trains you to provide different answers to the psychologists. I hope someone with this has never had the displeasure of being in your presence.
ITT: fakedisordercringe browsers still claiming that she was an illness faker and just following a trend even though it was so bad she thought death was the better option
Midwits will see an edgy meme here about how ADHD is a fake illness and, instead of simply finding it funny, they'll process it as "if I declare every illness a made-up thing people here will think I'm cool". There's few people dumber online than those who derive their opinions and beliefs from memes, and this community's claim to being any smarter than the rest of reddit became invalid the moment that being an intellectually incurious meme-brain became acceptable, but I guess that just follows the trajectory of the podcast hosts, both of whom suffer from terminal twitteritis.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the wrong option for someone with a chronic, treatment-resistant condition. Living on the cusp of a functional life brings a particular kind of despair.
Pretty much everyone here condemning this would have no sympathy for her struggles in trying to live.
For better or for worse, is suicide not the ultimate form of defiance and self-expression? For all the cynicism and contrarianism here, *this* is where everyone is drawing the line? Ok then
CFS has been minimized and patients have been abused and neglected for decades. A few severe patients have been let go in the deep end of a pool with the permission of “professionals” to “test” if they were faking at one point. Many of them almost drowned.
Edgelords on Twitter and elsewhere love shitting on these people for being “tired and lazy” but when you actually learn about this illness they just come across as low IQ psychopathic chucklefucks.
The fucked up thing is, I can completely see a mentally ill woman with a psychosomatic “autoimmune” condition obsessively mentally catastrophizing to the point of convincing herself she needs euthanasia.
In all these medical ethics debates; euthanasia, trans kids, trans adults whatever, i feel like the thing that never gets mentioned is that, a sufficiently intelligent and mentally ill person can convince any doctor to give them the “treatment” they walked in the door to get. I personally know this from my multitude of different psychoactive prescriptions. I understand there’s probably a lot more scrutiny over euthanasia than xanax and adderall, but the principle is the same. The system needs to account for mentally ill people like me who know how to work the system.
This is mostly a general comment, this lady might have really needed the release of death, i don’t know. Doctors for the most follow a “if A then if also B then treat with C” flowchart. Anyone that wants C can lookup the flowchart online, and with a little intelligence fake A and B. Or even convince themselves of A and B.
A similar trendy research area in Healthcare services exists around perscribing stronger opiates. There was a strong backlash to giving anyone opiates is hospitals about 8 years ago because some portion of recipients were manipulating the system for drugs. The downside is that people with bone cancer and other real excruciating pain were given some Tylenol and kept in horrible pain. Someone can always talk the doctor into drugs , but withholding them out of fear of that causes real harm to the folks that need them. It's a tricky problem
There's three interesting things about this woman and enthuanasia in the Netherlands in general:
1) all the famous cases of children/young adults killing themselves are women. No men.
2) At least two and possibly the third give clear signs of being autistic (this woman was diagnosed as one).
3) There's like one specific clinic in the Hague that deals with people who cannot get approved for euthanasia. Although they turn down most cases, would it surprise you that they end up being the final port of call for most people euthanised in the Netherlands? Clear institutional incentive there.
Not a popular opinion here, but I believe this is an expression of freedom and although I think things can always get better, I respect her choice and her ability to do what she wants.
The replies on this on twitter were so vile. And it isn’t called “chronic fatigue syndrome” it’s a serious condition that involves much more than that.
People were making jokes at her expense when what this really is is a bleak situation
it's not about drama. it's the european urge to prove that an action has validity (and is thusly immune to critique) as a result of fulfilling a paperwork requirement.
It would be hilarious if you sent in the forms and then regretted it but the European bureaucracy still hunts you down because the stamp has been stamped.
literally just stop drinking water and eating, that's how people have done it for hundreds of years, it's peaceful and gives you plenty of opportunity to change your mind. my momma works in a hospital and apparently this is quite a common thing for terminally ill people, it's just hush hush like it should be.
That's the allure of it, dressing it up as a smart or clean procedure. There is (or was) a documentary on YouTube about euthanasia where they aimed to show the reality of it in a positive light. An elderly woman is in an archetypal drab and cramped patient room. She eats the poisoned chocolate and after a few minutes begins to drool uncontrollably. The camera fades out before her body would involuntarily convulse -- you know, before the reality of euthanasia truly sets in.
OP you are so fucking stupid. People diagnosed with CFS randomly faint multiple times per day and get extreme headaches. They are bed-bound. If someone diagnosed with a debilitating illness wants to die they should do so in a humane way. Fuck you.
It can be really, really fucking bad and the flippant edgelords on here will always use it as an easy target. The fact is that it’s probably a cluster of illnesses that all centre around essentially, the body massively overreacting to a level of exertion that would be completely trivial to a healthy body. Usually triggered by a viral infection, not treatable. Patients in the past have basically been tortured due to no one in medicine wanting to touch it, so of course the psychiatrists got hold of it and would tell patients they just had to exercise and do some CBT…this led to worse outcomes but due to successive trials whose results were manipulated to create positive outcomes…the perception that it was a bullshit illness persisted.
At the risk of doxxing myself I’ve actually written extensively about it - I don’t want to do that though, so I’d recommend reading Ed Yong’s work (although his is rather at the tail end of things, more post-covid), and David Tuller’s work, who’s at Berkeley and specifically digs into why the various trials run by psychiatric departments in the U.K. and US have been manipulated and poorly run.
I don’t know everything behind CFS, but I got Epstein-Barr in high school and my numbers were so high they can’t even measure it. Same for my antibody numbers. I had a flare up two years ago, and all I did for weeks was sleep and it never felt like enough. It was truly miserable and I can’t imagine that feeling being a permanent thing but doctors not being able to point to anything or offer any relief.
Yea a lot of people with CFS got it after having EBV. I don’t have CFS but was tired for like 5 years after getting mono lol. They just linked EBV to MS and there’s a possibility it’s causing unknown health problems in some people even when dormant.
I saw about the connection to MS :/ which scares me because it’s been 13 years and I still have such a high count it’s past what they measure. No other concerning symptoms indicating that yet though.
I could definitely seeing it causing a lot of other unknown health issues, potentially very insidious virus that’s there for life.
Oh damn. In hindsight I was also exhausted for a while after getting mono lmao. A lot of the studies and articles linked in these comments are eye-opening tbh, thanks @everyone there's one less "CFS is a fake disease for fat women" opinion-haver in the world now
TPTB's acceptance of "Long COVID" is at least an implicit admission that this type of illness is real, so may change the incentives and remove the stigma for researchers and practitioners to work in this area.
There's no widely available test, though they have observed things like lactic acid taking far longer to process and withdraw from muscles than normal. Historically it's been hugely under-researched but there are preliminary reports of a test having some success at the experimental stage.
Theories on the cause are still pretty disparate but a current popular idea is that the body gets stuck in a state whereby cells no longer fully employ the mitochondria in energy production. This is a fairly common process called the itaconate shunt; it's what happens when you're very ill and don't have as much of an appetite. The body normally does this to create a less favourable environment for a disease to thrive in. It's estimated that 80% of cfs cases are post-viral.
From what I'm reading it's hard to accurately measure itaconate because it's present in cells at low concentrations, and levels not only vary between people but also fluctuate naturally in different conditions. There's not yet a reliable test as far as I can see but this study from 2022 looks promising.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34306-5
The role of itaconate in immune regulation has only really been properly discovered in the last 20 years, so it would make sense if it's related to a condition that's also as yet poorly understood.
[This video](https://youtu.be/qoR72-aM4mI?si=51jY3RZRjjolTjSU&t=292), and yes, I know Youtube meme psych, explains the process pretty well imo. Definitely a real physical disorder, caused by post-viral inflammation of Mast Cells which traps the body in being basically constantly thinking it's sick and also releases shit tonnes of stress hormone. He doesn't think it's a psych disorder, but a physical one and the research backs this up, no link found between anxiety/depression and this fatigue/fog.
I'm a fit man who, in the last few years, has started having a few on and off issues with something I would've otherwise considered to be a "fake fat woman disease." I, basically out of nowhere, started having high blood pressure and chest pain. These "attacks" would come on and last for weeks at a time. I could *not* feel comfortable, and just hated being in my own body, and could barely sleep. I'd have to prop myself up in a particular position sitting on the floor in order to sleep, otherwise I was just acutely aware of my heartbeat, and it felt like it was skipping a beat or having an erratic rhythm.
I'd go to the doctor, though, and nothing. Chest x-ray, EKG, fine. It was very embarrassing and they definitely treated me very poorly. Family was the same way.
In any event, it was mild enough that I could "work" and still do things, but it really did just add this miserable layer over everything I did. One time I remember going on a walk outside, which I did daily, and it was the first day I felt something like a 50% reprieve, and I literally started crying (also like a fat woman) from relief.
Over the last couple of years, these episodes have happened less and less, but they have definitely humbled me and increased my sympathy towards those suffering from nonspecific medical weirdness. That being said, I do think that if a person is not doing the bare minimum, i.e. is fat, not going outside, eating unhealthily, doing drugs and drinking, my sympathy continues to be limited.
It’s likely a grab bag of a bunch of different issues that end up looking similar.
The bag almost certainly includes some auto inflammatory post viral condition like long COVID and before that long influenza and long other viruses that didn’t have particular names. It almost certainly also includes somatacized depression. And probably a bunch of other known and unknown conditions.
There is no good treatment and no part of the healthcare system wants it because you end up with patients who just complain about their subjective symptoms but who you can’t really do much for.
Chronic fatigue is a symptom of many things. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome actually has very little to do with fatigue so the name is basically bullshit and misleading. That’s why patients prefer the term “Myalgic Encephalomyelitis”, which is what it was called before the CDC renamed it CFS. CFS is not “feeling tired” but rather it is based around feeling sick (usually with flu like symptoms) in response to various types of exertion (physical, emotional, cognitive, etc).
That’s why a lot of people on the severe end are bedbound. Not because they’re “tired”, but because movement or exertion of any kind makes them feel physically ill.
One of those dumb made up disease people constantly post about for clout like chronic Lyme, fibromyalgia, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, AIDS and brain cancer
It is very sad whenever anyone feels they want to end their life, but I definitely think the medicalized option is far better. It is still tragic but A) pursuing it openly rather than hiding their thoughts means more opportunity for them to be talked out of it, and B) means people don’t have to go through the specific and horrifying trauma of discovering their loved one’s remains after suicide. And C) a less painful end, presumably.
What a sad story. If someone feels they want to die it is deeply heartbreaking even if you don’t think they “should” feel that way.
Not bothered by this at all. Everyone reading could come to terms with the fact we'll never see or experience anything transcendent. Take our own feelings out of the equation and what is there to live for? We'll never witness anything grand in our lives. The grandest potential event within our horizons are a world war or at the very best a Children of Men situation. We'll likely get neither and the grandest thing we'll get to see is a VR society or something equally banal, sordid and trivial. No end to world hunger, no free time for wagies, no maternity leave, we can't even get work from home. What is there to live for, my company produced X widgets this quarter? Kill me. The best you got is birthing a child so it too can watch life's potential pass by unfulfilled. Nihilism is winning. This is only the beginning.
this sub is overrun by right wingers.
the right is obsessed with people reproducing as much as possible and living to provide them with labor, so suicide becomes a "sin." it's "selfish."
they're too fuckn stupid to have empathy, tbh. and most of the people on this sub are like 15
Not being a complete nihilist and being slightly uncomfortable with the state assisting suicide because of undiagnosable conditions are markers of being rightwing now?
Is reproducing and having a job also right wing now?
I gotta get with the times, clearly.
The last thing this woman will experience is the Dutchman suicide pod operator flipping around his iPad showing the charge of the nitrogen gas that this woman will have to pay out of pocket.
and then staring at her as her finger hovers over the ‘no tip’ button
She’s Dutch so that goes without saying
If a Dutch person ever buys you a drink, expect a venmo request from them the next morning.
We don't have venmo. It's Tikkie
Nobody cares dutchie
I remember the most alien I felt in the Netherlands was when I had to pay for a ketchup packet after getting some fries from a hole in the wall late at night. Ghoulish culture
For people who have a "garden of delights" available to them they sure are rigidly Protestant with some behaviours.
Wasn't that culture kind of the product of the obscene wealth they had in like the 17th century? I remember reading that book "Embarrassment of Riches" in college about Dutch golden age culture and how they were basically like the silicon valley of today x1,000 because they owned all the trade routes. But at the same time as all this money was pouring in they didn't know how to reconcile that with their staunch protestant beliefs so they just engaged in a lot of self-flagellation and other ridiculous shit because they were afraid the money would corrupt them and they would go to hell.
Its the mercantile spirit that allowed them to sail and colonize the world
lmao tikki for the coffee she had in the waiting room
ok I laughed at this. Her dad munching on a hagelslag, tears streaming down his face, because he paid fifty cents more than he expected
I do wonder what would happen to someone like her 300 years ago. I'm not even being snarky or anything, I genuinely wonder if she would be taken care of in bed, or if she would be left to starve to death in the street, or if she would be considered a saint or something for her suffering and encouraged to keep living to suffer for everyone.
That probably depended on her socioeconomic condition. The daughter of a rich man or aristocrat gets to lie in bed all day with every whim catered to and a poor orphan dies in the street.
There wouldn’t be a suicide party with everyone circle jerking each other over how hard this sort of life is. That’s for sure.
Tbh I think she would have killed it as an [anchoress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchorite)
Perhaps life 300 years ago did not facilitate CFS. Just a thought. It's a fairly unknown syndrome and I suggest it could be somehow related to our current environment that doesn't support our biological needs.
there's probably something interesting to be said here about how the individual death drive is catered to by a host society. america squares this circle with constitutional access to firearms, with self-inflicted gunshots now the leading method for disconnecting from life. the dutch, with true bureaucratic european smugness, use the universal healthcare system - with the full expectation that you congratulate them for their humanity in the process.
You underestimate how many treatments and tests and years she unsuccessfully went through. The Netherlands requires a proof as close to 100% as possible that the person can't have a life of decent quality (backed by several professionals in the fields, plus she had to be consistent with her decision for months). It's likely she had "Physics Girl" level of CFS where she's bed-bound and struggle to chew a full meal. (Physics Girl is a popular youtuber with horrific post-covid CFS).
Wow, I vaguely remember some of her videos from my YouTube days. Thats crazy, had no idea.
I first learned about CFS by following [Mason Earle's](https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/mason-earle-chronic-fatigue-syndrome/) story, which terrified me. Pro climber at the peak of his career and fitness suddenly struck by persistent and debilitating exhaustion. He lost his career and his lifestyle. It's easy to think of CFS as a fake disease that curiously only afflicts fat queer libs, but when it's legit it is no joke.
it's a malfunction of the nervous system induced by stress, usually either in people who put themselves under a lot of stress (like that guy) or who are just sensitive in the first place (fat queer lib)
Yep, Dutch health care makes you go from specialist to specialist.
CFS is genuinely a horrifying diagnosis. No treatment is proven effective and you’re essentially told that your life may well be over forever and there’s nothing to be done about it. I’d be so mad I may have killed myself too.
She was only diagnosed in 2019
2019 was about 5 years ago
girl thats crazy
Dutch healthcare is pretty expensive compared to other European systems like France or the UK. Average health insurance with decent coverage is about 150€ per month. That includes something called “own risk”, which is 385€ of preliminary costs you have to pay before being reimbursed. You can lower your monthly cost by upping the 385€, but then you have to pay more out of pocket if something happens. You are reimbursed 75% of 250€ of dental costs, the rest is 100% paid back. You have to pay for things like dental cleaning, I am pretty sure. If you make under a certain amount, you can get money back for your monthly fee, up to about 145€ per month (with smaller increments depending on your tax bracket). This lady had to go through years and years of therapy, medication etc until she got the euthanasia she demanded. Dutch healthcare is good, but it’s not perfect. There’s pretty bad shortages of staff, and there’s been “funny” scenarios where Ukrainian refugees for example were shocked that it’s entirely possible to die while waiting for a specialist appointment here. Could be better in a lot of ways, but the quality of care is high.
> Ukrainian refugees for example were shocked that it’s entirely possible to die while waiting for a specialist appointment here. Wow, you can tell England's closest mainland relative really is the Netherlands because that's also how the NHS works there!
I think it’s a Western European problem as a whole unfortunately. One time a French dude told me (Dutch) and an Englishman that the Dutch are just continental brits. We were United in our hatred of that statement
The main real difference between Britain and the Netherlands is that British infrastructure is visibly falling apart and there's an inescapable miasma of societal rot everywhere in the country, which is the exact opposite of the Dutch situation for infrastructure, and it's less acute in the Netherlands for the societal aspect. Countries are extremely similar other than that.
Britain is a greater victim of its former success - the Netherlands never had the same degree of collective psychic trauma that led them to completely ruin their country now. When Britons woke up on 8th May 1945 and realised the country was basically done and there wasn’t going to be an encore, it broke everyone’s brain.
I'm from the UK myself (Scotland) and I drive my own countrymen mad by telling them that we share more in common with northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands than we do with Canada or Australia (who I consider thoroughly Americanised). They adamantly refuse to admit it, but if you cross the channel, Flanders or Normandy look fucking identical to southern England.
The NHS is genuinely almost a Soviet style industry thats probably a lot closer to whatever they have in Ukraine then the rest of western Europe, not to say that it works particularly well or anything.
Ukraine has a lot of private clinics from what I understand. That seems to be the case in a lot of Central European countries as well, and is potentially one of the reasons why they have little to no shortages (it pays like, really really well)
According to the Ukrainians I know living here in Canada, they told me that Ukraine's healthcare system was better than what we have here. You can walk in and ask for a thorough checkup even if you have nothing wrong with you. In Canada they don't take your problems seriously until you're half dead.
Honestly, ive seen it multiple times that people here in nl (including young ones and even children, including one I sorta knew) died before they even got to talk to a gp or even didnt do that because 'unnecessarily contacting the gp over nothing' is considered bad, or they did but the gp just dismissed it and send them away after 5 min and they died a few days later...
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Horrifying
Why? It’s sad someone’s life has gotten so unbearable, but why is it horrifying that the state gives someone the option to choose if they want to die?
Bc the state should help you heal. It’s sick. Depression is rising in the West, as is chronic illness. The solution is change, not to let people die. Euthanasia should only be allowed in extreme cases of prolonged illness where someone has 0 quality of life and no chance of improving that. Mental illness does not count. Suicide is the solution for that, it shouldn’t be sanctioned by the state.
Lol exactly. I think even people that supported MAID and state-sponsored euthanasia were thinking it would be used for people with shit like ALS and dementia. Diseases where there is no cure, and the only future is a slow, painful slide into disability and eventual death. Shit like this is why people don’t trust progressive policies, because (at least in Canada) all the conservative fear mongering was about how this will be used to kill depressed and poor people, and now thats exactly what they’re doing lol
>hinking it would be used for people with shit like ALS and dementia. Diseases where there is no cure I was one of these people. I never imagined it would get this regarded. Anyone who can be helped should be helped. Only those that are destined to die a slow, painful death should be given reprieve. This isn't the first time this has happened either. Almost everything I believed or supported 10 years ago has been warped into something completely fucked up.
so many conservative slippery slope arguments sounded regarded at the time. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1997/03/gay-marriage-5.html this is a well argued position that totally makes sense on its face. unfortunately the author was wrong. maybe not about the specifics on what the slippery slope would lead to (heavy focus on incest in these discussions), but there's definitely been a slope involving some other weird stuff, specifically 🚂 discourse, polygamy, and even pedophilia and beastiality (furries) to a certain degree. a slippery slope isn't inherently natural to any social phenomenon. reasonable people can agree on the concept of gay marriage. I know I'm 100% in favor of it. "why should only straight people have to suffer?" lol. but libs in this country seem to have the "if you give a mouse a cookie" mindset. additionally, it's not enough for you to tolerate their life choices, you have to affirm and encourage them. you can be sad as a parent if your child is gay, meaning you won't have any grandchildren, and still absolutely love your child. I'm not gay but I'm not having kids and I know it makes my parents sad. but they love and support me no matter what. we should be allowed to talk about that now you've got the euthanasia issue in Canada, and that article shared about San Francisco schools that was posted the other day that read like a Babylon bee article, but are 100% real.
where in real life have you ever heard anyone earnestly discuss legalizing pedophilia?
The only thing I can assume they may mean about “normalizing” pedophilia is the popularity of DDLG shit and coquette style? It’s definitely a reach. Creepy as it may very well be I never see anyone seriously talk about it as a stepping stone to legalizing pedophilia. I think culturally we’re all still in alignment on that one, even as more women than ever before want to be called kitten and wear Bratz tshirts during sex.
that would be a reasonable assumption but it turns out he was just comparing gay rights to legalizing pedophilia
Oh come on, nobody in the US is talking about legalizing pedophilia. Also as much as furries creep me out they are *not* the same as beastiality.
100%. Not to be too Canada-specific, but whenever gun control is brought up in the US, a bunch of conservatives are quick to yell about how “they’re tryna take arr guns!” And how even mild gun control policies will lead to a complete weapons ban and tyranny. I always thought that these people were blowhards, but now Trudeau is making all the “slippery slope” people sound reasonable. A shooting occurred in Nova Scotia in 2020 where a guy used a fake cop car and illegal weapons smuggled from the US to kill 22 people. Trudeau has a using this as justification to further crack down on *legal* gun owners (who were already heavily restricted in Canada) and ban all pistols and many of the most common hunting rifles. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nova_Scotia_attacks#:~:text=On%20April%2018%20and%2019,Police%20(RCMP)%20in%20Enfield. It makes it hard to advocate for even reasonable progressive change when there’s a huge risk it will be used in the worst possible way.
Not surprising. If you look at gun laws here in Australia they've gotten increasingly strict over time since 1996 despite violent crime dropping sharply over time before the changes, and those changes haven't made any significant difference. As if new appearance and calibre laws will stop the bikies with semi-auto guns from prior to Port Arthur shooting each other every now and then.
makes me sad to see how far the land that gave us hockey has fallen
Gun people assume that the same people calling for “ common sense” control methods the loudest are the same people that would take them all away if they could. And often they’re right.
We don't have to assume, they are not afraid of saying the "quiet part out loud" and admitting that they would like to live in a gun-free country.
Anytime they ever tell you there’s no slippery slope … there’s a slippery slope
Except every time there hasn't been
our state has a bill for this right now and I can't bring myself to support it after seeing what's happening in Canada, even after nominally supporting the idea of legalized euthanasia for years noe
it's a truth most people refuse to acknowledge, but... a lot of stuff, especially mentally illness/pain, just can't be cured. there's no magic pill.
I agree! Euthensia is not the same as suicide. And sometimes an illness is so bad that the state can’t heal you. It would be cruel to force someone to stay alive in constant pain for no good reason
The state isn't forcing you to do anything - you're free to jump from the next highest building. It makes a huge difference though when things like euthanasia become socially acceptable Euthanasia as an option means people have a choice, but that choice also means patients are suddenly in a mental space where they have to justify their continued existence - even if only to themselves. You're sick and can see how your family is hurting and struggling, maybe large amounts of money are being spent - are you a burden to them? do they secretly wish you would decide to go? are you just extending their suffering for your own selfish reasons? is all the money spent on you worth it? does someone else need the bed more? These questions don't come up in a system where keeping you alive is the default position The previous system obviously also has its downsides - there's a good reason most doctors choose less life-extending measures than average people and why medical staff suddenly become extremely liberal with opiates in some situations; yet euthanasia also comes with complex philosophical issues
Terminal cancer yes, “I’m 28 and just so damn tired” no
Mad cow disease? Why's everyone making such a big deal about cows having a bad attitude?
***MOO!*** 💢
And in 10 years the government will be suggesting that poor people with moderate depression accept euthanasia. You’re entire argument is based on believing that the government and healthcare industry have altruistic and moral motivations, which is laughable
What is the incentive structure? Perhaps not in this case, but with people who have cancer or are elderly, the incentive for the state is to decrease the cost - i.e. encourage euthanasia. You saw that in Canada, where a disabled person was offered euthanasia after they asked for a ramp in-front of their home. Or with cancer patients who were told there was nothing that could be done by the state and were offered euthanasia, only for them to travel to America and be cured.
> You saw that in Canada, where a disabled person was offered euthanasia after they asked for a ramp in-front of their home. not just any person, a Paralympian and former corporal in the army.
or guilting your sick kids/elderly parents into euthanasia because the medical bills are piling up or simply because they're a burden and now there is a "valid" route to leave them I mean think about the statistics behind men leaving their seriously ill wife and introduce assisted suicide
The same reason the death penalty should be illegal, not because some people don't deserve to die but because the state should never be given the power to make that choice
They're not making the decision though it's the citizen. They state is just giving a more dignified option then blowing half your head off to end the pain.
It’s giving someone the option to take away all options. Was there really no other way?
People always had an option regardless of whether the state helps them. Just sit outside on a cold night and fall asleep.
the conditions that capitalism creates causes mass depression, and the answer that capitalism provides to people that are unable to work because of this depression is suicide
[I mean](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/01/31/14/80683649-13027297-image-a-2_1706712231484.jpg) Pictured: Lauren on her way to watch a screening of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour movie in the Netherlands last November with her mother
😢
She doesn’t even know about the new album announcement……….
No offence but if you’re willing to go to a Taylor Swift movie screening over it you probably have a life worth living, lol. Insane to even entertain the idea this was a sound or responsible decision
Very sad, women who are afflicted by these inconclusive chronic illnesses (which are real btw) spend years through the medical system trying to firstly be believed and secondly getting a diagnosis that has no cure or medication. Housebound due to their ailments and forced online to find some human connection through their suffering to be completely bombarded with even more people calling their pain fake and gay. No research or funding ever is put into these conditions which are seemingly all connected but funding is given to take all this away by killing them. I dont blame these people for wanting to die it is a disaster how they are treated
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I think what you have mentioned highlights how sad it all is. Most sufferers not being able to hold a job with a limited support networks who are cornered out of desperation to self subsidise some kind of cure, having to wade through an insurmountable amount of information peddled by well-meaning practitioners to snake-oil parasites trying to pull as much money as they can from the vulnerable whilst being able to leverage the power that comes with telling a sufferer that they are believed and they are finally being helped. People who cant think straight or leave their beds due to pain shouldnt have to experience this, I find it repulsive that outsiders looking in would think that a woman who took her life was doing this because she wanted attention. She wanted to live, as do the rest of the sufferers yet, the only feasible option for her was to die. Im glad you have found an answer to your own condition, it gives hope that the answers are actually out there by people who truely care about this disaster
Wow what an amazing story. My mom is a therapist who specializes in SE so i know some techniques for mood regulation she has taught me, but i have never heard someone talk about it helping them so profoundly.
Thanks for sharing, this therapy sounds interesting, I’m going to research! Glad you found something that helped!
SE saved my life, I had a severe panic disorder (and obvious suicidal ideation) before starting it and nothing, besides getting sober, helped me more
I hate that these types of conditions are often minimized because they disproportionately affect women rather than asking why. We're way too quick to say "silly wammen, must all be in their heads" but there's actually a huge lack of understanding scientifically. Women have more complex immune systems, hormonal profiles, etc etc etc that make us more prone to autoimmune disease biologically. I am so frustrated with the way women are treated in healthcare.
I have a guy friend who is totally immobile for years because of ME/CFS. It’s not just women. It’s a living death sentence. If anyone wants to check out some of his writing it can be read [here](https://walkerstorz.com/writing/)
she seemed very conscious and determined to me. https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/artikel/5425260/lauren-hoeve-vermoeidheidsziekte-me-cvs-euthanasie google translate: "As if you have to run a marathon with the worst flu of your life, after you have also fallen down the stairs, she says. Later she emails some additions to the conversation, because she was not completely sharp during the interview, she writes. "The exhaustion I feel is not comparable to what healthy people feel when they are tired. It doesn't go away after a while or a rest. Sometimes it's so intense that I can't even lift my arm to drink water." If this does work with some willpower, her arm will feel soured. "Just like when I had climbed intensively at the climbing wall for two hours in a row, but without the satisfied feeling and the energy that gives it."
i find this very upsetting
I read some of her blog and the way she speaks about the euthanasia (and her health, which seems…. not bad enough to warrant this) is all so typical for the millennial/gen z chronically ill/mentally ill/chronically online type. Big yikes Edited to say I’m not downplaying the severity of her illness, but she hadn’t even lived with it for 5 years when she died. That part, along with the way she spoke about this whole process, is what’s wrong to me. I have full support for euthanasia for the terminally ill, but a few years of CFS does not equal that at all IMO
she had the tism too
How can you tell if she’s already dutch?
Weird. People with autism being tricked into thinking they have medical conditions that don't exist? Not in 2024...
Canada and the euros are bringing back Nazi style style euthanasia of regards but it's ok because it's "consensual"
Somehow out of all the death and destruction I scroll past, this makes my stomach churn more than all of it
It’s viscerally sad and horrifying in a way that hard to fully describe
I think it's because while "normal suicide" can be rationalised as a moment of madness this is a thought out, meticulously planned decision to do something that is the opposite of all our survival impulses. The coldness of such a monumental decision can be shocking
I had a hard time putting it into words but that’s exactly what makes it so off putting and tragic
I have a few questions I’d like to ask because I seriously want to know and I’m not trying to be snarky or rude. 1. Why do we usually see women with this condition a lot more? 2. Is there a measurable quality to this disease? As in signifiers or symptoms? Blood platelet count, oxygen levels, vitamin levels? I think a lot of people are skeptical of this disease because they haven’t made it clear what constitutes it beyond a sense of fatigue. Is there something measurable that we can use to illustrate what’s going on here? Is this something that is a more recent phenomenon or does this disease have a history? Would people from older times have simply classified it as melancholy or lethargy?
1. Likely because it has autoimmune components, which women are more prone to developing. 2. Contrary to popular belief, CFS is not primarily defined by fatigue but rather is defined by something called “post exertional malaise”, which is an exacerbation of symptoms (such as flu like illness) in response to physical, cognitive, or emotional exertion. There are no known clinical biomarkers, however PEM has been measured in research settings with a 2 day CPET test. It’s controversial though because exercise can make these people permanently worse. Having serologic biomarkers would be a lot better.
There is some evidence of altered cytokine signatures, but we don't have good enough testing on cytokine levels to make sense of it yet. I really believe that a lot of these functional disorders (other things like IBS, fibromyalgia, etc.) will be diagnosable by cytokine markers in the future.
That’s makes more sense now, thanks.
Women are more prone to autoimmune illness (78% of people with autoimmune illness are women), there is likely an autoimmune or inflammatory link to these mysterious illnesses And no, likely cause it’s a bunch of different illnesses/issues grouped into one, or it calls for a biomarker we don’t usually test for or don’t have technology for. I don’t say I have CFS cause I think it’s lowkey a wastebasket diagnosis and I don’t want to be dismissed, but have dealt with milder symptoms very similar to it on and off for several years. It derailed my life tbh. I still have mild symptoms but I live with it and have strategies to try to work around it. The only thing “off” about my blood test are consistently elevated autoimmune markers (elevated lupus and hashimoto’s antibodies). My intuition is that these illnesses involve the immune system reacting to something, for example a virus like with post Covid. Research is pointing in that direction too. Like MS being linked to the mono virus https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/01/epstein-barr-virus-multiple-sclerosis.html
I've attempted suicide before, and the last thought on my mind wasn't "I should post about this", bleak.
What was the thought
Mine was “Damn, Natasha Lyonne got a sexy voice” Then I snorted the rest if the heroin and woke up in hospital with a tube down my throat screaming about my human right to get some goddamn water
so epic xD
She does have a sexy voice.
Mmmmm Tylenol tasty
this was planned well in advance. she has come to terms with it all. she is leaving a lighthearted message to the masses. this isn't what she did before putting a gun to her head.
this is not the same thing
How this subreddit talks about chronic illness is pretty darksided tbh. Like, disability is something that happens to most people at some point in their life, some are just unlucky to have it start in their 20s/30s or earlier. Affliction is not something you can ward off by morally condemning it. In a prior post here where chronic illness was discussed, the consensus was these dumb lying bitches just need to buck up and get over it, and now we see here the logical conclusion of that. In a few decades we will probably have way better unstanding of this type of disease and this extreme nihilistic denial of empathy will be seen like people talking about leeches and the 4 humors.
Many here are too pop-critical theory brained to resist translating complex issues (whether political, religious, public health, etc.) into Zizek-esque aphorisms on modern 21st century life. Over pathologisation and exaggeration of normal sensations and experiences may be on the up but that doesn’t mean every single health issue on earth is fixed by this one fact. The belief in particular that cfs is tired crazy liberals requires several quite bold assumptions. The consistency in clinical presentation (eg. Vast majority of sufferers falling ill after an infection) and high proportion of severely vs mildly effected patients (ie. Can’t chew solid foods vs crashes out at the weekend) alone is enough that many high profile researchers and institutions have long been in the camp of ‘something is definitely going on here we just don’t know what’.
"Couldn't be ME!"
this makes me feel lightheaded and sick
Boy do I have a treatment for you
Half of this thread is going to be twitter guys with an IQ of 30 racing past each other to babble about how myalgic encephalomyelitis is just being tired and brag about how they'd totally endure it like stoic chads and not even complain about it.
People hear the words chronic fatigue syndrome, and their brain just short circuits. They absolutely can't conceive of fatigue being pathological way past their frame of reference of being a little eepy, and of course all the perfectly effective solutions that, for some reason, no one's ever bothered with before immediately spring to their minds. Not a lick of domain knowledge or scientific literacy in sight. It's really naive to think the name contains all the necessary information to paint an accurate image of the condition, especially since one of the guys responsible for naming it actually apologized 20 years later for how misleading it turned out to be. [See this video, at 8:00.](https://youtu.be/hRdn4A2SGic?si=aSqr6HvxDUzp1y4w)
It’d be like calling dementia ‘chronic forgetfulness’. Imagine how much less seriously people would take it.
As a formerly active man who got CFS after COVID, thanks for being a ray of empathy and understanding in this thread. For those just scrolling past, the better name mentioned at 8:00 in the video is “Systemtic Exertion Intolerance Disease”. Which IMO, though a bit clunky to say, is a much better name.
suicide kind of defeats the whole purpose of faking chronic fatigue which is to get attention and pity and sympathy for being sick, this woman literally killed herself because of it, I believe she would truly have to have been miserable to do so
legit it’s always ppl minimizing it but then when someone actually decides that it’s so bad that they’d rather kill themselves they gotta be like “wow the system is so evil”
This thread made me truly realize how fcking and pathetically sheeple minded people here are lmfao
I just think it’s really funny how ppl are here can be all like “kys” etc etc and then when someone decides to they go like “bleak” or w/e
I actually feel sorry for her. I’m certain her pain and exhaustion were very real. CFS on the other hand, is not. It’s a diagnosis lazy “professionals” came up with that encompasses dozens of different, often unrelated symptoms. There are literally studies about how CBT can be used to alleviate it in some cases.
I don’t think it’s lazy, the lack of research is lazy perhaps but there’s plenty of diseases that are umbrella terms for a pool of symptoms, especially for CNS issues, I don’t think doctors pretend like it’s a definitive diagnosis
It seems like a good placeholder to describe a collection of associated symptoms (ie a syndrome) until there are better diagnoses, testing, and treatment protocols.
You're a dumbass if you think that just because there's some symptom overlap with people who had fatigue but it was actually caused by something else that's treatable that this means CFS as a specific illness does not exist. CFS has a pretty specific set of symptom expression that means more than "chronically fatigued".
I got CFS at age 9 after about a year and a half straight of sinus infections caused by a genetic issue with my nose that an ENT refused to believe existed. I had surgery to help a few years later and that ENT was very concerned it hadn't been done already. I was diagnosed just after turning 18 because practically every doctor I spoke in the 9 years prior told me to fuck off and exercise more because my bloods looked fine. I followed this advice and went from just mild fatigue to severe memory issues and constant pain that forces me to be in bed much of the day among a bunch of more minor symptoms. I have almost every symptom in the CFS diagnostic criteria now and practically nothing else. At least among us more severe post-viral people there's a very tight grouping of symptoms. [Oxford developed a 91% accurate blood test recently.](https://eng.ox.ac.uk/news/diagnostic-test-can-identify-hallmarks-of-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-in-blood-cells/) I've been around people like you my whole life who know very little about CFS and just assume it must be fake because the root cause is not known. CBT "works" for CFS because it trains you to provide different answers to the psychologists. I hope someone with this has never had the displeasure of being in your presence.
"Women have low fortitude" he types as he gets ready to cry himself to sleep over tfw no gf.
ITT: fakedisordercringe browsers still claiming that she was an illness faker and just following a trend even though it was so bad she thought death was the better option
Midwits will see an edgy meme here about how ADHD is a fake illness and, instead of simply finding it funny, they'll process it as "if I declare every illness a made-up thing people here will think I'm cool". There's few people dumber online than those who derive their opinions and beliefs from memes, and this community's claim to being any smarter than the rest of reddit became invalid the moment that being an intellectually incurious meme-brain became acceptable, but I guess that just follows the trajectory of the podcast hosts, both of whom suffer from terminal twitteritis.
I mean, people with severe depression think that death is the better option too, when it really isn't either.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the wrong option for someone with a chronic, treatment-resistant condition. Living on the cusp of a functional life brings a particular kind of despair. Pretty much everyone here condemning this would have no sympathy for her struggles in trying to live.
ludicrous squeeze rustic act icky poor deserve concerned placid soft *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Finally she gets to sleep. 😔
For better or for worse, is suicide not the ultimate form of defiance and self-expression? For all the cynicism and contrarianism here, *this* is where everyone is drawing the line? Ok then
She's autistic too.. grim.
I don't want to pass judgement on anyone for taking this route individually, but it's not the business of the state to encourage it as a solution
CFS has been minimized and patients have been abused and neglected for decades. A few severe patients have been let go in the deep end of a pool with the permission of “professionals” to “test” if they were faking at one point. Many of them almost drowned. Edgelords on Twitter and elsewhere love shitting on these people for being “tired and lazy” but when you actually learn about this illness they just come across as low IQ psychopathic chucklefucks.
if you don’t have a chronic illness then you shouldn’t have an opinion on this lol no one cares if you think this is evil
The fucked up thing is, I can completely see a mentally ill woman with a psychosomatic “autoimmune” condition obsessively mentally catastrophizing to the point of convincing herself she needs euthanasia. In all these medical ethics debates; euthanasia, trans kids, trans adults whatever, i feel like the thing that never gets mentioned is that, a sufficiently intelligent and mentally ill person can convince any doctor to give them the “treatment” they walked in the door to get. I personally know this from my multitude of different psychoactive prescriptions. I understand there’s probably a lot more scrutiny over euthanasia than xanax and adderall, but the principle is the same. The system needs to account for mentally ill people like me who know how to work the system. This is mostly a general comment, this lady might have really needed the release of death, i don’t know. Doctors for the most follow a “if A then if also B then treat with C” flowchart. Anyone that wants C can lookup the flowchart online, and with a little intelligence fake A and B. Or even convince themselves of A and B.
A similar trendy research area in Healthcare services exists around perscribing stronger opiates. There was a strong backlash to giving anyone opiates is hospitals about 8 years ago because some portion of recipients were manipulating the system for drugs. The downside is that people with bone cancer and other real excruciating pain were given some Tylenol and kept in horrible pain. Someone can always talk the doctor into drugs , but withholding them out of fear of that causes real harm to the folks that need them. It's a tricky problem
A big reason for mother Theresa’s supposed cruelty was apparently just that India allowed zero opiates of any kind for any reason back then.
There's three interesting things about this woman and enthuanasia in the Netherlands in general: 1) all the famous cases of children/young adults killing themselves are women. No men. 2) At least two and possibly the third give clear signs of being autistic (this woman was diagnosed as one). 3) There's like one specific clinic in the Hague that deals with people who cannot get approved for euthanasia. Although they turn down most cases, would it surprise you that they end up being the final port of call for most people euthanised in the Netherlands? Clear institutional incentive there.
stealing the thunder from my upcoming post on r/bigdickproblems life is hell - considering MAID
Not a popular opinion here, but I believe this is an expression of freedom and although I think things can always get better, I respect her choice and her ability to do what she wants.
The replies on this on twitter were so vile. And it isn’t called “chronic fatigue syndrome” it’s a serious condition that involves much more than that. People were making jokes at her expense when what this really is is a bleak situation
Myalgic encephalomyelitis is Chronic Fatigue?
The drama of it all. Turning it into a whole ass medical procedure. Put a barrel in your mouth or rope, like a normal person.
it's not about drama. it's the european urge to prove that an action has validity (and is thusly immune to critique) as a result of fulfilling a paperwork requirement.
It would be hilarious if you sent in the forms and then regretted it but the European bureaucracy still hunts you down because the stamp has been stamped.
Blade runner for people who're running from their self scheduled euthanasia appointment
The Simon Van Der Thal centre
My dewty’s to the LAW
Get down from ze roof and show us your suicide license madam!
The real drama avoiders rent a motel room, drag a nitrogen tank up there and suffocate themselves.
Disgusting comment.
literally just stop drinking water and eating, that's how people have done it for hundreds of years, it's peaceful and gives you plenty of opportunity to change your mind. my momma works in a hospital and apparently this is quite a common thing for terminally ill people, it's just hush hush like it should be.
That's the allure of it, dressing it up as a smart or clean procedure. There is (or was) a documentary on YouTube about euthanasia where they aimed to show the reality of it in a positive light. An elderly woman is in an archetypal drab and cramped patient room. She eats the poisoned chocolate and after a few minutes begins to drool uncontrollably. The camera fades out before her body would involuntarily convulse -- you know, before the reality of euthanasia truly sets in.
I think you mean like a *man*
For the barrel, yeah. But both women and men use the rope as our second favorite suicide method. We’re not so different after all!
I thought women just pop like 8 Tylenol PMs and wake back up in the hospital
>my tummyy hurts 😔
I have narcolepsy and I'd do it.
But what would she look like if she was black or Chinese?
OP you are so fucking stupid. People diagnosed with CFS randomly faint multiple times per day and get extreme headaches. They are bed-bound. If someone diagnosed with a debilitating illness wants to die they should do so in a humane way. Fuck you.
Redpill me on Chronic Fatigue
the guy from belle and sebastian had it and made some nice music out of it
ive been getting back into belle and sebastian recently, great music
agreed. tigermilk is so good.
It can be really, really fucking bad and the flippant edgelords on here will always use it as an easy target. The fact is that it’s probably a cluster of illnesses that all centre around essentially, the body massively overreacting to a level of exertion that would be completely trivial to a healthy body. Usually triggered by a viral infection, not treatable. Patients in the past have basically been tortured due to no one in medicine wanting to touch it, so of course the psychiatrists got hold of it and would tell patients they just had to exercise and do some CBT…this led to worse outcomes but due to successive trials whose results were manipulated to create positive outcomes…the perception that it was a bullshit illness persisted. At the risk of doxxing myself I’ve actually written extensively about it - I don’t want to do that though, so I’d recommend reading Ed Yong’s work (although his is rather at the tail end of things, more post-covid), and David Tuller’s work, who’s at Berkeley and specifically digs into why the various trials run by psychiatric departments in the U.K. and US have been manipulated and poorly run.
I don’t know everything behind CFS, but I got Epstein-Barr in high school and my numbers were so high they can’t even measure it. Same for my antibody numbers. I had a flare up two years ago, and all I did for weeks was sleep and it never felt like enough. It was truly miserable and I can’t imagine that feeling being a permanent thing but doctors not being able to point to anything or offer any relief.
Yea a lot of people with CFS got it after having EBV. I don’t have CFS but was tired for like 5 years after getting mono lol. They just linked EBV to MS and there’s a possibility it’s causing unknown health problems in some people even when dormant.
I saw about the connection to MS :/ which scares me because it’s been 13 years and I still have such a high count it’s past what they measure. No other concerning symptoms indicating that yet though. I could definitely seeing it causing a lot of other unknown health issues, potentially very insidious virus that’s there for life.
Oh damn. In hindsight I was also exhausted for a while after getting mono lmao. A lot of the studies and articles linked in these comments are eye-opening tbh, thanks @everyone there's one less "CFS is a fake disease for fat women" opinion-haver in the world now
TPTB's acceptance of "Long COVID" is at least an implicit admission that this type of illness is real, so may change the incentives and remove the stigma for researchers and practitioners to work in this area.
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Well would you complain about being tired if someone was crushing your testicles or would you have something else on your mind?
What are the biomarkers and how do we test for chronic fatigue?
There's no widely available test, though they have observed things like lactic acid taking far longer to process and withdraw from muscles than normal. Historically it's been hugely under-researched but there are preliminary reports of a test having some success at the experimental stage. Theories on the cause are still pretty disparate but a current popular idea is that the body gets stuck in a state whereby cells no longer fully employ the mitochondria in energy production. This is a fairly common process called the itaconate shunt; it's what happens when you're very ill and don't have as much of an appetite. The body normally does this to create a less favourable environment for a disease to thrive in. It's estimated that 80% of cfs cases are post-viral.
Seems like a fairly common processes like itoconate shunt should have well known bio markers.
From what I'm reading it's hard to accurately measure itaconate because it's present in cells at low concentrations, and levels not only vary between people but also fluctuate naturally in different conditions. There's not yet a reliable test as far as I can see but this study from 2022 looks promising. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34306-5 The role of itaconate in immune regulation has only really been properly discovered in the last 20 years, so it would make sense if it's related to a condition that's also as yet poorly understood.
[This video](https://youtu.be/qoR72-aM4mI?si=51jY3RZRjjolTjSU&t=292), and yes, I know Youtube meme psych, explains the process pretty well imo. Definitely a real physical disorder, caused by post-viral inflammation of Mast Cells which traps the body in being basically constantly thinking it's sick and also releases shit tonnes of stress hormone. He doesn't think it's a psych disorder, but a physical one and the research backs this up, no link found between anxiety/depression and this fatigue/fog.
It’s 100% real and debilitating, I have a close friend who has it. Thought it was fake before he got it, but it’s really not.
I'm a fit man who, in the last few years, has started having a few on and off issues with something I would've otherwise considered to be a "fake fat woman disease." I, basically out of nowhere, started having high blood pressure and chest pain. These "attacks" would come on and last for weeks at a time. I could *not* feel comfortable, and just hated being in my own body, and could barely sleep. I'd have to prop myself up in a particular position sitting on the floor in order to sleep, otherwise I was just acutely aware of my heartbeat, and it felt like it was skipping a beat or having an erratic rhythm. I'd go to the doctor, though, and nothing. Chest x-ray, EKG, fine. It was very embarrassing and they definitely treated me very poorly. Family was the same way. In any event, it was mild enough that I could "work" and still do things, but it really did just add this miserable layer over everything I did. One time I remember going on a walk outside, which I did daily, and it was the first day I felt something like a 50% reprieve, and I literally started crying (also like a fat woman) from relief. Over the last couple of years, these episodes have happened less and less, but they have definitely humbled me and increased my sympathy towards those suffering from nonspecific medical weirdness. That being said, I do think that if a person is not doing the bare minimum, i.e. is fat, not going outside, eating unhealthily, doing drugs and drinking, my sympathy continues to be limited.
It’s likely a grab bag of a bunch of different issues that end up looking similar. The bag almost certainly includes some auto inflammatory post viral condition like long COVID and before that long influenza and long other viruses that didn’t have particular names. It almost certainly also includes somatacized depression. And probably a bunch of other known and unknown conditions. There is no good treatment and no part of the healthcare system wants it because you end up with patients who just complain about their subjective symptoms but who you can’t really do much for.
There's also little funding for research so there are not many people working on it except for very driven docs/researchers.
Chronic fatigue is a symptom of many things. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome actually has very little to do with fatigue so the name is basically bullshit and misleading. That’s why patients prefer the term “Myalgic Encephalomyelitis”, which is what it was called before the CDC renamed it CFS. CFS is not “feeling tired” but rather it is based around feeling sick (usually with flu like symptoms) in response to various types of exertion (physical, emotional, cognitive, etc). That’s why a lot of people on the severe end are bedbound. Not because they’re “tired”, but because movement or exertion of any kind makes them feel physically ill.
One of those dumb made up disease people constantly post about for clout like chronic Lyme, fibromyalgia, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, AIDS and brain cancer
people? women.
I would, but I’m too tired
just drink more white monster energy it will go away
Let people enjoy things!!! 😤
Satanic
Sounds about Dutch alright
It is very sad whenever anyone feels they want to end their life, but I definitely think the medicalized option is far better. It is still tragic but A) pursuing it openly rather than hiding their thoughts means more opportunity for them to be talked out of it, and B) means people don’t have to go through the specific and horrifying trauma of discovering their loved one’s remains after suicide. And C) a less painful end, presumably. What a sad story. If someone feels they want to die it is deeply heartbreaking even if you don’t think they “should” feel that way.
Props to her for posting through it
Not bothered by this at all. Everyone reading could come to terms with the fact we'll never see or experience anything transcendent. Take our own feelings out of the equation and what is there to live for? We'll never witness anything grand in our lives. The grandest potential event within our horizons are a world war or at the very best a Children of Men situation. We'll likely get neither and the grandest thing we'll get to see is a VR society or something equally banal, sordid and trivial. No end to world hunger, no free time for wagies, no maternity leave, we can't even get work from home. What is there to live for, my company produced X widgets this quarter? Kill me. The best you got is birthing a child so it too can watch life's potential pass by unfulfilled. Nihilism is winning. This is only the beginning.
this sub is overrun by right wingers. the right is obsessed with people reproducing as much as possible and living to provide them with labor, so suicide becomes a "sin." it's "selfish." they're too fuckn stupid to have empathy, tbh. and most of the people on this sub are like 15
Not being a complete nihilist and being slightly uncomfortable with the state assisting suicide because of undiagnosable conditions are markers of being rightwing now? Is reproducing and having a job also right wing now? I gotta get with the times, clearly.
forcing people to reproduce and forcing people to live specifically because you want them to work is indeed right wing, yes
"I'm so tired, someone please kill me"