Tragedy and trauma

For some reason the story of a survivor of the ISIS bombing in Brussels who decided to end her life via assisted suicide was in the Ukrainian news today (Link in Ukrainian). After searching, there wasn’t much on this in English, but I’ll quote from it for lack of anything better:

Shanti De Corte was a 17-year-old student traveling with her classmates at Brussels Airport when ISIS terrorists detonated a bomb…De Corte was not physically injured in the attack, but endured years of panic attacks and depression afterward.

“With all the medications I take, I feel like a ghost that can’t feel anything anymore. Maybe there were other solutions than medications,” she wrote in one post, according to the Belgian news site RTBF.

De Corte, then 23, chose to be euthanized earlier this year, which is legal in Belgium. She died on May 7 after two psychiatrists signed off on her request.

This is a damning indictment on the state of mental healthcare. Obviously the pain from living through such a tragedy must be unimaginable. But clearly the current, popular, approach of drugging people into dull shells of themselves ins’t the answer.

I find this story particularly tragic because it sounded like De Corte actually wanted to live, to find treatment, but she had zero hope in the medical system to provide the treatment she needed. I fear this is far more widespread than any of us would like to think, and there’s a growing skepticism of many anti-depressant drugs.

There has to be better treatments for depression and anxiety — likely not in pill form, which means they’d also be more expensive, harder to measure and produce variable results. I can’t help but feeling our understanding of the mind is primitive compared to other areas of medicine.