One Month

The Academic Medical Center (the AMC) in Amsterdam is a concrete labyrinth. A small city, with streetlamps lining the hallways and confusing stairwells…I got lost twice. There, I met with Rosalie Pronk, a graduate researcher on psychiatric euthanasia in the Netherlands. I was sweating and filled with uncertainty when I arrived at her office on the second floor above the “medische bibliotheek.”

Rosalie guided me back down through the labyrinth to grab some coffee (of the ‘just OK’ variety) and the conversation began.

Some of the enlightening themes were:

1. Psychiatric euthanasia is not all that popular amongst Dutch psychiatrists. Rosalie believes that this is because they have a difficult time discerning when their patient’s suffering is ‘unbearable’ and ‘hopeless.’

2. General Practitioners (GP’s) focus their intentions when administering euthanetics around the professionally respecting the autonomy of their patient, treating their patient with fairness (i.e. if a physically ill patient is afforded the opportunity to participate in a euthanasia program, why not the psychiatrically ill patient?). And, believe it or not, to prevent suicide.

3. That the general practitioners and advocates for psychiatric euthanasia believe that there is a nuanced difference between suicide and psychiatric euthanasia. That is, that a suicide is motivated by a crisis episode whereas psychiatric euthanasia, although technically a suicide, is a more balanced and less painful suicide, that is not wrought with irrationality and emotions.

Rosalie kindly connected me with a prominent psychiatrist in Belgium who has received a lot of attention from the international media regarding her views on psychiatric euthanasia. (Reach out to me and ask me for the password to the new page: “CW: SUICIDE” above, to see a video of this psychiatrist.) I will also, as a result of my conversation with Rosalie, sit down with a woman in Antwerp, Belgium who requested psychiatric euthanasia three years ago, but, has yet to participate in the program.

Things are coming along slowly but surely with the interviews I have been conducting and the meetings I have had. I will say, however, that there has been a sudden disruption in the project that I just gotta tell y’all about. One of the many closer connections I’ve made in Rotterdam, Iris, brought my attention to the book “White Innocence, Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race” by Gloria Wekker. (Wekker gets death threats via email often for some of the things said this ethnography of “dominant white Dutch self-representation.") This book has turned my project upside down.

Indeed, as an American inundated with messages of the “moral greatness” of Scandinavian countries and the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) from a lot of joe-schmoe politicians, I was given a rude wake up call upon learning the insidious nature of racism and xenophobia in the Netherlands. I was taken aback, but, not all that surprised. The Dutch just hide it better. Wekker coins this phenomenon “white innocence.” She writes:

Innocence, in other words, thickly describes part of a dominant Dutch way of being in the world. The claim of innocence, however, is a double-edged sword: it contains not knowing, but also contains not wanting to know, capturing what philosopher Charles W. Mills has described as the epistemology of ignorance. Succinctly stated, “the epistemology of ignorance is part of a white supremacist state in which the human race is racially divided into full persons and subpersons. Even though — or, more accurately, precisely because — they tend to not understand the racist world in which they live, white people are fully able to benefit from racial hierarchies, ontologies, and economies.” …innocence speaks not only of soft, harmless, childlike qualities, although those are the characteristics that most Dutch people would wholeheartedly subscribe to; it is [also] strongly connected to privilege, entitlement, and violence [toward people of color, particularly women of color, immigrants, and Muslims — and at its worst, an amalgamation of the four].

This book in all of its critical postcolonial glory has given me the insight and understanding to begin to also ask questions concerning race, religion, and socioeconomic status when I am asking questions about the Dutch mental health care system and psychiatric euthanasia.

Unsurprisingly, the folx who participate in psychiatric euthanasia are predominantly white. Rosalie couldn’t recall a time she had heard of a person of color requesting psychiatric euthanasia. This can be unpacked in a multitude of ways, however, my project now points me to sit down with Gloria Wekker herself as well as leaders and organizers in the Muslim and black community to understand why this might be.

August has gone by in a flash. And, even though Amsterdam was a fucking-fever-dream, I look back on it with fondness. I do this with every passing day. I am trying to find balance between remembering and cherishing memories and romanticizing them to the extent that it hurts my heart. (“If nostaliga could kill, I’d be dead by now.” - Brynn Witter)

I know September will be a balancing act as well. And, on top of that, busy as hell.

So, to re-center myself after all of the growth I have done in just a SINGLE month, I traveled to France. (See post: Baptised by the Dutch Rain for more of my reasoning behind this.) From the morning I left, I actually felt like a “traveler.” At 8:30 am I ran onto Spoor 4 shouting “WACHT! WaCHt!! By the grace of the gods, I got on the train, navigated Paris’s piss-smelling Metro, ran onto another train and ended up in Arles, France at 4:00 pm.

Arles was beautiful, I understand why Van Gogh loved it and painted it passionately – no –monomaniacally. I spent most of the two days there at the International Photography Festival, The Rencontres d'Arles. The way century-old monuments and buildings were turned into modern galleries floored me. I spent the month-a-versary of my leaving Tacoma reading by the Rhône at sunset. Right before I had to catch my train back to Paris, I met a Portuguese frenchman with a guitar. The song that he composed, “Pandora’s Garden” is the song that accompanies this blog post. (You’re dead to me if you don’t listen to at least some of it, if not all. He is truly one of the most talented musicians I have ever met. You can hear us talk about my leg hair, liberty and death, within the first two minutes. The rest of it is him gradually working through this song that everyone needs to take time to hear. At 3 minutes at 30 seconds he really starts to get into it all.)

After Arles, I met up with Sophie* and their partner. What a fucking-breath-of-fresh-fucking-air! They gave me the space to exist simply and easily and I could not be more grateful. We got wine drunk looking up at the Eiffel Tower and ate the most incredible French pastries sitting along the river.

They introduced a lot of fascinating thoughts in my brain, but, the most important one being:

Can an epidemic of suicide be classified as a genocide?

This August has been a whirlwind and I am so grateful to be growing in the way that I am.

I’m gearing up for what September will offer and am already looking at connections in Argentina.

If all works out, I’ll spend a week in October in Lithuania chatting with psychiatrists about their nation’s incredibly high suicide rate and its correlation with alcoholism.

France had some damn good coffee — of the excellent variety.

I’ve made, from start to finish, two lattes here in Rotterdam.

The community I’m cultivating here is an amalgamation of Rotterdam queers, feminists, organizers, and beverage professionals i.e., bartenders and baristas – some things never change.

De dokter in Rotterdam genas mijn gebroken hart.

Page 420 (bLaZe iT!) of Infinite Jest.

Page 152 of The Dispossessed.

Finished: “White Innocence.”

Writing some poetry I think is cute and will definitely delete later. (Read it! Above! If! You! Love! ME!)

Feeling all the love from Tacoma, you know who you are.

Europe is expensive and I’m so over it.

The LSAT sucks.

There is a really incredible coffee shop here called “Heilige Boontjes” (Holy Beans) that allows folx after they have been incarcerated or are distanced from the work force to train as baristas and serve specialty coffee to the community – good shit.

I have moved out of my room with the beautiful balcony and now live in South Rotterdam across the bridge.

Thinking of cutting all my hair off.

Happy September y’all.

Cheers!

Sam