Shanti De Corte, 17 at the time of the attack, escaped the explosions without injury. In the time since the bombing, however, De Corte ...
Shanti De Corte, 17 at the time of the attack, escaped the explosions without injury. In the time since the bombing, however, De Corte struggled with depression and PTSD. Earlier this year, the now 23-year-old De Corte choose euthanasia, allowed by Belgian law, to end her life.
Belgium legalized euthanasia in 2002. The law allows patients suffering from untreatable or unbearable physical or psychological conditions to choose to end their lives.
Newsweek shares, “Belgian law specifies that to qualify for euthanasia, the person must be in a “medically futile condition of constant and unbearable physical or mental suffering that cannot be alleviated, resulting from a serious and incurable disorder caused by illness or accident.”
A woman who survived the Brussels airport terror attack has died after choosing to be euthanised due to severe depression and PTSD she suffered following the incident.
Shanti De Corte, 23, was walking through the departures lounge of the Belgian airport in Zaventem on March 22, 2016 with her school classmates ahead of a trip to Italy when Islamic State terrorists detonated a bomb.
The then 17-year-old escaped the explosion, which together with two other detonations claimed 32 lives and injured more than 300, without suffering any physical wounds.
But the psychological effects of the ordeal left her wracked by constant panic attacks and bouts of dark depression from which she never managed to emerge.
Despite attending a psychiatric hospital in her home town of Antwerp for rehabilitation and taking a range of anti-depressant medications, Shanti was unable to shake the spectre of depression and attempted suicide on two different occasions in 2018 and 2020.
In a social media post, De Corte wrote:
I laughed and cried Until the very last day I loved and I had the right to feel What true love was The tears of love were flowing Gently on my face I will now leave in peace Know that I miss you already
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