Noelia Castillo stopped bothering.

OPINION
Gabriel Carrion

On March 26, 2026, at six in the afternoon I was reading the manuscript of my next work and taking notes on it. I knew that in a room at the Sant Camil social and health center in Sant Pere de Ribes (Barcelona), a 25-year-old girl who had not been allowed to mature with dignity, who had not been helped at any time in her life, had decided, thanks to some lax laws on Euthanasia, to stop living.

The day before, I heard a politician affirm that we had to respect the decisions of people who aspire to die with dignity. His ideology: leftist. Death is never dignified, even if it is consented to, especially if it is forced by circumstances.

I can perfectly understand all the cases related to degenerative diseases, and that in full use of their mental, although not physical, faculties, people make tough decisions about their right to die with dignity. I respect him deeply. Furthermore, if I were in a similar situation, where my cognitive and physical deterioration came to an end, I would want a death assisted by professionals, passive sedation and a dignified death.

However, the case of Noelia Castillo was not that.

Supposedly, the life circumstances that led her to this situation were basically three, at least that is what experts, psychologists and psychiatrists maintain: unresolved personal traumas, intense psychological suffering, and an illness that deteriorated her quality of life. All of this, experts continue to say, led her to feel without hope of improvement. He considered that his life had become unbearable and that there were no alternatives that would really alleviate his situation. For all these reasons, he decided to request euthanasia, seeking to put an end to suffering that he perceived as continuous and irreversible.

However, no one emphasizes the deplorable situation of her parents, a strongly unstructured family that apparently led her to drug consumption at a very young age, two rapes, one of them group, of which, most presumably, was not well treated, a few suicide attempts, more than five, without the current services intervening in a proactive way. And finally, a psychiatric treatment where, I don’t know the actual treatment, pills that would most likely appear in their contraindications would appear, for sure, the word suicide induction, or suicidal ideationmore than likely.

In the end, as she herself has commented, there were times when she lived among rats, on the street, etc. In the end, and after his multiple injuries, caused by his suicide attempts, he saw no other way out. Nobody gave him another way out. The social services, the doctors, including the psychologists who treated her, failed; The politicians and judges failed by applying a law that perhaps was not for them. And of course the parents failed, no matter how much love they showed, one in the trash TV that some programs are becoming and the other, trying to delay the inevitable, when perhaps it would arrive many years too late.

From Europe, approval was also given for said death. Some European bureaucrat, sitting in Brussels one afternoon, after indulging in empanadas, cheeses and chocolates, decided that it was better to sign the file and let the Spaniards solve their problem.

All before getting involved in paving the way for Noelia in an honorable way so that she could live. Perhaps better living conditions could have been created for her, long ago, perhaps she should not have been left behind, like so many other women forgotten after being raped, and perhaps psychiatrists should have diagnosed her true illness, instead of doing what they often do, treating only the symptoms. It is easier to read what is written in their dossier than to really care about the patient.

They have talked about the failure of society, and epic epithets have been said, tears have been shed, but shamelessly they have moved from their news to another related to lovers and bandits on TV afternoons of the heart. When I worked in the early nineties on certain programs on emerging networks, we were accused of serving trash television, but honestly the years have allowed me to understand that I was in diapers in relation to that issue: We’re going to make her cry and then we’ll move on to a few minutes of advertising, and if she keeps crying, it’ll be great.

As I said, Noelia Castillo has stopped bothering me. Now the docudrama on some platform and the book of a psychologist who will give us an analysis of the case. And until the next story.