Suicides and domestic setting corpses

This book describes how forensic doctors’ registrations have been used to describe different types of deaths in the Netherlands. The book consists of two parts.

Part 1 describes the gradual increase in the number of suicides where helium is used combined with an exit-bag since the publication of the book ‘Uitweg’ published in 2013 in Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands. It recounts which kind of individuals choose this method, as well as which individuals choose to use a barbiturate overdose. It also describes in which cases the forensic physician in the presence of the Crime Scene Technicians investigates a suicide.

Part 2 describes which individuals had a risk of lying unnoticed dead in a home for more than two weeks (‘domestic setting corpse’) and how common this phenomenon is in the four largest cities in the Netherlands. In addition, it describes whether preventive measures against loneliness in both Amsterdam and Rotterdam, deployed after the media attention following the discovery of a 10-year-old housing corpse in Rotterdam, led to a decrease in the number of domestic setting corpses. This study shows that there is no difference in the number of domestic setting corpses before and after the implementation of the preventive measures.

Karen van den Hondel works as a full-time forensic physician at GGD Amsterdam and is affiliated with the ‘Expertisecentrum Euthanasie‘.