On March 26, a twenty-five-year old Spanish woman named Noelia Castillo Ramos died by euthanasia, which is legal in Spain. She had first requested it after she became paraplegic as a consequence of a failed suicide attempt. Her request was granted in 2024, but her father managed to delay the procedure by almost two years by fighting to stop it in court. In her final interview, Castillo explained that she had “always felt alone, never felt understood.”
“When the unhappy can’t be fixed, they must be purged.”
Castillo’s story attracted considerable attention in Spain and abroad. Her pain has been regarded as so extreme, her tragic life so irredeemable, that more than one media commentator has brought up the common custom of putting old pets to sleep when discussing her case. Castillo’s unhappiness was not taken as part of the unavoidable unruliness of human life. Instead, it was viewed as a sickness—one so profound that it could only be escaped through death.
Castillo’s case makes clear that we are living in what sociologist Eva Illouz and psychologist Edgar Cabanas call a “happycracy.” What we value is no longer a meaningful life, but a life in which we achieve and maintain a positive emotional state. Good politics isn’t about rationally bettering material conditions, but augmenting the population’s general levels of happiness. We live under a dictatorship of happiness, so when the unhappy can’t be fixed, they must be purged.
Castillo had a difficult home life. After her parents separated when she was 13, she spent time in the care of the government. She suffered, she said, three separate sexual assaults. She attempted to take her own life by jumping off a building, which left her without the use of her legs.
Relatively little of the coverage of the case focused on the state’s failure to address these material conditions. As journalist Juan Soto Ivars has written, Castillo “experienced the failures of a system which talks care on paper more so than it does in terms of budget allocation.” Hours before Castillo’s procedure was set to occur, her mother went on television and read messages that had been sent to the family offering financial support and free housing to try to persuade her to reconsider her choice. These offers of individual charity might have seemed touching, but they were a stark reminder that the Spanish state was willing to facilitate Castillo’s death before guaranteeing housing, stability, and safety.
The case also underlined the degree to which mental distress has become a legitimate reason to request euthanasia. Especially remarkable here is that an individual known to have attempted suicide was granted this request. Just last year, the government increased funding for various mental health services, and among these was suicide prevention. Yet the same state that would have tried to prevent Castillo’s attempted suicide has now enabled it. The only difference is the unruliness of the first attempt—which the state, in any case, failed to prevent—and the clean supervision of the other, which the state has not only supported but directly provided.
For the progressive Spanish state, “care” is no longer about defending the material interests of the working class, but the creation of a therapeutic apparatus focused on the supervision and, inevitably, surveillance of personal, psychic life. Issues related to labor, property, and production are de-emphasized, while the personal and the psychological come to the fore as a crisis to be managed by experts. Castillo’s euthanasia was not about a “dignified death.” It was about a managed one.