A 25-year-old woman will become the first citizen to be euthanized in Spain on the grounds of mental health and depression when she ends her life later today (March 26, 2026).
As per heartbreaking reports, Noelia Castillo Ramos, from Barcelona, has been vying to medically end her life since 2024.
After a long and protracted legal battle, she’s been granted permission on the grounds of mental health.
According to Reuters, Noelia had previously made several attempts to end her own life after a traumatic experience, one of which left her paraplegic.
Shocking reports have detailed that the young woman was living in a state-supervised centre for vulnerable young people in 2022 when she was the victim of serious sexual assault involving a number of people.
After the harrowing incident, she tried to die by suicide by jumping from a building. She survived the fall, but her injuries left her paralysed from the waist down. Since then she’s been diagnosed with a host of conditions including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and borderline personality disorder.
In March 2021, Spanish lawmakers legalized voluntary euthanasia and assisted death. Under the law, voluntary euthanasia involves a doctor administering a lethal injection to patients who qualify.
When the law was passed – strictly for Spanish citizens – only adults with ‘serious and incurable’ conditions that inflicted ‘unbearable suffering’ were deemed eligible.
Noelia had been scheduled to undergo euthanasia one month after seeing her application approved in August of 2024. The process was immediately halted, however, after her father filed a legal objection.
In March 2025 he appeared in court to urge a judge to cancel the procedure entirely, claiming that his daughter suffers from a personality disorder that affects her judgement. The father’s lawyers argued that Noelia had changed her mind on the idea of euthanasia several times, thus proving that she wasn’t absolutely certain it was the right course of action.
Noelia herself attended those same legal proceedings. As per the BBC, she said at the time: “I want to finish with dignity once and for all.”
The judge in question ruled in her favor, with the Catalan government’s legal representation claiming they’d observed “no evidence of a scientific or expert character has been presented to contradict the many medical reports which support the decision [to die].”
Speaking in a television interview given to Televisión Pública Noticias earlier this week, the 25-year-old revealed that none of her family members support her decision to take her own life.
“I am a pillar of the family. I am leaving them suffering,” she said.
Later she added: “But what about my suffering?”
“No, I was very clear from the beginning,” Noelia went on. “I simply want to go in peace, stop suffering, and that’s it.
“The happiness of a father or mother should not be above the happiness of a daughter.”
