Pourqoi Docteur (a Canadian blog) wrote: EXIT Deutsche Schweiz accompanied 782 patients last year, which is 30% more than in 2014. In French-speaking Switzerland, the trend seems identical.
Summary: The German Exit Switzerland association released its figures for the year 2015: requests for assisted suicide ‘exploded’: 782 ‘cases’ in 2015, which is 30% more than in 2014. Exit Suisse Romande will publish its figures later in April, but already it appears “the tendency seems identical”.
The Swiss penal code was changed in 2001 to allow “assisted suicide”, “provided that it is not motivated by a ‘selfish motive’. Since then, “the number of patients that use continues to increase”. Exit explains this increase by the aging of the population. Among the 782 people who died by assisted suicide in 2015, 55% were women, middle-aged 77.4 years. Primarily persons “in a terminal phase of cancer, or a combination of several diseases of old age or suffering from chronic diseases.
In Switzerland, assisted suicide represents each year 1.5% of the 65000 identified deaths. But associations such as Dignitas welcome also “non-residents”, mainly Germans, English and French. Thus, in four years, more than 600 people from around the world visited this country for resorting to assisted suicide, including 66 French.