It Was Too Easy for Eileen Mihich to Kill Herself
The four-star Hotel deLuxe in Portland, Oregon, features a soaring lobby with a gilded ceiling that drips with chandeliers. Eileen Mihich, a 31-year-old woman from nearby Beaverton, checked in on the afternoon of March 6, 2025. Two days later, a hotel employee named Stephen Jones noticed that Mihich had failed to check out at the appointed time and went to her eighth-floor room to investigate. No one answered, and the room was silent behind the door, so he let himself in. He found Mihich dead on the bed, with purpling skin. Jones immediately called the police, who noted the empty pill bottles at Mihich’s bedside, along with a pamphlet: “Step-by-Step Instructions for Taking Aid in Dying Medications.”
Mihich had told her family that she was debilitated by a mysterious abdominal pain and was interested in a medically assisted death. But her suicide still shocked her two closest relatives: her cousin Sarah (who asked to be referred to by her first name, to protect her privacy) and aunt Veronica Torina. Sarah and Torina told me that they had striven to be sources of love and stability in Mihich’s harrowing life. Nearly a year on, they are still trying to solve the mystery of her death.
After Sarah and Torina heard the news about Mihich, they went to the hotel to pick up some of her belongings, including a backpack with library-rental DVDs of Matilda and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, as well as a book on spirituality. At the medical examiner’s office weeks later, they received her phone, her wallet, and pharmacy receipts for prescription drugs commonly used to end the lives of patients with untreatable illnesses.
They also learned that Mihich’s body bore no signs of illness. Mihich had been suffering, but she had not been on the verge of death.
Medical assistance in dying—a euphemism for physician-enabled suicide—has been gaining legislative ground in jurisdictions around the country. Twelve states and Washington, D.C., allow doctors to prescribe lethal dosages of medications to patients with terminal illnesses, and a new law takes effect in New York this year. Most Americans now favor laws that allow doctors to assist patients who want to die, and their numbers have grown over time, according to Gallup. In Canada, where the practice has been legal since 2016, physician-assisted suicide now accounts for about one in 20 deaths.
[From the September 2025 issue: Canada is killing itself]
For both advocates and opponents of this medically and culturally sanctioned form of suicide, Mihich’s story is a nightmare. The policy debate over medical assistance in dying generally concerns statutory changes, but new laws are encouraging a shift in social norms. When some people in severe distress imagine a peaceful end to what feels like unbearable pain, the availability of medical assistance in dying may shape their thinking, and current safeguards do not seem sufficient to prevent tragic outcomes.
Torina suspects that her niece would still be alive had it been just a little harder for her to secure lethal medication. “She didn’t really want to die, but she felt that she was powerless to create a life worth living. She mentioned that to me on more than one occasion,” Torina told me. Studies show that even minor barriers to suicide, such as selling pills in blister packs and limiting the amount of analgesics that can be sold over the counter, may deter people from ending their life, perhaps because they introduce delays into what can be a rash act. Shortly before her death, Mihich had ordered eye shadow online, which arrived after she was gone. “She was showing signs that she did want to live,” Torina said.
Mihich had been mentally ill for a long time, her relatives said, and she had needed many things that life did not supply her. An only child of negligent parents, Mihich identified with the Roald Dahl character Matilda, a precocious schoolgirl who learns to fend for herself against sometimes cruel adults. Mihich’s parents had screaming fights in front of her, Sarah and Torina recalled, and Mihich alleged that her father, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, had raped her when she was a teenager. (Mihich did not pursue the allegations in court, and her father did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Her mother declined to comment.)
After bouncing from foster home to foster home, Mihich was 15 when she fled her last foster parent and arrived on Torina’s doorstep, asking to be taken in. Torina obliged. Mihich’s psychiatrist eventually diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and borderline-personality disorder, the symptoms of which were so severe that she struggled to hold down a job or a home. She vacated one apartment because, Torina recalled, she felt that it emanated negative energy.
Mihich’s relatives said that she often refused to take the medication prescribed to treat her bipolar disorder, and that she nursed semi-delusional beliefs about her capacity to heal herself. She lived on Social Security Disability Insurance and was occasionally homeless. Mihich sometimes told her family about mysterious pains she felt in her pelvic area. Torina wondered whether this was Mihich’s way of expressing the depredations she had suffered as a woman.
Disappointed with mainstream health care, Mihich sought help from energy healers, spiritualists, and other alternative-medicine practitioners and entrepreneurs, who regularly supported her aversion to psychiatric medications, according to Sarah and Torina. All the while, Mihich repeatedly told her family that her pain was so great, she did not want to live. “She would tell me often that she couldn’t do it anymore,” Torina said. “She was too traumatized and broken” to keep on living.
Sarah and Torina understood why Mihich had decided to die. Once her toxicology report came back, they also knew which medications she had used to kill herself. Many of the drugs prescribed for medical assistance in dying are not commonly thought of as vulnerable to abuse. But when death is a possibility, minor errors can have catastrophic consequences.
To understand just how Mihich had secured these medications, Sarah turned to Mihich’s phone. Reviewing her incoming and outgoing calls in the days leading up to her death, Sarah found that Mihich had been in touch with multiple hospice coordinators and loan agencies, as well as a Washington State pharmacist who runs a compounding pharmacy out of a gift shop. Posing as a California family-practice physician under an assumed name, Mihich requested a prescription order form over email, then completed the paperwork and emailed it back—a method of submitting prescriptions that is illegal in Washington and elsewhere, in most cases. She then asked that the pharmacist coordinate via text with her “patient,” and gave her own phone number.
Ultimately Mihich was able to carry out her fraud with publicly available information and relative ease. Unlike conventional pharmacies, which sell only FDA-approved pharmaceuticals, compounding pharmacies are able to sell customized formulations that are not FDA tested and approved.
[From the June 2023 issue: The outer limits of liberalism]
Compounding pharmacies are the only places capable of dispensing medications that allow for a more peaceful death, as this involves mixing various sedatives, painkillers, and muscle relaxants into something more easily ingested and absorbed. Yet few pharmacists agree to supply these drugs, largely for ethical reasons. Jess Kaan, a Washington-based doctor who works with people seeking end-of-life care, told me that many of her patients have trouble finding a pharmacy that sells this medication, which can make such transactions particularly lucrative for those that do. The drugs Mihich bought cost a little over $2,500, based on her prescription forms, which she likely paid for out of pocket, given regulations that ban the use of federal funds such as Medicaid to cover costs associated with physician-assisted suicide.
To better understand how a pharmacy could have accepted her cousin’s suspicious and invalid prescription, Sarah filed a police report in May. This investigation is ongoing. The pharmacist who supplied Mihich with the drugs that killed her did not respond to requests for comment.
Sarah and Torina knew that Mihich was suffering emotionally and that she had been seeking more permanent relief. But they had assumed that Mihich’s talk of suicide was a way for her to express her misery, not something she was actively pursuing. Torina said they had assumed that Mihich’s aversion to suffering “any more pain” would deter her from making good on any plans. For example, they knew that she had considered starving herself, and that she had acquired a gun explicitly to shoot herself, but that she’d had trouble following through with either method. (They are not sure how she bought the gun.)
Instead, Mihich turned to a suicide approach that is advertised as a dignified way to alleviate pain. Mihich likely did not know that the drugs used to medically induce death do not necessarily guarantee a peaceful exit. In Oregon, where medical assistance in dying has been legal for nearly 30 years, the state’s Health Authority reported in 2024 that the drugs can cause side effects, including seizures, regurgitation, and regaining consciousness after an initial sedation. We can’t know for sure what Mihich experienced, because she died alone.
What we do know is that Mihich found a network of support in her pursuit of a medically assisted death. Her relatives discovered a message on her phone left by a representative of a naturopathic health company called Temple Natural Health, who explained that she had found “a way forward” after discussing Mihich’s case with a hospice-care organization called A Sacred Passing. The message did not include details, and the company did not respond to requests for comment. A representative of A Sacred Passing confirmed that the organization had responded to Mihich’s request for help in seeking medical assistance in dying with “a list of things to do” to get legal medical support—“the ways to reach out and locations to call.” The representative added that she stayed on the phone with Mihich because she sensed that the caller was struggling and needed someone to talk to, but that she didn’t think Mihich would qualify for a medically assisted death.
Eager to bring attention to the loopholes and lapses in judgment that helped end Mihich’s life, Sarah and Torina reached out to a number of organizations that advocate for medical assistance in dying, including the nonprofit Death With Dignity, but received no response. They had more luck when they contacted Aging With Dignity, a nonprofit that advocates against the practice and offers resources to people facing end-of-life problems. This group has worked with Sarah and Torina to create a video about Mihich that helps share her story.
Mihich’s method of suicide was clearly illegal in Oregon, Washington, and elsewhere in the United States, where medical assistance in death is available only to adult patients who are terminally ill, have six months or less to live, and are mentally capable of making their own health-care decisions. But her ability to access fatal drugs is concerning, as the spread of laws allowing medical assistance in dying makes it likely that incidents like this will happen again.
Mihich’s case also raises pressing questions about whether access to an assisted death should extend to people with persistent and severe mental illness—a category of disease that may not be terminal but can be debilitatingly painful. Patients who are suffering from severe psychiatric disorders can already legally seek medical help to end their life elsewhere, including in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and, beginning as soon as 2027, Canada. Yet establishing which psychiatric patients are worthy of this assistance has proved complicated. Authorities in Canada are weighing the case of Claire Brosseau, a 48-year-old woman with severe mental illness who hopes to secure medical help in ending her life but whose own psychiatrists are split over whether her illness is indeed incurable. Many of the country’s top psychiatric groups warn that there is no empirical standard for determining whether a mental-health condition is irremediable.
Advocates who oppose medically assisted suicide—perhaps because they don’t believe the government should play any role in these decisions—may take comfort in the fact that state laws permitting the practice do not currently consider unbearable pain to be a qualifying condition on its own. This makes American laws less vulnerable to arguments that medical assistance in dying should be available for all kinds of suffering, including from psychiatric illness. Yet it may soon be hard to keep these laws narrow, given the logical implications of a growing public acceptance of physician-assisted suicide, which is largely based on the idea that people who want to end their life should not suffer needlessly.
For some, Mihich’s story offers a salient lesson about the importance of greater oversight and tighter regulation of lethal drugs. Others may see in Mihich’s suicide a glimpse of things to come.