The Dutch government intends to draft a law that would legalise assisted suicide for people who feel they have 'completed life', but who are not necessarily terminally ill.

The Netherlands was the first country to legalise euthanasia in 2002, but only for patients considered to be suffering unbearable pain with no hope of a cure.

In a letter to parliament this week, the health and justice ministers said the details remained to be worked out but that people who 'have a well-considered opinion that their life is complete, must, under strict and careful criteria, be allowed to finish that life in a manner dignified for them.'

The Dutch government intends to draft a law that would legalise assisted suicide for people who feel they have 'completed life'. Pictured: A euthanasia clinic in The Hague, Netherlands

Currently, the process in Holland for those wishing to carry out a lawful assisted suicide involves them submitting a request to die to a doctor.

The GP must then agree that they are in a medically hopeless condition, suffering 'unbearably', either physically or - contentiously - mentally. Above all, they must have no hope of improvement.

The request then goes to an ethics committee which makes a decision, normally within a week.

Currently, four per cent of the 140,000 or so deaths a year in Holland are the result of doctor-assisted suicide and the tally is rising.

In particular, increasing numbers of Dutch people with mental illness demand euthanasia. In 2010, two people with such conditions had their lives ended with the figure increasing to 56 last year.

HOW THE LAWS ON DYING DIFFER Netherlands: Euthanasia laws were introduced in 2002. In 2015 there were more than 5,000 euthanasia deaths; only four were found by review officials to have been marred by 'irregularities'. Euthanasia is carried out with drugs, either injected for incapable patients, or provided for self-medication. Psychiatric patients can be put to death at their own request despite their mental illness. Britain: MPs voted against an Assisted Dying Bill last year by 336 votes to 118. But the courts continue to lean in favour of laws permitting assisted dying. Guidelines effectively mean that no one who helps someone to die will be prosecuted for assisting a suicide, a crime that carries a 14-year maximum sentence, unless they did so for financial reasons. Advertisement

Of those deaths, 36 were conducted by doctors from Amsterdam's End Of Life clinic which has a lengthy waiting list and sends mobile euthanasia teams across Holland to help patients die in their own homes.

The clinic is run by Steven Pleiter, the former European director of an American IT company, who said earlier this year: 'One of the reasons the clinic was set up was to help the 'forgotten ones' who wish for euthanasia but get denied it.

'This is a huge group: those with dementia, the elderly with no clear medical diagnosis and those with psychological problems.'

Significantly, many of the mentally-ill patients had already been rejected for euthanasia by their own GPs. He explained: 'If someone has cancer and the prognosis is poor, doctors will shorten their suffering by euthanasia.

'But if you cannot see what a patient is dying of, or know when they will die — it could be many years ahead if the person is mentally ill — then the doctors find it more difficult to decide whether to end a life.'

Research shows that 70 per cent of those with psychiatric problems which the Dutch clinic helps to die are women. A quarter of them are under 50.