MrFalconfly said:
And I'm not saying that those people aren't arseholes.
In my experience however, people who commit suicide forget about their friends (that is, their true friends, not the pricks who make their life hell and are mislabelled friends).
For every suicide I see this.
[-video snipped-]
Heartbroken mates whose life just took a turn towards Satan's wine-cellar.
Innocent people who would've like nothing more than to help them, being left feeling "why didn't I see this? Why didn't I stop this? I'm at fault, it's my fault that they're dead".
The problem with that line of thought is kind of a glaring one in two parts. First it's pretty easy to feel horrible about something like this after the fact. People tend to hold themselves responsible when they survive a friend, or family member, regardless of the cause, survivor's guilt is always part of the grieving process. Bargaining and Guilt stages to be exact. The other part is that if they were as close to the person they lost as they claimed, they would have seen how their friend was in agony, or at least known something was wrong.
But you can't just put all the anger on the person who did see fit to end their life, they didn't do it explicitly to upset others, they did it to make the pain stop. That's the thing, when your pain is so bad you can't see anything else, you really also can't be expected to see how your choices will effect others. The thing is, I've seen people fall to those depths, I've been there and it's a state that's hard to miss. So those "true friends" might want to take a moment to realize that they might not have been paying hard enough attention.
zelda2fanboy said:
MarsAtlas said:
Really? How do you think they get to that point in the first place? Do you think magical elves into their bedroom while they were sleeping and covered them with depression-causing glitter? People get to this point because assholes are being assholes to them. When these assholes are your coworkers, your neighbours, your friends and your family it wears down on you. Its not complicated. Nobody just becomes suicidal for no reason.
That's a gross oversimplification. What about people with paranoid schizophrenia hearing voices in their head and suspecting the world is made of robots plotting against them? Did that person just happen to run into a group of evil scheming robots or are they sick? Having emotional responses to what happens in your life is normal and acceptable. Murder is not. I don't think saying that someone who is rationalizing suicide is mentally ill is a particularly controversial stance. I'm pretty sure modern medicine and the law is clear about that as well. If you tell a police officer or a doctor that you feel that way, then they will do everything in their power to prevent you from hurting yourself. There's no "well maybe that the only way out for him/her." Believe me, I want to be on your side on this issue (and trans people in general) as I'm pretty socially liberal on most things. I just want that one piece of the conversation on trans or gay people to not be given as much credence. And if it is a part of the conversation, then it be treated more seriously and not act as though it's always "everyone else's" fault that it happens or that's a logical move for a discriminated trans person to make.
First off, schizophrenia and depression are not comparable states. My mom had both, I've known many others with one, the other, or both, and they all will assert that they're incomparable to each other. So lets not try to make comparisons like that.
Second, suicide isn't murder, not technically. Ultimately a person's life is in their own hands, some people have given up on life to a point where they're perfectly healthy, being fed, but still just die due to lack of will to live. Which in it self is a type of suicide. Same thing can be said for people who drink themselves to death, that's also a type of suicide.
Now while there is a legal and medical stance against suicide, as in preventing it an anyway possible, there are still times where people emotionally break. There are times where people are in a particularly dark and painful place and they see death as the only escape. That's not to justify suicide, but it's important to understand that it's what happens to some people, along with that it's important to understand that it's stupendously difficult to pull a person out of that kind of mental state. Still we don't do anything constructive by vilifying people for feeling suicidal, or committing suicide, doing that
doesn't help at all. That's something likely to make someone who feels bad enough to commit suicide, feel just enough worse about themselves to actually do it.
Finally when it comes Gender and Sexuality Minorities, the fact that this is such a common thing is evidence of a problem in society. For example, transgender people who transition are far less likely to attempt suicide, thus transition is generally considered medically necessary. Still we have these people with official power who deny us housing, employment, and try to legislate us out of existance. That kind of erasure does horrible to people. Still the answer isn't blaming the victims of things like that, the answer is taking the people who allow that discrimination and hatred's existence to task for how they allow others to be treated.
That's the whole point, when someone is in a broken mental state the
why it happened part of the equation is extremely important. Vilifying the person driven to such extremes just makes others in the same sorts of situations feel even worse. That's not constructive, it's victim blaming and it helps no one, especially not the people current battling suicidal tendencies.
