As Xeni has been pointing out (though it doesn’t seem that people are reading the links), there’s over 30 years of research that have substantiated the real threats of mis-reporting suicides.
http://www.suicidology.org/c/document_library/get_file?folderId=231&name=DLFE-71.pdf
Arguments denying or minimizing this link are akin to climate change denial.
No one gives a shit about this possibly leading to people getting “butthurt”. (Nice implied rape reference, by the way!)
People give a shit about this possibly leading to people getting dead.
Suicide is not freedom, it is destruction. Framing the destruction of life as freedom is an abominable and dangerous act, even if it comes from misguided attempts at respect or reverence.
This is like shouting “You can fly!” to someone on a window ledge, then when they jump saying “I was only joking to try to lighten the mood!”
I haven’t read this entire thread, but I don’t get the impression that people are denying that copycat suicides are a real thing. Just because a person doesn’t want to restrain their speech doesn’t mean they are unaware of what the consequences may be.
The consequence is people potentially ending up dead. Anyone with a shred of decency would voluntarily restrain their speech on this.
From earlier today on this very site:
Suicide contagion is a real thing and it’s better to educate yourself about it and try to avoid it than to promote it. I’m not angry at anyone who shares their own feelings, but if it is important to you to share your feelings in a way that minimizes the chance of copycat suicides, you can learn how to do so.
Can we still romanticize a poetic death by consumption?
In other news…
“Whenever I hear of trigger warnings… I release the safety catch of my Browning! — Young Werther”
Let me get this straight – if you’re in extreme pain and somebody assists you in swallowing a lot of pills (or something), you’re free. But if you think you’re in extreme pain and you swallow a lot of pills (or something) all by your loneself, you’re not free, is that right?
That is, presuming we (whoever that is) accept assisted suicide as “valid” and non-assisted suicide as “non-valid.”
Which may not be the case, but loosely seems to be true around here.
I’m having some dissonance in cogition.
I didn’t actually say that “it’s the suicides’ fault”; please don’t put words in my mouth.
I completely understand how someone could equate “you’re free!” as being a freeing moment, and the fear of seeing suicide as relief and freedom is something to avoid, indeed. But in my opinion, if someone is so close to the edge that a well-intentioned, warm-hearted Disney facebook meme is all it’d take to push them over, censoring peoples’ empathy is the wrong place to focus.
A true ‘trigger warning’ in this scenario would be if someone took the joyful, blissful scenes from What Dreams May Come – a movie where Robin Williams dies and goes to heaven – and posted them on Facebook to show how glorious things are for people ‘up there’ (ignoring that the movie makes suicide incredibly grim and horrible). That’d be a really potently cruel and misguided way to say goodbye to Robin.
I get what you are saying and in certain contexts, I agree 100%. How CNN and Fox report suicide should be different than how my neighbor paints about it.
It’s a warm-hearted Disney facebook meme with the explicit message, “Death is a release from pain.” It’s a pretty explicit message, supported by hundreds of thousands of people, to anyone who currently sees their life as too painful to endure (even if only because they lack the experience to know that both good and bad times come and go). I honestly don’t see how this meme is anything but supportive of suicide.
I’d like to think that one difference between assisted and non-assisted sucide is that the person providing the assistance is preforming some kind of reality check on the situation. An 80-year-old who wants to die because they have an agonizing disease that will kill them in a few weeks anyway has a pretty good case for making that decision with a sound mind. A 14-year-old who just broke up with their girlfriend not-so-much.
I don’t begrudge Robin Williams his decision, but I don’t pretend to know what state of mind he made it in either. A lot of people can be saved from suicide by simply talking to them for a few hours so that they put it off long enough to think about it. If someone isn’t going to want to kill themselves tomorrow then killing themselves today is a pretty bad idea.
You analogy is flawed, in that very few people would advocate assisted suicide for anything other than terminal cases with completely negative prognoses and no chance of recovery.
Depression is suffering, but it’s entirely cureable. Just as if you broke your leg, you wouldn’t request assisted suicide - you’d work to repair the leg. The same is true of depression - except that depression has the terrible side effect of promoting suicidal ideation in its victims.
In contrast, assisted suicide is really only ever used when there are literally no other options. They overwhelmingly involve people faced with a choice of living with crippling pain and no chance of recovery before a painful death, or euthanasia.
Suicide only makes sense when your life cannot improve. That’s why suicidal ideation from depression is so insidious - victims are perfectly capable of fully recovering and going on to lead long, healthy, happy lives, but their brains are telling them that isn’t true.
They suffer from the delusion that things can never get better, and in that light (and that light only) the choice between death and life becomes somewhat more balanced. If you believe your life is hopeless, that you can never be happy or never not hurt again, then the will to live can falter. But the problem with depression is that it is divorced from reality, and people make choices based on falsehoods and delusions that they would never accept if they weren’t suffering from imbalanced brain chemistry.
There is a difference between suppressing honest speech and giving advice on how to properly express such speech. Pointing out that you shouldn’t equate freedom and suicide is like saying that you should start sentences with a capital letter. It isn’t disqualifying the message, only it’s pointing out that it is saying something that is likely unintended by the speaker.
I know that this is the internet and we all like to assume a defensive posture of snark, but this is an important conversation that we should try to keep ourselves open to hearing.
You really don’t see the irony in this, huh.
think their tweet was touching and poignant.
I’d call it tacky and ill thought out. When someone kills themselves because they’re miserable I don’t feel any urge to say “You’re free!”.
This is not a tweet from your neighbor that went surprisingly viral. This was posted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I’d argue they have more clout in venerating and glorifying celebrities than CNN and Fox combined.
Death some times IS a release from pain. What is ironic or hypocritical is that if it is PHYSICAL pain we tend to call death merciful. Ever watch someone die horribly from something like stomach cancer? People take comfort that their loved one is no longer in pain. Do you have much experience with end-of-life Hospice care where you basically drug someone with Morphine or what ever until they finally waste away and die?
Robin wasn’t a 21 year old with issues, he was 63 and battled demons his whole life. He was tired and decided to exit on his terms. If he had languished in bed with a physical disease no one would be saying anything negative about him “Finally being free”.
ETA:
HA - I do now.
Regardless of the implications, this thing is pretty tacky. I guess, people are really bad at acknowledging death, especially if it’s a suicide. I figure, part of the problem is that I haven’t seen a lot of media portray what depression is like, without venturing into afters school special territory.
I guess I’m an unfeeling monster, but I think we should remove the stigma from suicide. Futurama had it right, we should have suicide booths publicly available. People on this very site will fight for individual rights to feel/act anyway they please, as long as no one else gets hurt. Except for this. Shaming someone into sticking around when they don’t want to is simply selfish.
What I would like to know is this: How did this discussion become about censorship? No one is proposing legal measures here. This is criticism of speech. Holy Monkeys on a Swiss Roller-Coaster, haven’t educated people gotten together by now and established that criticism of speech is not censorship? You don’t like that someone has issues with something you found fitting and poignant? Too bad. Grow up. Ignore them. Argue the other way. Do whatever you want, but don’t tell me that anyone is being actively being censored and expect me to take you seriously.
I think it’s a good rule of thumb that as soon as somebody uses the phrase “politically correct” unironically, you can safely ignore whatever it is they’re saying without fear of missing out on anything profound or insightful.
Except that suicides hurt everyone who cares about the person, so that’s not really accurate. Moreover, killing oneself is not necessarily a well-thought-out, immutable decision, so I would err on the side of caution here.
