Essentially, it boils down to permission suicide. I’ve seen it at work in a close relative’s group of friends. Over 10 years, five of them took their own lives. There was no apparent commonality other than when times were hard, they had an example of escape. The first to go was very Hunter S. Thompson about it; graphic and seedy. Opened a gateway.
Dressing it up in Disney clothes is mawkish at best; highly attractive and persuasive at worst. Add the loss of an extraordinary individual who has brought sunshine, dignity and laughter to most everyone’s life, and you have a heady brew.
The cel fits the circumstance, it’s true. It’s a sweet thing to consider abstractly, a simple way to detach oneself from the hard cold fact that Robin Williams hanged himself, alone and in trouble. But it’s a thought to keep to oneself, and not spread like Hallmark honey over the population.
I’m deeply saddened and troubled by his death. But it will pass in a while. I’m not in any kind of depression or danger; but I can’t help but imagine that for people closer to the line, people who loved him without perhaps thinking it daily, but realise how deeply his loss affects them, well, I’d buddy up to them about now.
Radiolab had a story on people who survived suicide attempts (jumping off of bridges) and almost immediately they recalled their first thought that jumping off was a mistake.
I find the tweet to be more infantile than offensive. I’m sure it was well intentioned but in the end it just reduced him to a cartoon character from a movie. Is that really the best representation of Robin Williams’ body of work? How about acknowledging him as the human being he was and at least show a photo of him?
When I looked at those guidelines, they seemed vague and abstract to me. So this example made the whole argument very real. I’m a little shocked at how defensive people are getting about it, though.
My impression is that the first impulse for a lot of people, is to distance themselves from what happened, and then what happens next after that. Talk is cheap on the internet, it’s easy to believe that “words are wind” as the saying goes, and it shouldn’t matter how you abstractify and sugarcoat a popular celebrity’s death.
My reaction on seeing all this glurge and blowback it to remark to myself, “these are people who’ve never talked down a suicidal friend, and they’re not someone a suicidal person would want to talk to in any case” Survivorship bias and confirmation bias all rolled into one.
Is there any actual scientific research establishing a connection between those “about a billion other things” and actual harm that is as clear as the well-established phenomenon of suicide contagion?
I really don’t get why people are being so defensive about this. Nobody’s being forced not to say anything; a tweet is just being criticised for the possibility that it encourages suicide. There’s no “trigger warning” request whatsoever, no call for “political correctness”, just a statement of a problem with the way suicide is being framed in a tweet and a presentation of the evidence for why that framing is problematic. What’s wrong with that?
The only explanation I can imagine, is there are people to whom the thought of suicide simply hasn’t occurred. So they can’t imagine anyone actually being vulnerable to such imagery. Call them out in it, and it’s not about telling people to “Jump!”, it’s about infringing on their right to say whatever the hell they want whenever the hell they want to.
It is very much like Kurt Cobain. People who are depressed see one of their idols, someone who seemingly had everything going for him, end his own life. This prompts many to ponder “if HE couldn’t find something worth living for then what chance do I have?”
I think some people just don’t like to be told that what they said was hurtful in anyway. Or they just don’t like being reminded that free speech doesn’t equal freedom from criticism or consequences… in other words, they have a different definition of “free speech” than you or I.
Edited to add: It seems that they want freedom of speech to mean freedom from consequences and from criticism.
I accept the natural right to end ones life, but it is clearly my right to respectfully ask that others not engage in behaviour which increases the odds that I would have to deal with another suicide. I would say the same for posting a video of you driving at 200km/h and posting to a teen driving board. As much as you don’t like to think it you and I as well as the rest of us have lower levels in our brain, are the dog in my example with some additional prefrontal lobe to do advanced thinking and awareness such as considering ending ones life or operating a car to go really fast. We are biological organisms with neurology and related neurochemistry which can go off the tracks, this is the idea behind the annoying and overused trigger BS. The majority of victims don’t want to commit suicide, clearly that is difficult to understand but some on topic reading will help, also will appreciate you not engaging in dangerous behavior.
This is not a competition to see who is the toughest, very tough successful people, even astronauts, scientists, and doctors, succumb to the severe depression and plenty of wimps have no problem.
This is not about philosophy or civil rights, it is lower on Maslows pyramid in the survival zone, we have the science to back this up so lets move into the future.
But maybe the advent of social media and the sudden explosion in people talking about it, and those also sharing their own struggles in a public forum is more of a trigger than you could possibly realise.
Being prompted to finally get it off your chest to only then have it lost in a sea of woe-is-me and the conversation forgotten in a weeks time, smells like a pretty rough time to me.
I want to refrain from calling you insensitive. I’m not sure I’ve even made the point I was thinking.
Exactly as I said, the meme is supportive of suicide, as are you. That’s not an attack. However, if you would rather not have those 21 year olds with issues committing suicide then you should avoid sharing very simple messages that accept that death is a release from pain without including any nuance. Linked above and earlier from the same day as this post are the CDCs recommendations for avoiding suicide contagion. This is the opposite of those recommendations.
That would lead to a lot of teenagers going through breakups dying when they would have been perfectly fine next week if they just stuck it out. Criminalizing suicide is stupid, but making it super easy is also pretty stupid.
From the CDC:
“Health professionals or other public officials should not try to tell reporters what to report or how to write the news regarding suicide. If the nature and apparent mechanisms of suicide contagion are under-stood, the news media are more likely to present the news in a manner that minimizes the likelihood of such contagion. Instead of dictating what should be reported, public officials should explain the potential for suicide contagion associated with certain types of reports and should suggest ways to minimize the risk for contagion (see Appendix).”
Perhaps they were too optimistic that people would actually want to avoid leading others to kill themselves?
I was trained in helping people on a listening hotline get through suicidal times, so, having spoken with people who are right in that moment of crisis, and learned about how people are feeling at that time, I am very empathetic with that feeling of wanting to kill yourself and end it all. And if anyone reading this is thinking of suicide, please call a hotline or reach out to a doctor because you are not alone.
However, I think for Robin Williams, this is a kind of poetic tweet. He did seem to be trapped somehow in this manic personality, almost seemed to be forced against his will to constantly entertain and vomit forth jokes. He says in one of his interviews floating around right now that he used coke to calm down and get quiet because he was just so out of control otherwise. In the article on the front page right now, it acknowledges that he was uncomfortable to watch sometimes in his more straight up comic roles because he was just so frenetic. He was funny to watch but also, I cannot imagine having to live inside his mind going a million miles an hour all the time.
I don’t want anyone to think that I condone his suicide, but I do sympathize with the struggle he had in his life, and I think this tweet did touch on it in a warm way. On the other hand, I don’t really think he is “free,” just not here anymore. Stay with us, while you can, we need you!
