It’s a little disingenuous to discount North American cultural attitudes to suicide as the decrees of a middle eastern sky friend and then to say that others are discounting Chinese cultural attitudes.
I don’t begrudge Robin Williams his choice at all, and it is quite possible he made it with some measure of wisdom, but most of the time people kill themselves because they are currently in a very dark place and they would change their minds given some attention. Killing yourself because of depression is not akin to killing yourself because you know a terminal illness is going to make the rest of your short life painful.
I find myself having to quote again the passage I took issue with from what you wrote:
No one told you to censor yourself, no one told you to suppress your feelings. People have pointed out that this tweet goes against everything we know about preventing suicide contagion and that makes them believe the academy should have been more responsible.
If this is about empathy for Robin Williams’ decision to kill himself, then we are contrasting:
The value of a particular way of expressing empathy for a non-entity (there is no Robin Williams anymore)
The value of showing empathy for people who might be adversely affected by that expression by not inciting them to kill themslves
Absolutely not. He was successfully battling his disease for decades. He was unsuccessfully battling it for one day this week and he died.
This is a nonsense understanding of genes. There cannot be a gene or a series of genes that give a person a predisposition to kill themselves in absence of environmental factors (unless there is a kill yourself organ we haven’t yet discovered). Homosexuals have a greatly increased chance of suicide in our culture, but there is no reason to think that they would in a culture where homosexuals were not mistreated. If a culture outlawed music you’d find people who wanted to be musicians having an increased chance of suicide.
Depression is not a genetic heart defect, it is a very complex interaction between a person and their environment.
People with schizophrenia fare better in cultures that have more social support without drugs than they do in our culture with drugs, even though the drugs help. We need to think about how our culture is arranged that makes people want to kill themselves. Genetic strength is not in eliminating genes that make people want to kill themselves (which may be genes that make them homosexual or genes that give them perfect pitch) but instead in genetic diversity which is promoted by finding ways that people with different sets of genes can bring their strengths to the table.
I told you that “well-meaning” isn’t a card blanche to spout anything that comes to your mind without being told that doing so isn’t a good idea.
You really can’t have it both ways.
If you want to excuse poor wording of the kind that leads to pushing mentally unstable person to suicide - an effect that has been shown to exist - just because the intent was well-meant, you also have to accept - no, excuse - statements about rape prevention that belilttle rape victims, as long as they were well-meant.
Methinks you overestimate your own understanding of genetics. Yes it’s a complex mix of nature & environment. Yes their are epegenetic factors to consider. None of that precludes the possibility that a gene or a particular set of genes make someone predisposed to depression, impulsivity, self-harm, or any number of traits which might make the more susceptible to suicide.
I’m not trying to claim environmental factors wouldn’t play a role, but it’s equally absurd to claim inborn factors do not play any role.
Let’s consider two hypothetical musicians living in a society that has outlawed music. One of them commits suicide, the other does not. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some other factor(s) helped contribute to one of them taking their lives when the other did not.
I don’t know if that factor(s) was inborn or environmental, but neither do you. Chances are factors of both sorts contribute to a persons predisposition to suicide.
The very fact of genetic therapy proves you wrong. We know of a gene that dramatically increases the likelihood of aggressive breast cancer for women in their 30s and 40s, right? Suppose we had a culture where every woman with that gene got preventative mastectomies. The breast cancer rate among women with the gene would plummet to below that of the general population. Then it would be a gene that prevents breast cancer in that environment.
Of course it’s not unreasonable to think there are other inborn factors that contributed, but all contributed within the context of the environment the person was in. A person who was born without functioning legs can’t go to the second floor of a walk-up but they can go to the second floor of a building with an elevator. Is their inability to go to the second floor of the walk-up inborn? That’s a meaningless question.
Suicide is an uncomfortable topic. Until I did the training, I really had steered clear of the idea in my own head. We had to discuss when we might think it was okay, and assess our own ideas about it, in order to be helpful to others and not cloud what we had to say with our own judgments about it. It was freeing to be allowed to think about what had been a taboo to my own self. Then, listening to people who really were suicidal, I just kept coming back to what Nietzsche said, which is that “Suicide is a comforting thought that gets us through the night.” and I was okay with people needing to entertain the notion of it knowing that it helped people to choose life. But the people who make the other choice, I feel so strongly that I want to pull them back to me, back to the living, back to love - and knowing a couple of people who chose death - I am angry at them for taking the choice away from me of knowing them and caring about them.
I think that trying harder is the thing we are all called to do, push, push, push to make the here now better for all of us.
It certainly could be, if you were trying to “cure” melancholia, or Bipolar, or Manic Depression without looking at the survival positive apects of those genotypes.
All the gene therapy I’ve heard of, deals soley with the individual experiencing symptoms. AFAIK, gene therapy patients would still pass on the same traits to their kids without passing on the cure.
But at the current level of understanding, we don’t have consensus on what constitutes a disease. Are small breasts a disease? Short children? There are doctors who would argue that they are, and that they can successfully treat them with the right cuts and chems.
When I did my training for distress center calls the trainer made a big point of this. Some people are helped by reminding themselves that if things get really unbearable they have an out. Nietzsche was probably one of those people - he doesn’t strike one as overly cheery.
Those are some conveniently straw-man-esque examples you’ve chosen.
Of course being short, or having small breasts are not diseases (but you already knew that).
There are many genetic traits which are clearly undesirable, and are not so easily confused on an “everything is relative” spectrum.
It’s reduction to the absurd to suggest that an effort to prevent the expression of clearly harmful traits leads to superficial gene modification. There is a big difference between preventing Sickle Cell Anemia, and preventing shortness.
If one day I am fortunate enough to have a child and while they are in utero, I have the capacity to alter their genetic makeup to prevent a physical deformity, mental illness, a predisposition for depression/suicide or other preventable impediment, I would do it.
My point is that both are old cultural attitudes and not absolutes. Yet, here the subject is being treated as such. Killing a person is absolutely wrong. Killing yourself… that’s open to interpretation.
The title of this article is ‘The problem with genie you’re free’ The article quoted and linked tells us that the sort of post in question violates well-established public health standards.
From what I’ve read and heard he was constantly battling depression. We disagree on what a successful battle with depression looks like. It seems to me a successful battle is one where you can win and not a protracted stalemate that leaves your life full of pain.
Yes, there is a problem with it. It is true that it doesn’t follow establish guidelines and recommendations. These guidelines aren’t written into any laws and have no enforcement mechanism. The idea that you shouldn’t present messages like the one in the tweet being discussed is premised on the idea that you want to avoid suicide contagion. If that premise doesn’t hold, then the language will come across as unnecessarily prescriptive - “you shouldn’t” instead of “if you would like fewer people to die you shouldn’t.”
For a lot of people with lifelong depression winning is getting out of bed, interacting with other people, holding down a job, etc. It’s managing to live at a 4 out of 10 instead of a 1 out of 10. In the case of people who have an acute episode of depression without chronic depression I understand that medication and therapy can often get them “back to normal.” For many, though, depression is normal, but they manage to live their lives. That doesn’t seem like a failure to me.
That’s why suicide as one option (among several) doesn’t freak me out unduly. It’s when it becomes the highest on the list and stays that way for months and years, that gets to be a bit much. And yet people are usually so uncomfortable talking about it (and all the other options relative to that) that it makes it nearly impossible to accurately convey one’s emotional state, without hearing, “That’s not so bad! Now when I was [someplece] back in [somewhen], that was bad!”
You really think so? The doctors who are pushing these cures have vastly more experience than you or I in these things, and they have a pretty powerful professional union in the AMA, so I wouldn’t blow them off just because you think their agenda is nonsense.
I’ve been told my bipolar disorder is genetic in nature, and that someday I or my children could be candidates for gene therapy. And that’s as much nonsense to me, as those other diseases are to you. I don’t have a bipolar disease, I have a bipolar condition, and I don’t want to be “cured” of it. It’s Eugenics when someone else decides I no longer get to choose to avoid their “therapy” or that I shoudn’t be allowed to have kids.
Unless the gene job is done on the gametes or gamete-producing cells as well. Which is likely to be a future option, once the kinks are ironed out, in non-euroamerican clinics, not operating in the judeo-christian culture paradigm. It’s good when choice is just a flight ticket away.
Ever seen Gattaca? It’s a great movie on just this topic.
Superficial gene therapy is not something I’m interested in, but fundamentally I don’t object to it. If that option were to become available I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who chose to pursue it. If a doctor really wants to offer such a service so be it.
It’s good you are at peace with your bi-polar condition. However if I had a child, and I had the option (not mandate) to prevent them from becoming bi-polar (or suicidal or many other conditions), I would choose to prevent it. I think a lot of people would. I’m not suggesting such a therapy be mandatory, nor would I advocate for mandatory reproductive restrictions, etc.
People want the best for their progeny. There are practical reasons why living with a bi-polar, autism, and a litany of other conditions is not widely viewed as desirable if it can be avoided. Medicine which pursues that end is not fundamentally immoral. Call it Eugenics if you must, but I think it’s a far cry from the acts of Mengele or Ishii.
this thinking has me wondering, why do we make this distinction? Why do we consider unremitting physical pain an acceptable reason for ending life but don’t consider unremitting emotional pain an acceptable reason. The palatable and oft quoted idea that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem in some cases may not be true. In some (and I emphasize SOME) cases it may be a permanent solution to a permanent problem.
We should not forget the impact of modern medicine to the overall genetic health of the population. People who got a lousy hand in the genetic lottery, instead of dying of natural causes are able to pass the genes to further generations. The good of saving the individuals translates into the bad for the overall gene pool. (A nice example is handling mitochondrial trouble by transferring a nucleus that’s itself healthy into a healthy egg. Relatively simple procedure, and still it makes some people scream in controversy. And that’s why we cannot have nice things.)
This can be handled on the level of editing the faulty genes that are now passed to said next generations. But for some odd reason, often the same people who are all for saving anybody (not bad per se!) who can be saved are all against this, thus harming the species. From a long-term perspective, the choice for the species is between neither or both, and I personally would prefer both, in a noncoercive way (which as it is a rational choice to do should shift the balance enough, no coercion needed; the ones who refuse will act as backups of the faulty genes, in case a need for them shows later, as bad assumptions and surprises happen.).
On-purpose editing/selection of future traits is a logical extension. That and repairing old bugs, e.g. that one in the ascorbate synth pathway… and it would take too much time to talk about…
