This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Are you seriously suggesting that society prefer depressed people commit suicide by train?
That feels like the most outlandish thing I have read on the internet all week.
Suicides by train are only topped by intentionally driving on a highway in the wrong direction as far as damage to broader society goes.
Suppose you are a train conductor without psychopathy. You go through your routine job of driving the train, listening to music perhaps when suddenly a person steps on the track 50m ahead of you. You sound the whistle and slam the brakes. You have more than a second to contemplate what is about to happen, but no way to stop it. You hear the impact over the sound of the brakes. After the trains comes to a halt, you grab a first aid kit and run back the person you have just hit. If you are lucky you only need a glance to confirm that they are dead, cut apart by your vehicle. Or you might spent the next ten minutes giving CPR to a corpse until the ambulance arrives, hoping for a miracle which is unlikely to happen.
Intellectually, you know that you did not kill the person, they killed themselves. Still, it was your train. You know that it is not feasible to slow trains down to speeds where they will no longer be used as a method of suicide. If you had reacted a tenth of a second faster, it would not have made any difference. But still, you wonder while you lay sleepless in bed, held awake by the images and sounds which have burned themselves into your memory.
Driving trains is your job, a profession you spent years to learn. It is high responsibility, but also very routine. Before you had hit that person, it was not very stressful, most of the time. But now your brain anticipates that any second, another person might step on the track in front of you, and you would be just as helpless to do anything about it as the first time.
Personally, I would take the life of a physician who assists a suicide of a depression patient after all the process is done a ten times over the life of that train driver.
Okay, not a train. That's an asshole thing to do. If you're going to commit suicide, don't involve other people.
I included it because it's the stereotypical thing to do (at least around here), but thinking a bit further, it's probably that way because when someone does it, everyone in the train knows. Probably most people have been on a train that's been delayed because of a train suicide. Other methods of suicide don't get that attention.
I do absolutely think we shouldn't be offering assisted suicide to people who are physically capable of unassisted suicide.
This is surprisingly hard to do. Someone needs to find the body and unless you plan carefully this can easily be a random bystander or group of random bystanders (and planning carefully is hard when you are suicidal).
Usually EMS and healthcare get involved and seeing someone who has committed suicide can be deeply harmful (especially if it's gruesome like a gunshot to the head). Often they'll have to run a code on the body even if it's clearly dead which is....awful.
Then you have to think about the family and friends of the deceased. Having a close contact or family commit suicide is a risk factor for suicide it hurts people around you in a way that just dying doesn't.
Yes, suicide is bad. Ideally there would be no suicide at all. This is part of my point.
When we do something in an official manner, we thereby give it a stamp of approval. We should not approve bad things if we can avoid it. Because by doing so, we are saying that the bad thing shouldn't be considered as all that bad. We are shifting the norms and encouraging more of it. We can't always avoid this, but we should at least always try.
If someone's dying anyway, say with terminal cancer, and we artificially keep him alive at that point (which we've gotten quite good at), we are merely prolonging his suffering. At that point, sure, just end it humanely.
But this person (and see my other comment, there are more) was not actually dying. She was in fact physically healthy. There is no argument to be made that we are prolonging her suffering. We are not actively doing anything. There is no argument to be made about freedom either. If you are physically capable of killing yourself, you always have this option.
She could've ended her own life herself at any time. And that would still be bad, even if it truly is the least bad option it's still bad, but we would at least have avoided giving the act an official stamp of approval. And maybe she never would've killed herself, and then there would've been one less suicide. This is the point that I was trying to make.
And it does seem to be accelerating. I looked up the statistics (see my other comment for the sources). There were 14 euthanizations for purely psychiatric reasons in 2014. By 2024, this had grown to 219. In the same year, there were 1819 traditional suicides. So by now, for every ten suicides we're adding an eleventh.
Sorry I don't really have a dog in this fight I just wanted to make that point specifically.
In truth I remain somewhat undetermined about how to handle this specific issue which is awkward given the possibility of it appearing in my clinical practice, however my plan is to just follow legal, regulatory, and hospital frameworks and stay out of the ethical side of this thing.
That said it is worth dialing in just how miserable certain classes of patients are. Again I'm not convinced we should assist them in dying but certain patients have a lived experience that is comparable or worse than the more typical examples (dying of chronic disease, intractably bad life experiences, significant chronic pain*).
For instance someone with severe borderline personality disorder may find themselves zigzagging from being too happy to wanting to kill themselves to burning down their relationships to getting fired to whatever on a regular basis. With associated involuntary suicidal ideation it can approach a point where the life experience is almost abhuman, miserable, and devoid of the traditional pleasures of existence.
That's a reasonably good case, especially since some people like this may struggle to successfully kill themselves because the system does a good job of preventing it and because the problem isn't pure depressive misery, therefore it becomes challenging to overcome the routine desire to live.
Again not necessarily advocating here just pointing out if you had chance to interact with one of these people you might go....oh yeah, I get it, holy shit (or might not).
*Although best we can tell this is somewhat linked to psychic distress.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The pilot of Germanwings flight 9525 would like to have a word with you.
I knew when I wrote this that someone would come up with another exotic counterexample. I will not try to argue that flying a plane into a mountain is a special case of going the wrong way on a highway either.
Fine. I retract my claim and say that they are the second most harmful commonly occurring suicides, and patiently wait for someone to explain to me why that is still wrong.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link