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The trick is that when pressed, they say they're talking about suicide rates, and thus making a veiled threat to kill themselves. As a reminder, this is archetypal abuser behavior.
If a depressed person said if you deny us medication or therapy then more depressed people will kill themselves, is this making a veiled threat or recognizing (what they see to be) factual truth?
Unironically, I think it's valid as their interpretation of factual truth if and only if they acknowledge that they're mentally ill. Because without that acknowledgment, then they maintain agency for their actions, and their decision to commit suicide is entirely on their own moral ledger. People who aren't mentally ill can get mad that other people are making them unhappy, but crossing the rhetorical line from unhappiness to suicide is just an abusive tactic in that context.
Does it change the argument if I ( a non depressed person) say that I think depressed people are more likely to kill themselves if denied treatment?
There definitely is some kind of line where threats of suicide can be used abusively I agree, but I think in most examples like this it is being used as a guilt trip which can be (but is not necessarily) abusive. I guilt my kids into doing stuff all the time, because it is one of the social tools at our disposal. When it crosses the line into abusive is hard to define I think.
Again... this is okay if and only if we agree that depressed people are mentally ill.
If you tell your kids that you'll kill yourself if they don't eat their vegetables or whatever, you'd be way over the line into abuse. If you observe to them dispassionately that you are statistically more likely to kill yourself if they don't eat their vegetables, you haven't salvaged the situation. It isn't the guilt trip that (necessarily) puts you over the line, it's threatening suicide.
Right because eating vegetables and suicide are not linked (I assume!). But depression and suicide are. If I tell them "If you don't eat your vegetables I will be disappointed you have chosen not to eat healthily" I am guilting them with a reasonable outcome on my behalf. If they were doing something that actually would increase my risk of death, then it becomes once more reasonable. Don't pretend to throw your brother off the roof, you'll give me a heart attack perhaps?
A heart attack is involuntary. What makes it a threat is that you are going to act if they don't do as you demand. The fact you are pinning actions you are going to take to hurt yourself on them makes it more abusive.
Again though remember the original example was about other people hurting themselves. So maybe we're losing it in analogies.
If I say stopping medication to bipolar people increases the risk of bipolar people killing themselves. That can be either true or false. Whether I am bipolar doesn't change anything about what those other people do. If I say I will kill myself if you stop that medication, then that is a different type of statement.
If my son is a truck driver and wants to call out to play Call of Duty and I say, if you don't deliver that shipment of widgets, the widget factory will shut down and people will lose their jobs, some might starve and some might even commit suicide, I am not going to hurt anyone or myself, I am pointing out the potential consequences of his actions. I might be making those consequences up to guilt him, or they may be true or I may be exaggerating them for effect. But we can't tell which without knowing about the widget factory and the financial situation in the town etc.
Yeah that got a bit too abstracted.
The problem is, you are 100% correct imo, the idea that better treatment of trans people will reduce the risk of their suicide is not inherently abusive, and it's a fairly standard part of risk management re the mentally ill. Which is why it became such a popular talking point. But then you had trans people lobbying for their community with it. And when trans people started lobbying with that talking point the potential for abuse increased by orders of magnitude, because when you lobby for the community you belong to, anything which affects your community necessarily affects you.
And a percentage of trans people, like a percentage of the rest of the world, are manipulative abusers who saw a superweapon - by ramping up the emotion and playing on their fear, they could make their community (many of whom are on hormones, never mind their default mental state) feel like they were being viciously persecuted and driven to suicide. Then even if someone points out that they are a sociopath manipulating everyone, they can discredit them as a transphobe trying to kill trans people.
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