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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32145 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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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?

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.

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?

Again... this is okay if and only if we agree that depressed people are mentally ill.

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

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.

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.

I think what offends, at least to me, about this line of argumentation is that it implicitly incentivizes committing suicide. It's a kind of brinksmanship of slave morality. It has the same kind of energy of forums that hear about a mass shooting and are, often not even secretly, hoping for it to be their kin slaughtered by the hated outsider. It's this ugly race to the bottom of grievance where instead of groups showing how excellent they are everyone is slavishly hoping for their ingroup to come out as pathetic and worthy of sympathy as possible. It's an impulse I recognize in the worst parts of myself. And if this is the impulse that gets my ingroup what it wants why not indulge it?

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