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Is your distaste rooted in some actual lived experience with suicide, or is it based on some abstract sympathy for suicides as an abstract, theoretical class of people? If it's not the former, I would recommend thinking twice about casting judgement on how others react to it.
Flippant is defined as "not showing a serious or respectful attitude." I assure you that I was quite serious about what I said. I was not mocking his death, I was saying that it was a pity, a shame, a sad and grave mistake, completely and utterly unnecessary (assuming the article caused it). And I afford suicides the respect they are due, which outside of extreme circumstances, is IMHO not very much, as it is often a quite self-absorbed act.
If you disagree, I'd be interested in hearing why. I don't claim to be the sole authority on the subject, I'm on The Motte to have my opinions challenged after all.
Not Thomas, but I felt your post was callous and flippant, and this is because I regard suicidal impulses as a mental illness, not an action which it is worth criticizing at the level of rational debate. It's a "stop hitting yourself!"-level error - suicidality is an altered state of consciousness, and suicide survivors coming out of it very often testify that they're immediately aghast at what they experienced. ("What was I thinking?") You may as well tell a schizophrenic that hearing voices is irrational, or a junkie that whatever he ingested he should just stop tripping, as a pure exercise of will, because rationally, he knows fnords don't exist.
Eh, sometimes. My most recent suicide attempt was pure* "bad intel"; I remained suicidal until sufficiently-convinced that I'd been wrong about the legal practicalities (for like a decade; it just hadn't become relevant until then), and then immediately stopped. One of the others was closer.
*Unless you count "high scrupulosity" as a mental illness, which I would object to on moral grounds.
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Part of the reason that this topic is hard to discuss is that suicide is the end of a wide variety of behaviors, such as:
Suicide to avoid certain torture and death at the hands of genocidaires
Suicide to escape chronic pain that cannot be alleviated
Suicide due to a chronic mental illness
Suicide due to pain from deep and profound tragedy (wartime PTSD, death of ones spouse or children, etc)
These are clearly all sympathetic cases, and I think you would have to be extremely callous indeed to condemn those decisions.
But then there are other reasons:
"Suicide" to regain control (often only attempted but sometimes accidentally? completed) -- your BPD ex saying "Goodbye, it was nice while it lasted" via text after you fight
Suicide due to loss of prestige or wealth -- the guy who kills himself after blowing it all in Vegas, leaving a grieving wife and kids; the guy who is outed as gay despite being and ardent anti-gay activist
"Suicide" by recklessness -- I'm super depressed and I don't care what happens to me; I'm not going to blow my brains out but maybe I'll drink a 12 pack and then speed down the highway at 120mph just to FEEL something
These IMO are less sympathetic. If (and as I keep saying -- it's a big if! We don't know why this guy really died!) he really did commit suicide because someone wrote a mean story, that is pretty weak. If (again, as I stated in my original post) he had other stuff going on like a congenital mental illness or something, his (alleged) suicide is a lot more sympathetic.
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