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This is a suicide posts about an entrepreneur who failed and is going thru certain twitter communities.
https://twitter.com/smb_attorney/status/1720486539325587858?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720231141826015303?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720232058109469137?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
A few thoughts.
Yes business owners do kill themselves when their business fails. Capitalism does have brutal aspects.
I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff
He shouldn’t have killed himself. I’d assume he could have found some consulting or being an employee for a bit gig.
Society has very little tolerance for failed men. After the fact everyone will say he showed some signs and should have helped out. When you are failing you have the stench of failure and people honestly try to run away from you.
I know someone whose dad killed themselves so when there business failed. I always thought the lefts argument that rioting and looting isn’t damaging was false. Being able to provide for your family is life and it’s something men take very personality.
Females somehow survive with nothing. Not sure how but realistically society is far kinder to widowed mothers.
"I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff"
I don't understand this point even slightly. Do you genuinely think the other people calling a suicide helpline are not dealing with real issues but just 'lefty mental health'? It's the businessman who has real issues, the others are just faking it?
To rephrase the point slightly, I tend to categorize mental health issues as either mental illness or as mental injury. With mental illness you have some kind of internal, ongoing problem that needs to be fixed so you can get better. With mental injury, something clear and external happened and you just kind of need to stop poking at it and let it heal.
For example, I was in a bad car accident. I wasn't hurt, but other people were, and it gave me what I presume was PTSD. I would drop a can of tomatoes, I would have that same feeling of suddenly losing control like I did right before the impact, and I would break down in a mess.
My wife wanted me to get therapy, and I started the process of getting it organized, but in the end I didn't go. Not because I didn't have issues, but because it seemed incredibly obvious to me what the issues were. There's no broken relationship with my mother or whatever to work through, just a recent bad event. I figured I would get over it with time and couldn't see how talking about it with a stranger would help.
And, well, I did. I never had any "breakthrough" or trained my mind to think in a different way or whatever. I just got a bit of distance from the event and it stopped being so fresh in my mind. I gained the ability to think about it without feeling like I was in the middle of it.
Having a business fail, or a marriage break down, or a loved one die, are all very upsetting events. There's nothing unhealthy about being upset by them. Just as it's normal to feel pain when you break your leg - you aren't malfunctioning, you're just injured.
Wow, this is a really interesting framing, and it seems so obvious I don't know how it didn't occur to me before.
To extend the metaphor further, some physical injuries are so grave that you can't just rub some dirt on them and expect them to heal by themselves. A person severely injured in a car accident may require physical therapy to enable them to walk again. By the same token, it seems reasonable to conclude that certain psychological experiences may be so traumatic that one can't reasonably expect a person's mind to heal of its own accord without outside assistance.
I've often thought about something similar in the context of depression diagnoses. We use the same word, "depression", to describe both the emotional state of feeling depressed and the mental illness more properly disambiguated as "major depressive disorder". Feeling depressed may be an entirely expected and healthy response to certain mental injuries (hence why it was so controversial when the DSM removed the "bereavement clause" from the diagnostic criteria for major depressive order - I don't care how stoic or Buddhist you are, if you don't feel depressed after your young child dies there's something deeply wrong with you). It's only when it's a chronic sensation with little obvious relationship to any mental injury that we consider it a mental illness as opposed to simply a transient and normal human emotion.
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Good post I like this model. Seems to catch a lot of what I wanted to say.
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I feel like you are describing a time when you weren't suicidal and had the composure to see that time would be an adequate healer. That's great. But in a case where you are suicidal, almost by definition, you are not coping with what has happened and time may not be enough to heal you. You may die first.
In your last para you are implying that there's nothing unhealthy about being suicidal after losing your business. It's a very short step from there to saying there's nothing unhealthy about going through with it and killing yourself after losing your business. If that's what you think, then 'nuff respect, but I consider not living in that kind of shame/honour culture to be a good thing and one worth building protections against, such as we're able to do.
My point is that if you're miserable because miserable things are happening to you, you're not malfunctioning. A shrink can't fix your brain because your brain isn't broken.
That doesn't mean you should kill yourself. I don't believe anyone should kill themselves except in truly extreme circumstances. I used to work in the funeral industry and dealt with a lot of suicides, and the only one that made me think "yeah ok fair enough" was the convicted paedophile child care worker who did himself in while awaiting sentencing.
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And in your last paragraph, you are implying that it's unhealthy to feel upset by a loved one dying. It's a very short step from there to saying there's something unhealthy about ever feeling upset or sad about anything. If that's what you think, then I respect that, but I consider not living in a culture that pathologises all negative feeling and affect to be a good thing and one worth building protections against.
I think it depends. I think one thing therapy and therapeutic culture get wrong is just how much place you should give to your feelings. You should have emotional responses. They just shouldn’t be the basis for deciding what to do, and they shouldn’t rule you. Most of therapeutic exercises and the culture they create is so feeling centric that people never really develop any mental toughness to deal with normal feelings. Being sad or upset for a few days at a trauma is not a problem, tbh, a lack of emotional response is probably more pathological. But it’s also not healthy to be so paralyzed by your feelings that you can’t function. At some point you need to get over it.
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Thinking that someone who is suicidal due to a business failure should seek mental health assistance in hopes they don't. ---> "A culture that pathologises all negative feeling"
Wow!
I do think it's "pathological" to want to kill yourself in many circumstances, that doesn't mean I think the same about feeling sad or upset about life events.
I also don't think that having a pathology is something to be judged, rather something that it might be useful to get help with.
I'm maybe a little confused by your reply though.
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