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Comment by goodJobWalrus | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that suicide in tech is talked about a lot (more than in any other profession, except for maybe armed forces), but I have never seen data that it is any more common than in other professions. Can anyone point to some actual data on that?

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I've heard that the more that you talk about it, the more it is likely to happen...

As someone who has attempted suicide and been hospitalized twice for being suicidal, I will suggest that how you talk about it is a huge factor in whether it makes it more likely or less likely.

Agreed. I think the stigma around mental illness has a lot to do with how people react to it. Society tells us it's embarrassing and a sign of weakness and many people suffer in silence until it's too late. Fortunately this industry appears to be more open about it.

I cannot wait until we stop using the term "mental illness" entirely. I have a serious medical condition. It is classified as a dread disease because enduring it is horrible. I also was molested and raped as a child.

On the one hand, some of my suicidal tendencies are rooted in physical, chemical side effects of what my condition does to my brain. On the other hand, there is absolutely nothing crazy about wanting my suffering to end and feeling like death is the only answer.

And it pisses me off, because it doesn't have to be that way. But that is a rant I do not even want to get into at the moment.

Nonexistence doesn't end suffering. You need to live in the moment. Your life is precious. I hope you feel better

Do the parent a favor and spare her this kind of patronizing bullshit.

EDIT: s/him/her

Mz is a her, FYI.

That's such a rude assumption. I have OCD as I've discussed here before. I've been there, so that's where I was coming from.

but next time I'll just say nothing

OCD does not begin to compare to what I suffer. Look up cystic fibrosis. It has an average life expectancy of about 37 in the U.S. It impairs gut function and lung function and immune function. Most people with it struggle to achieve a normal healthy weight while eating twice as much as others and it accounts for something like one third of adult lung transplants and one half of pediatric lung transplants.

Telling me you hope I feel better is the kind of thing that absolutely is best left unsaid. I am, in fact, gradually feeling better because I have, in fact, figured out how to fix my body. This gets me nothing but shit on by other people, who accuse me of being crazy and a teller of tall tales.

Do not assume your suffering begins to compare to mine. It most likely does not. And do not ever tell someone you hope they feel better when they are talking about being suicidal if you do not have concrete suggestions for helping them actually feel better. It just comes across as incredibly obnoxious. (Yes, I am a Pollyanna who has done similar things in the past. I try to offer solutions these days, not empty wishes.)

I'm sorry. Honestly. Trust me, I won't ever tell someone to feel better without context again. I'll keep my comments to myself.

I can't delete that comment. I would have if I had seen the replies in time. I made a huge mistake but it wasn't malicious.

It's not fair to think the worst of me. I really didn't mean it to come across as obnoxious and I feel absolutley awful about it

Edit: Actually, I'm gonna go ahead and abandon this account. This whole exchange has made me feel incredibly bad about myself

I don't want to be associated with this incident in the future

Oy. I don't see any reason to abandon your account. Nothing I said was intended to make you feel awful, make you feel you should delete anything and so on. I have made the same mistakes in the past and I am still working on trying to learn to effectively communicate online. The lack of voice tone, facial expression etc ad nauseum makes Internet discussions especially challenging. I get wildly misinterpreted in an ugly way on a regular basis. I absolutely have no plans to abandon any accounts over it.

If you learned something from the exchange and are more careful in the future, that's as good as it gets. Lots of people keep making the same mistakes over and over, never getting any better. As long as you learn from your mistakes -- so you can go make all new mistakes -- you are fine.

Thanks. And again, I'm sorry this whole thing happened.

You don't need to do that, the world is big and our perspective can only incorporate so much of it. It's not really healthy to let one (relatively small) mistake or a couple of people you don't even know getting mad at you cause you to abandon things of a higher priority. (Like your current identity on a website you like.)

As Mz said, if you learned from the mistake flagellating yourself isn't necessary.

Thanks. I was ashamed, but I think you're right not that it's not worth abandoning an identity over. A better strategy will be to avoid participating in non-technical discussions on HN. So that's what I'll do.

Nah. I am probably the best possible person to make this kind of mistake with. I am not grudging, I have excellent family support -- when I am suicidal, my sons make sure I am not left alone -- and I explain certain kinds of things well.

Take a break until it smarts less, but don't swear off nontechnical discussions for all time. :-)

Have a great day!

Please be charitable. Maybe it was patronizing, but maybe it was heartfelt and genuine too. Intervening aggressively makes the conversation worse, not better.

This is getting downvoted, but it is in fact true. Copycat suicides are a very real phenomenon. In general, anything that heightens the mental availability of an action (how easy it is to recall) increases the probability of that action occurring. This causes news reports on suicides to increase incidence of suicide, news reports on mass shootings to increase incidence of mass shootings, and last but certainly not least controversially, violent actions in video games to be causally related to (though neither necessary, nor sufficient for) increases in violent behavior.

This is a basic fact of human neurology that many people have trouble accepting because of the illusion of free will they like to indulge in.

Yeah, no. It is not that simple. "News" tends to be sensationalist crap. Simply talking about it does not have to make it more likely. I do realize that it can make it more likely. But it depends a helluva lot on how that conversation happens.

Just because a lot of people fuck it up doesn't mean that speaking about it is the cause per se. Words have power for both good and evil.

Please, let's not promote the idea that we should be terrified of mentioning it. That deepens the problem.

Please do not do that.

I believe you were down-voted because you made a somewhat bold claim without providing evidence. The idea that mass-shooting copycats === suicide copycats is extreme, because they are two very different phenomenas.

Do you have anything that could back it up?

This is mostly true, but I don't think the evidence is there for videogames. What you might find evidence for w.r.t videogames is that they'll change your behavioral responses under stress, for example having played many shooter games, and given a real gun, then put in a stressful situation, you're more likely to pull the trigger on another human than otherwise.

For mass shooting, absolutely true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4 (Skip to 1:30 if you want an argument from authority.)

I suspect it's true for suicides as well. People underestimate copycat / monkey-see-monkey-do influences.

Reports on suicides influence people's choice of suicide method, but there is no evidence that they influence the choice of whether or not to commit suicide.

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