> law enforcement did not drive him to suicide
People can keep repeating this, and it will still be false. LEO and Prosecutor action was the proximate cause of his actions.
You can make moral arguments that, say, the prosecutor was Just Doing His Job, and I may even agree with you. But you and everyone else are simply wrong about cause and effect, and attempting to blur that tells me more about your priors and biases than anything about the situation.
I'd say no. Most of such cases, like Swartz, had existing mental conditions that are primarily responsible for their decision to commit suicide. Loss of a job may have been the event that ultimately prompted the act, but the driving factors were mental conditions. Saying that these people were driven to suicide conflates these cases with like this where someone is actively driving someone else to suicide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Conrad_Roy
I think it is "fair" to describe action B as following from action A, when there is good reason to consider them related.
If you revise your observations of reality based on what you fear might happen later, you're not observing reality.
I am part of a support group that is dominated by people who've attempted suicide.
The words trivial and temporary don't describe any part of their journey.
What is common, is how these people were harmed by the self-interested and misguided actions of others.
To me the proximate cause 100% was the legal case against him - it inflamed any underlying issues and they just kept pressing. I could be wrong of course but I don’t think anyone will ever truly know what was happening in his head.
It's fairly clear that Swartz had a history of suicidal ideation, this wasn't of the DoJs making no matter how unfairly they may have treated him.
>To me the proximate cause 100% was the legal case against him - it inflamed any underlying issues and they just kept pressing. I could be wrong of course but I don’t think anyone will ever truly know what was happening in his head.
Obviously the cause was his preexisting mental issues, a healthy individual would not kill themselves in his situation.
Whose fault was Epstein’s suicide?
Robin William’s?
R. Budd Dwyer?
You all know what I'm going to say here.
As for the rest, it's a fine line. There are obviously individual variances in how much it would take to push someone over the edge, I can certainly see how nine felonies would be enough in the case of Aaron's example.
> attempting to blur that tells me more about your priors and biases than anything about the situation
And right on cue, here comes someone who would rather talk about Eminem and Epstein to blur the situation than talk about the actual situation.