Ecomom's Founder and CEO Jody Sherman Passes Away
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I mean, IMHO you make such a tattoo if you're (a) young, stupid and drunk, in which case you might do anything whatsoever or (b) you have a serious internal hurt or a selfesteem issue - and a temporary, fluctuating one, since you felt awesome when you made it, but you knew that you often feel not awesome and need to be reminded of it. Which is something that really correlates to people with clinical depression episodes or bipolar episodes - that also are a big suicide risk.
Maybe I'm oversensitive to such signals since I've been thinking a lot about these diseases, but they should matter.
There were quite a few Aaron Swartz related threads and "let's save his legacy" etc. type posts.
I'm picturing someone that is depressed, followed those weeks on HN and is thinking to themselves "well if I kill myself people will remember"
Maybe I'm just a cynic though.
The basic idea being that public coverage of a suicide may prompt others who are considering it to follow.
Telling someone makes it likely that they will try to stop you. If you have decided to take your life, the worst thing you want (in some cases) is for someone try and prevent it from happening.
Also, depression never leaves you alone, so there will be multiple points in your life where you will think about taking your own life, and you will yourself doubt whether you will go through with it up to the point of pulling the trigger, so you don't want to tell someone and "waste their time" if you are not sure you are going to do it.
Its pretty crazy how these things work, and the best way out for me in helping such people has been to physically take them to a professional, every time, every session, until someone certifies them as no longer depressed. Nothing else has worked for me and I know I am not qualified or capable in talking someone out of a suicide attempt.
Having been there myself, the big one I've seen in myself and with friends in similar situations is that the depressed individual feels worthless and "unfixable" at their core because of their:
- past behaviour (e.g. they did something considered seriously socially unacceptable and feel they can't tell anybody lest they be ostracised forever, or people already know about it and they are ostracised leading to feelings of no hope of escape); or
- past experiences (e.g. they have a string of failed relationships they feel responsible for and believe they'll never be happy and every day seeing happy couples on Facebook or in the shopping mall is like a stab in the heart).
At the root of it is hopelessness, which also covers:
- future expectations (e.g. they're trapped in a very bad situation, e.g. money, relationship, crime, etc., and can see no way of escape)
In these desperate situations, they feel too guilty, hopeless, ashamed and/or disgusted to discuss their circumstances with anybody, and besides, in their minds, it wouldn't accomplish anything because they "know" they're broken ("I can't live with myself after what I did", "Alice was the only person who could love somebody like me", etc.) or screwed ("I can't go to prison", "If anybody ever finds out I'll never get a decent job/lover ever again", "Nobody can replace Alice, I screwed up forever", etc.) and there's no way out.
Perhaps the saddest thing about suicidal depression is that many (note: I'm not claiming all, or even a majority, OR in the case of Aaron OR Jody, simply 'many'!) of these scenarios seem to stem from a dysfunctional belief system and a lack of introspective coping skills that I imagine could easily be taught, in the form of life skills based on cognitive behavioural therapy, to school teenage children. Many parents lack these skills (through no fault of their own), and pass dysfunctional beliefs and thought processes onto their children (entirely unconsciously).
It's fascinating to me that such a serious problem - the #2 non-biological cause of death, behind road traffic accidents - receives so little real attention [1]. People get upset about wars, murders, have extensive fire safety requirements, covers for their pools, hide their poison and medicines from children, panic over their children being abducted or falling pregnant etc., yet suicidal depression? I don't believe I knew a thing about it until I had to learn quickly - to help myself.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/09/2...
We naturally give people the benefit of the doubt. Bystander effect, etc.
I think this is a likely reason, along with feeling of low self worth (feeling irredeemably "unfixable" as lusr described it [1]), or not having any fiends or family that they can tell.
The best thing is to talk to someone. Ideally a mental health professional, or failing that a friend or relation. But if a suicidal person feels that this would diminish their control over their life then I would urge them to phone a crisis line (list here: [2]). They keep their anonymity and control while giving themselves the chance of a way out of the immediate crisis, hopefully enabling them to get to the point where they can confide in someone and get help.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138789
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines
Actually, that's the fundamental problem with this whole discussion. Stopping suicide means stopping people from doing what they want to do, literally with their own life, just because you don't want them to do it. With loved ones perhaps it's understandable, but what standing does some stranger on a crisis line have to try and do that?
You may well be right. The problem is that suicidal people are usually depressed, and depression (as others have said [1]) is an illness. Specifically, a biochemical illness the affects the functioning of the brain to the extent that severely depressed and suicidal people often don't think rationally about the consequences of their actions. I think it is strongly arguable that trying to prevent the suicide of a mentally ill person is morally justified, even at the cost of temporarily impinging on their freedom of action.
I'm not saying that suicide is always irrational. Faced with, say, terminal illness and severe pain, suicide can be a rational choice for a person capable of rational thought. And I definitely support the right of an individual to end their life in that or a similar situation. Ultimately they "own" their life.
"what standing does some stranger on a crisis line have to try and do that?"
Maybe you haven't thought this through. When a person phones a crisis line they are actively seeking help, and have an implicit understanding that the person they speak to is there to try and provide it. "Standing" doesn't come into it because the caller chose to made the call and controls when to end it.
I also think the "mental illness" explanation is just a little too convenient in the general case.
This is not true, though I agree that this is how the afflicted might see it.
I've had depression and suicidal thoughts. Now I don't. A combination of ambition, temporary setbacks, and treatable medical problems / drug interactions were at fault.
Now I don't feel suicidal. I sometimes feel sad, but never depressed. If anything -- the few bouts of depression I had were something like a crucible. I've looked into the abyss, broken down, and now I know that I can put myself back together again. It's actually kind of liberating and focusing.
There is hope!
Having been suicidal, I can tell you that to my current mind-state, my suicidal mind-state's rationale was laughably bad. The dangerous thing is that it didn't feel that way at the time. It. Felt. Crystal. Clear.
I'm a smart guy. I don't want anyone telling me that my thinking is flawed. I certainly don't like the idea of someone else coercing me into treatment, given the history of abuse.
That said, suicide would have been a terrible mistake. Perversely, it would have greatly harmed some of those I was trying to protect.
* Legitimate reasons, e.g., you're a French resistance fighter captured by Gestapo and if you speak under torture innocent people will be deported to Auschwitz (okay, had to "Godwin" this preemptively); you are elderly and are terminally ill with a very painful illness and want to die with dignity.
I think suicide should be legal and legitimate for individuals in truly unescapable circumstances. The exception could be those who commit suicide to escape retribution, but we should ask deeper questions of why individuals prefer death to imprisonment if (historically) death penalty has been a greater deterrent and is today reserved only for the most heinous crimes (in other words, if don't feel an individual has committed a crime heinous enough to warrant death, why is that we find it to inflict punishment considered by many to be worse than death?)
The key way to reduce suicide cause by these reasons in a first world society is to fight its causes which are already societal ills even when they do not lead to society (reduce brutality in prisons and offer better rehabilitation programs for convicts, actively work to fight terminal illness, have a better societal safety net, etc...)
* You are making a cry for help, you want people to notice you, and to intervene. Generally people in those circumstances attempt suicide in public, write a suicide note, and use means that are known to be reversible (pills that don't act instantly, public attempts, etc...).
I think this is where the most common means (e.g., suicide prevention hotlines) work very well.
* Bipolar or unipolar depression, negative symptoms of schizophrenia: in this case, no one may even know that you're planning to take your own life, there's seldom a note left, and the method used is usually more certain (e.g., firearm, actually toxic drugs). Gun control is not the solution either -- it may or may not be a valid route to violence prevention (this is an entirely different topic) -- it is nearly impossible to obtain firearms in Belarus (my home country) and very difficult to do so in Japan, but these countries still have a very high suicide rates despite being (respectively) second and first world countries (i.e., there are certainly problems, but there is no mass starvation, civil war, genocide, etc... going on).
I don't know Jody, but it's possible that the latter is what indeed happened here. When such a person is suicidal it's already too late: the best way to help them is to remove societal stigma against the mentally ill. If we take the illness paradigm seriously, then they will then be able to get help early on and lead happier lives; an obvious parallel is with epilepsy, we stopped seeing it a curse from Apollo and began to seriously research and understand its physiological causes.
Society needs to understand that far more often even the most stigmatized illnesses (schizophrenia, bipolar type I a.k.a. "manic-depressive") are characterized by the negative symptoms (inability to experience pleasure, inability to focus, apathy, etc...). The media is far too focused on the positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions, mania, etc...) and portrays the suffers of these illnesses as prone to violence or bizarre acts; even the films that are generally commended for positive portrayal of mental illness do this.
Reality is that the negative symptoms are more prevalent and hurt their suffers worse. Society needs to re-focus the image and allow these individuals to get help without fearing a permanent stigma and loss of civil rights. From a harm prevention point of view mentally ill individuals are more likely to be victims of violence than its perpetrators, so while violence committed by mentally ill makes headlines, if we're playing a "greater good for greater number of people" game it's better to err on the side of allowing individuals with positive symptoms to remain unrestrained than to force individuals with negative symptoms into hiding (out of fear that they'll be involuntarily committed).
I am very lucky in that my family has no history of mental illness. Yet, research seems to indicate that the intelligence and mental illness are tied together; in today's society intelligence is more important to evolutionary success than ever before (this can be seen through Flynn effect), so mental illness will most likely become more common in the future. It might even become endemic to certain area, e.g., Bay Area where someone who is not a knowledge worker will soon be unable to afford a place to live.
If someone has a heart attack, we don't say "why didn't the body just increase blood flow to the heart." Yet if someone commits suicide, people ask why they didn't just change their behavior.
While some people are against psychiatric or other medications, their goal is to fix or compensate for the bugs in the system.
Sometimes, the world is a hopeless place and the future holds little for you. But that is for you to decide, not someone commenting on the internet. Sometimes, your life is great, and you want to end on that highnote and not watch it slowly erode. I won't judge a stranger as good or bad based on their life choices, because I am not their judge. I had a grandfather that chose to drive to a park, watch a beautiful sunset, and finish it off with a shotgun. He was not a bad man, he didn't need to be "cured", in fact, he probably had 10 years of life ahead of him, but he chose not to live it. And that is a beautiful choice, just one of the infinite number of choices any of us can make.
This is why things that affect your very thinking are so insidious. Think of sleep deprivation or hypoxia. Ever watched a video of someone trying to draw simple shapes while not getting enough oxygen? The crucial point is that they think they are okay.
When I was feeling suicidal it seemed like the only logical solution to a set of unsatisfiable constraints. However, none of these were particularly hard constraints. As a relatively privileged person I was ashamed to reach out for help, because I felt I was letting everybody down. Don't be ashamed. It can do weird things like convincing you that it's better to kill yourself than inconvenience your self and others by e.g. quitting a job, or failing some courses.
To make a coding analogy -- sometimes your client / management etc. tells you they want X and Y and Z. The set of solutions to X and Y and Z is empty. However, if the constraints were relaxed, X and Y is solvable. Y and Z is also solvable. Maybe they didn't really want X anyway. This closing down of options seems to be a common pattern, however it's often false.
Very few people are actively being tortured to the point where death is the only logical escape. Typically, there's more of a spiral inward where more and more options disappear until only one seems to be left. Typically there are so many steps along this path that removing a few constraints or realizing that they're not really there can make all the difference.
Yes, everyone who died is insane.
Seeing as not so many people came back from death, life is not so much of "best next thing after sliced bread". It is just an experience, don't hang on it too much. ;)
To someone who's considering suicide, death can actually be more appealing than telling anyone about how they've lost another job, failed another course, etc. etc.
My mother is also a social worker at the VA Hospital, and she's had some of her patients opt out so to speak. It does appear to have a very strong pull on other people who are suicidal to choose that path.
So if anyone reading this is having those thoughts, please, please talk to someone professionally. Call the suicide hotline in your area. There are very real things that can be done to help you through this.
I've observed this myself. The effects of suicide are insidious but brutal: if you think nobody will be affected you're deluding yourself.
As a result I suppose it would not be an unreasonable hypothesis that entrepreneurs (who might have very lofty goals) might be more likely to commit suicide if they are either unsuccessful at sustaining a business or are successful, but never achieve the level of success that they had expected of themselves.
We shouldn't treat people like shit and refuse to help them with their suffering, then complain bitterly when they commit suicide. When this happens, it is our failure as a society.
It's their decision. There are myriad reasons someone may want to end his/her life. It's not the role of someone not in the headspace of the suicider to comment on what they're going through.
It's astounding that so many people want to restrict the freedom of others to be released from suffering.
The suffering is too often imaginary, do you understand that?
One, we're all climbing the vertical mountain wall. It's called life. This even applies to those who seem to have it easy. Suicide is not limited to high flyers.
Two, pushing the edges and suicidal thoughts often have the same roots. And I'm not just talking bipolar.