Marked as NSFW due to the content.
Suicide is complicated. I do not count myself as suicidal nor do I have any plans but I have had daily suicidal thoughts for the past year and some change. Over and over in the back of my head I think about it. To someone who never had frequent thoughts this would be a red flag but I disagree. I haven’t told a therapist(again) because it’s useless, and I dont want to go back on antidepressants because it’ll just make me good for working, which is the point I want to make.
Suicide prevention is so meaningless without a systematic solution. A hotline can be useful in some temporary cases but it will not help somebody with permanent problems nor does it help in anything material.
hotline: " I want to end it all" “No don’t do it you have a lot to live for” “Oh okay”
Talking to friends who don’t get suicidal thoughts might as well be the same as talking to a stranger who hands you the hotline.
Saying the wrong words to a therapist will get you put on a hold, which will not help you as you’re cutoff from being an autonomous person, plus you get thrown right back into whatever BS that got you in there in the first place.
So, what is to be done?
There needs to be something better for preventing suicide for people who are tired of hotlines. Being told there’s so much left to live for is tone deaf. I think suicidal thoughts are unmet contradiction, some underlying issue that cannot be solved under capitalism: child under abusive parental control, extreme loneliness or alienation, unfulfillng career in a declining job market, unmet mental health needs due to inaccessible Healthcare (and useless hotlines), etc.
We need to do better for the disabled and those facing mental health crises. Pop psychology gave us all the terminology with none of the follow through because all signs point back to capitalism and we have to dance around the truth to pretend it’s something else. I hope we can see some improvement in my lifetime
Societal views on suicide is just fucked. Why is a 20 year old who wants to commit suicide or otherwise live recklessly treated with contempt but an 80 year old who chooses hospice care instead of undergoing painful treatment treated with (relative) dignity? I’ve seen the opposite where the 80 year old who chooses to undergo painful treatment gets treated with mild contempt as someone who’s afraid of dying. It’s the same insult against suicidal people: they are a coward. To put these two observations together, there’s a societal approved age (~80 years) when you’re supposed to die and any steps you take to either die before or after that societal approved age is cowardice somehow.
In general, it seems like taking any conscious steps to either ruin or improve your health is treated with scorn. People who drink too much are treated with contempt, but so are people putting on N95 masks because they don’t want to get Covid. People who don’t exercise are treated as slobs but people who exercise too much are treated as some health nut.
My conclusion (that I thought of just now while writing this post lol) is that the people who label others cowards are the real cowards. Unlike the suicidal and health obsessed, normalTM people haven’t reckoned with their mortality. They haven’t truly faced with the idea that they will die one day just like the other people they feel scorn about. People who have attempted suicide have reckoned with their mortality, which they feel thankful that they have so they can even attempt to commit suicide. People who wear N95 also have reckoned with their mortality because they understand that worst case Covid means an excruciating painful death and wearing the masks is an active step towards mitigating that risk. It’s the people who feel self-righteous about suicidal people while they go to some Covid trap called movie theaters that haven’t reckoned with their mortality.
One of the results of reckoning with your mortality means controlling how you’re going to go out. Dying is inevitable, but the manner in which one dies is not. Suicidal people got it right in terms of how they want to die even if when they want to die is in dispute. They often do research on various means of suicide, weighing the pros and cons between them. There is care towards dying in such a way that other people would be less traumatized. And when it comes down to it, ODing on sleeping pills is better than dying from Covid or from organ failure. Dying from carbon monoxide poisoning because they left the car on in their garage is better than dying from getting run over by a drunk driver.
Absolutely. We are alienated to each other and we are alienated to our own mortality
A part of it also seems to be the Darwinian nature of capital where through its abilities to control so many aspects of life it can sense what maximizes profits. So people living beyond their productive age is unacceptable, and social murder will be committed against them. Attempting to take care of your health may be treated with scorn because it breaks the mold regarding the perfect balance of profitability and efficiency that the ‘normal’ diet, lifestyle, etc provides. We are obviously talking about these effect’s manifestation in the postmodern consumer societies, not the many work camps which in the parlance of the western slave system is called ‘the third world.’