#Content:Suicide
Much like the infamous Very Special Episodes of 90s sitcoms, I’m going to take a break from my normal postings to talk about mental health. I’ll get back to defining and defeating the patriarchy next week. I was inspired by a friend's post on Facebook on this subject. He is absolutely right. There is no sin or shame or fault attached to suicide. It’s a tragic end to a horrible, potentially fatal, illness. I am going to expand on the comments I left in the above post here, as it bears repeating. I hope to take apart some of the arguments that people use to justify calling suicide a sin, or an act of cowardly selfishness. Maybe understanding some of the reasons why people do this can help someone reading this find peace.
Before I get into those arguments, I am going to say this: If you are struggling with mental health, and don’t know where to turn, there are resources out there even if you can’t access traditional therapies. If you want information, BuzzFeed health news is a great place to start. There are articles that help identify Depression, Anxiety, and other common issues. All their articles have the following information, but I’ll post it here too:
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) and the Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741. Suicide helplines outside the US can be found here.
Hopefully, these resources can help you or a loved one.
Now, onto my arguments:
Many people still do think of suicide in terms of blame, cowardice, selfishness and sin of the person who died. I feel compassion for those people. Such reactions come out of real grief and pain. They are looking for someone to blame. They feel that such a sudden, tragic act must have someone to blame. In my experience, a lot of people who say this actually feel they are to blame. They ask themselves how they missed it, and what they could have done to save the life of their friend or relative. This unanswerable pain turns outward, and they place the blame on the deceased.
One common justification for that kind of blame is to say that the person should have just waited. After all, everyone is down sometimes. They should have just believed the popular (but flawed) mental health idea of it gets better, that we can somehow cure depression by moving away from a particular stressor, such as prejudice. But, while that certainly can help, it's not a cure. It's also not possible for everyone. The fact is, it doesn’t always get better for everyone. I was lucky. It did for me. But for a lot of people, it never does. In fact, it gets worse. They can’t afford the help they need. They are in one of the many areas of the country where competent mental health care simply doesn’t exist. They may not have family or friends that can help them. When 12% of adults in the USA are living below the poverty line, there isn’t much time or energy to spare to give to therapy. And no money to move closer to better support. Even when you can access therapists, friends, doctors it is not that easy to find help. The search is exhausting and feels like it is doing more harm than good. And those are just a couple of the barriers to breaking the cycle of poverty and Depression that trap so many people.
The second problem with the it gets better if you just wait and think positive thoughts lens is that it assumes Depression is situational or transitory. That if you can just wait long enough, the feeling passes and you can move on. To put it bluntly, this belief makes the stigma around mental health worse by minimizing the severity of mental health illnesses such as Depression. Depression in the clinical sense is not transitory. It’s not situational. Stressful circumstances can, of course, make Depression worse. But it is largely a genetic neurological disorder. It goes deeper than just being sad for a few days. So even if someone does get lucky and makes it out of their bad circumstances into better ones, it won’t cure their Depression. It might make it easier to access proper help, but that’s it. There is no cure for Depression. It’s a complicated, potentially fatal disease that we can sometimes treat but never cure. In that way mental illness, and individual response to mental illness, is similar to cancer. Some people are able to catch it early, access treatment, be able to afford to continue that treatment, and have the support they need to get through the treatment. As I said above, many people lack one or more of those privileges. And, even if they don’t, people in every one of those groups die. It will kill some people regardless of what they do or don’t do. The people who survive aren’t stronger, smarter, less selfish, braver than the people who don’t survive. All of them are doing the best they can. It’s no one’s fault. Just like it is not your fault if your friend died of cancer, it is not your fault if your friend dies of Depression. It is also not their fault.
A lot of people like to think they can judge whether something is wrong or right from the outside, anyway. They want to make sure they don’t make the same mistakes. They particularly like to do this with money. I’m sure we have all heard the arguments about “the deserving poor” who spend their money “correctly”. Some will go so far as to say that poor people are to blame for their own situation because “they buy iphones instead of healthcare”. They don’t deserve help, or even basic compassion, as they got themselves into this situation and are now taking the coward’s way out. We’ve all heard these judgments. I’ve heard them aimed at me, in fact. And in every case they are from very scared people who have let their fear make them selfish and narrow-minded. They are ignoring the context of the action, and possible ways in which that outcome has happened other than a person being lazy, selfish, or careless. For one thing, problems with managing money can be both a symptom of and an outcome of poorly managed mental health issues. So can trouble getting or keeping a job, maintaining healthy relationships, and even complying with treatment options. People also make different calculations based on different circumstances. So, what you see as irresponsible, such as getting an iPhone, might be necessary for them. And, keep in mind, that it may not be expensive or any money at all. Many cell carriers offer free or reduced cost earlier generation smartphones on their plans. And anyone who is doing anything pretty much needs a cell phone these days. A cell phone makes it possible for potential employers to call someone who is on the run all day. It makes it possible for someone who works long hours keep track of their children. The point is that we really can’t tell if someone is doing the “right” or “wrong” things, so there is no point in trying to judge it, or use those judgments as a basis for our own behavior.
It is scary to accept this, I know. There is a weird kind of comfort in blame, and saying that if they just did this thing or that thing, they’d be okay, and alive, right now. We want to hold someone responsible for tragedy so we can make them not allow or cause that tragedy again. We want to believe that tragedy is a result of personal choices, so we can make different choices and avoid that tragedy. The fact is that life just isn’t that simple. You can do everything “right” and still get hit with tragedy. You can do everything “wrong” and prosper. I could write a library’s worth of books on that point, but I’ll leave it here for now.
