Posted by Simcha on August 7, 2001, at 15:32:01
In reply to Re: Sadness over suicides-Everyone, posted by kid_A on August 7, 2001, at 13:47:25
> a. on the veer off the path, i think i am going to side w/ lissa in her points, especially as concerns external stressors... i will go so far as to say that i think that these stressors can even be oblique ones that are built in to a good percentage of the population as a whole, things such as anomie, the term durkheim had coined to describe the effect on mental health as the large scale behavioural structure of a society breaks down... as the social mores for behaviour start to untangle and eventually erode away some of us may increasingly be in a state of anomie, not having a good understanding of how we relate to one another, of what our social responsibilities to one another may be...OK,
Not to be terribly argumentative....
Diabetes and cancer have been shown to have their environmental factors aswell. If you eat a crappy diet and you are genetically pre-disposed to develop diabetes... you will most likely get diabetes.
If you eat a crap diet, don't exercise, smoke, work with nuclear waste, breathe in exhaust fumes, work with insecticides, or take certain drugs and you are genetically predisposed to certain types of cancers then you will most likely get cancer.
Like my depression. Psychoses, schizophrenia, paranoia, depression, OCD, and other mental illnesses run on both sides of my family. The pdoc reasons that I am genetically pre-disposed to depression and OCD. There were environmental factors that may or may not have triggered the depression and OCD. I did not have the best childhood.
Reasoning this way, yes, my mental illness is like cancer or diabetes. I need my meds to correct the very physical problems in my make-up like a diabetic needs insulin..like a cancer patient needs chemotherapy, surgery, and/or radiation.
Now, suicide can be a final stage or "final symptom" of my depression. Depression is fatal. So is cancer and diabetes if left untreated. Sometimes even with treatment cancer and diabetes do kill. Sometimes even with treatment those of us who suffer from mental illness take our own lives. A very dear friend in one of my 12-step groups committed suicide after many attempts and much treatment for his depression.
Now as to assisted suicide, personally I'm against it for any illness. I watched my grandmother die over the course of eight years. At no time did she want to be "put out of her misery." I'm not saying that I have a right to stop others from "checking out" in terminal situations. Morality, I find, is rarely as absolute as they would have liked me to believe in religious education.
I hope I'm not being too argumentative. I respect everyone's differences on these topics. This is a very interesting discussion we are having. ;-)
poster:Simcha
thread:8808
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20010807/msgs/8884.html