Posted by Destroyo on November 13, 2003, at 20:19:36
In reply to Los Benzos in Mexico and Andrew Solomon, posted by Destroyo on November 12, 2003, at 13:14:27
I think that just thinking out loud sometimes can increase knowledge. The interaction with others can produce results that a person thinking alone, by himself, couldn't achieve. If one is into polemics, you must painstakingly anticipate all of your potential opponents' arguments. This can be rather constipating to the development of creative solutions to intrasigent problems. Don't take me too seriously (I certainly don't). As a practical matter, I think that offing yourself with a gun is somewhat more difficult to will the nerve to do than swallowing pills. The incredible sudden violence of a bullet temporally concentrates the fear of death into a terrifying black hole. With pills or opiates, you just go to sleep and never wake up, and the drugs take the edge off the fear before you slide beneath the waves. I'm not facilitating suicide by pointing this out, most people who've considered suicide (I have) will naturally compare the methods they have avaiable to those they wish they had available. Surely most people would choose pills over a gun, but's it's a taboo subject. We tell people that suicide is not an option, but people aren't stupid. They know that it IS an option, and perhaps by lying to people who are pondering non-impulsive suicide that it isn't an option, we lose credibility. It's our humanitarian duty to play (not devil's but) "angel's advocate" to the person contemplating suicide, to try to talk them out of it. If you start right off by telling them "suicide is never an option", then all credibility is lost. This is heresy. So what? I want fewer people to commit suicide. It's paradoxical, but if drugs were legal (in 20 plus years we might eventually give up on the war on drugs) and people could take that handful of pills, go to sleep and never wake up, as I said, it might lead to changes that would help ameliorate the causative factors in people's lives that lead to suicide. In others words, facilitating suicide might actually reduce its incidence. If I could provide EVERYBODY with a Solomonic Doomsday Pill Stash, would I consider it? Well, I would certainly at least consider threatening to do so (only to those over 30). Admittedly, I have not studied the circumstances of people who commit suicide. I'm assuming that people do it because they perceive that their lives are lousy. Solomon, by all accounts had a pretty good life, still, he was depressed, and contemplated suicide. Myself, my life is pretty crappy, I don't like to get into details, but most people would agree that I live
a somewhat circumscribed and frustrating and painful life. That's why I ruminate on suicide sometimes. But I may be overgeneralizing from my own experience. Society seems bent on trying to prevent suicides one by one, one at a time. If we shifted the focus to preventing suicide as an a societal ill, rather than an individual one, by generally improving the quality of people's lives, the goal of minimizing the incidence of suicide might more readily be acheived.
poster:Destroyo
thread:279044
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20031113/msgs/279540.html