Daddy isn’t coming back

Well, there's the estimated work to fix and then there's how ... "valauble" someone is. It's an invisible measure: a little bit of celebrity (or how many people know you), some kind of reputational Whuffie (will they be missed?), a dash of disregard for age("he was so young" versus "it was his time"), some men versus women as kind of a global score, then you have individual removal. As an example, were Taylor Swift were pursued by the black dog, wallets would open up for suicide prevention, but some loathed yet similarly known figure not so much.

Whatever it is, the never-to-be-acknowledged issue that for many, people "care" to an extent that is materially indistinguishable from not caring one bit. Most people give advice with no skin in the game and no penalties for being wrong. Who wants to face the question, "What if it didn't get better?" What if you convince some miserable twenty-something that it gets better, as the platitude goes, and some fifty years later, no, it didn't, that their life was one terrible slog through stone-faced despair, lest we "affect loved ones" via the taboo of picking the time we board the train to Endsville? Whoops, sorry about that, we guilted you into suffering for half a century so we wouldn't have to look at you. Someone who would have done a Richard Cory instead ends up like Giles Corey, and it was just one more weight on the plank crushing them down, but gosh we feel good about saying the right thing.

That's a pretty harsh view.

Let me try something else: the author notes that 6,000 people take their lives in the UK every year. That has a very substantial cost, potentially measurable in many ways, but let's measure it in dollars.

The US EPA uses a value of about 7 million dollars for a statistical life in 2006 dollars [1], or about 10 million 2021 dollars [2].

The cost of suicide in the UK in the aggregate is something like 6,000*10,000,000 dollars. That's a 60 billion dollar problem.

Nearly every 60 billion dollar problem is worth caring about. Hypothetically, if you could spend $10 billion dollars to prevent all of those suicides, you would be generating a $50 billion dollar gain.

It's worth at least asking of a "we need to talk about..." article how big the problem is (on some dimension, whether in dollars or otherwise). This one is quite large.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-v... [2] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

Not a comment on the story itself, but rather on the postscript which follows it:

> If you are struggling to cope or have been affected by anything in this story, please contact the Samaritans in the UK at 116 123 or jo@samaritans.org. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. More information at mind.org.uk, samaritans.org and save.org

Years ago, unhappy but not suicidal, I decided to call a suicide hotline. I did this for the same reason we have fire drills and software tests - I was verifying whether it would work if I did need it.

It did not work. I was quite disappointed. After my experience, I would never suggest to anyone to call a suicide hotline, and I realized that most people who recommend them probably have never used one and don't know what they're recommending.

The individual I spoke to asked if I was suicidal - I said I wasn't at the moment, but then that doesn't mean much, does it? _I'm still calling, regardless of what I say._ I would imagine a lot of people who call suicide hotlines might not be entirely honest about the urgency or seriousness of their emotional state. Their reaction was dismissive thereafter.

The person would not make any connection with me - they are clearly trained not to do that to avoid certain problems, but I feel that in a moment where what a person needs most is a connection and is calling to try to seek one out, the total refusal to answer any questions at all or be personable in any way was like having a door shut in my face. The individual continually turned the conversation back to a set of formulaic questions that were of no help whatsoever, and I ultimately disconnected feeling worse than when I'd initially called.

I do wonder if my experience is representative of the norm or not.

Meaning it's more acceptable to not comply with cultural standards: i.e. keep standard hours, have a job, not marry/have kids, or whatever else the standards of behavior are.

I'm not convinced though that developing countries are actually lower compliance but that's what the OP means.

Thanks for sharing this. I'm sorry that you've been so poorly treated. You deserve better. Very many people do.

I recently read Van Der Kolk's "The Body Keeps The Score", a book about trauma and its effects. It's a masterwork, and I'll be thinking about it for the next year. But one of the big themes for me is the extent to which he, a well-placed psychiatrist with a strong mix of clinical and research work, had trouble getting the medical establishment to go beyond outdated categories and marginally effective treatments. It's heartbreaking to think of all the patients so poorly supported by the existing system.

It made me realize that as far as mental health goes, we're living in an age that people will later look at with horror. It makes me think of Semmelweis [1], who had the then-radical idea that surgeons should wash their hands before cutting people open. Many in the establishment mocked him. How dare he call them dirty! He ended up being committed to an asylum where he was beaten; he died 2 weeks later from a gangrenous wound. Eventually people realized he was right, but too late for him. And for who knows how many deaths.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis