41–50 of 430 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of mental health issues that make this level of self-awareness and future planning incredibly difficult.
Perhaps a good reason to keep elevating the socially approved age to reproduce? By the time you're in your 40s, you likely have a good idea of whether or not you're a stable enough mind to commit to the minimum 20 years required to uplift a new human adult.
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 ca…
Is your advice based on this single interaction?
1. Despite my bad experience, recommend suicide hotlines in the hopes that they work even though they didn't for me.
2. Recommend against suicide hotlines while explaining why and cautioning that my experience may or may not be representative of the norm.
I'm going with #2 for the time being, yes.
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 ca…
There are lots of studies that show that such programs are at least moderately effective (https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12...)
I can’t stand articles that start with “we need to talk about…”. What the author is really saying is “This topic is important to me, and I’d like to pressure you into having the same views on it as I do”. Regardless of the merit of those views, the only thing that ever comes after “we need to talk about…” is a description of some hardship the author (or somebody the author knows) faced, an explanation of how that sha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of mental health issues that make this level of self-awareness and future planning incredibly difficult.
Perhaps a good reason to keep elevating the socially approved age to reproduce? By the time you're in your 40s, you likely have a good idea of whether or not you're a stable enough mind to commit to the minimum 20 years required to uplift a new human adult.
Statistics also suggest that, singularly among illnesses, people with schizophrenia fare better in the developing world, where the rates of remission are higher. It's because developing countries are low-compliance societies. Humans weren't evolved to live in high-compliance societies and a lot of us don't care for it at all. Some of us get by. Others don't.
The way someone experiences schizophrenia may be a reflection of their overall societal mental health, and how fearful society is in general.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is your advice based on this single interaction?
Well, I have two options going forward: 1. Despite my bad experience, recommend suicide hotlines in the hopes that they work even though they didn't for me. 2. Recommend against suicide hotlines while explaining why and cautioning that my experience may or may not be representative of the norm. I'm going with #2 for the time being, yes.
I have a black thought on this. I would be happy if someone corrected me. When something breaks, sometimes we repair it, sometimes we throw it out. The more valuable the item, the more we will spend to fix it. However even with the most valuable items, we sometimes reluctantly decide that it is broken beyond repair. Are people like this? Are some simply too broken to fix? I feel awful thinking this, but I wonder if t…
There's an oft-used Lord of the Rings quote: “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.” What is a broken person? since we're all fallible beings ourselves, who could possibly decide that someone is broken beyond repair? It doesn't matter if there's truth to it.
There's a big difference between judging someone unworthy of life and acting to kill them, and judging that someone is not worth the energy and struggle to fight against their own drive to throw themselves off a cliff.
We're not collectively strong enough to save everyone. Getting strong enough is a goal to aspire to, but the dark reality is that in our state of weakness, we need to prioritize what we struggle to hold onto.
Statistics also suggest that, singularly among illnesses, people with schizophrenia fare better in the developing world, where the rates of remission are higher. It's because developing countries are low-compliance societies. Humans weren't evolved to live in high-compliance societies and a lot of us don't care for it at all. Some of us get by. Others don't.
I can’t stand articles that start with “we need to talk about…”. What the author is really saying is “This topic is important to me, and I’d like to pressure you into having the same views on it as I do”. Regardless of the merit of those views, the only thing that ever comes after “we need to talk about…” is a description of some hardship the author (or somebody the author knows) faced, an explanation of how that sha…
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 some…
I think it's important to note that the value of a statistical life has nothing to do with actual value, or money provided into an economy. So it's not something that can be taxed against etc. So to me it's false statement to say "spend $10 billion dollars to prevent all of those suicides, you would be generating a $50 billion dollar gain." there is no _actual_ dollar gain. The gain is that the average mortality goes down by 0.001%.