As someone else who has battled depression most of my life I have to make it clear that depression is a broad diagnosis. Robert Sapolsky discusses this in depth and why this makes it such a difficult disease to treat[0]. Hotlines will help some people but not for others. Diet and exercise helps some but not others. Medication helps some but not others. There is no singular solution to depression and framing it that w…
> Also, we should also be clear that you are talking about toxic behavior. You isolating yourself when depressed probably isn't the best move. "Well", said the rich person to the beggar, "being poor really isn't the best move."
This comment comes off weird as I'm also discussing my depression and how I do similar things. It's not a rich person talking to a poor person, it is two poor people talking to one another.
Don't understand this idea. In UK there's a dozen or so magic numbers with one for each special crisis that you're supposed to memorize. Some are straightforward: 111 (non emergency health), 999 (emergency), but then there's 101, 112, 105? and you're supposed to dial them in certain circumstances. It seems this takes some triage load off, but it also seems like the path from "what's your emergency?" "this is not an e…
112 exists because it's the emergency number in some other countries. So it's smart to have it in the UK as well so foreigners can still call for help even not knowing the local convention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112_(emergency_telephone_numbe...
111 is also the emergency number in some countries - here in NZ some time back in the '30s some post office functionary bought a while bunch of dial phones on the cheap - because they had the numbers on the dial the other way around from what was becoming the standard elsewhere - hence 111 as the emergency number - worked great for 40-50 years until international direct dial became a thing ....
I also wonder what the impacts of having "Placed calls to the suicide hotline" in your permanent record will be on people's lives if they do choose not to take it. With the state collecting that data, your phone company collecting that data, your cell phone OS collecting that data, random apps collecting that data, and who knows who is on the other end of that call and what they're doing with your data. Will you be t…
Absolutely those things can happen, and they should. For example, imagine if an airplane pilot or anyone in a position of being responsible for a mass number of lives has previously called into suicide hotlines. Would you feel secure knowing the pilot of your plane once exhibited suicidal tendencies? I doubt it. Any bits of data we can collect to make accurate assessments should be collected.
Imagine if an airline pilot or anyone in a position of being responsible for a mass number of lives has felt suicidal and considered calling into a suicide hotline.
Would they feel secure knowing their call will create a permanent record of suicidal tendencies, limiting their career for years to come? I doubt it.
Any bits of data we collect to make accurate assessments will encourage suffering people to withdraw further and remain silent instead of getting help.
I wonder at how proving a legal path to ending life for anyone (with a lengthy waiting period and multiple psych sessions) would reduce the instances of impromptu suicide. My suspicion is that the availability of a legitimized path to the same result, but with a far less traumatizing method for both the individual and their loved ones, might allow for transitioning people into getting help when that's not the outcome…
No, if someone has lost their motivation to live, that is the fault of the community around them, and it’s the responsibility of society to fix the failures that led to that loss of motivation. The path to fixing these failures is not to offer state-sponsored (or at least state-sanctioned, as your comment implies) lethal injection for anyone who asks for it. That’s sweeping the problems under the rug. I’m not religio…
Calling the authorities under _any_ circumstances where the person is not planning to harm anyone else is unacceptable. The way you talk seems to presume that all suicidal people are out of their mind and irrational and need to be protected from themselves, which allows you to rationalize neglecting respect for their bodily autonomy. My body, my choice. It’s a person’s goddamn right to make the choice whether it’s be…
You're viewing this rather myopically. If someone texts us, we're operating under a valid presumption that they value their life, otherwise why text for help? We can't call EMS on someone we're unaware even exists.
My views are based on personal experience, so they may be biased, but they’re not ignorant. Years ago I was at the height of a decade of misery and spent months convincing myself that God and hell did not exist so that I would have the option of killing myself. I then spent months when I would decide every day whether I wanted to keep living. My life is top 1% awesome now, but if I had to go back knowing what I know now I don’t know that I would endure that suffering again to get where I am. Nor would I force anyone else to. Regular people can’t imagine the level of suffering someone contemplating suicide is experiencing. I’ve talked to a number of acquaintances contemplating suicide since then and I’ve made a point of never telling them it’s wrong. I offer my friendship and support to make sure their feelings are not from lack of that, but I also give them advice on what to do instead if what they’re planning is unnecessarily painful. To my knowledge they’re all still alive and don’t think I’m a jerk for not telling them it’s wrong to do it.
Interesting side effect of this: In my local phone number area code, it's no longer possible to dial local numbers without the area code. That means all outgoing calls require an area code, whereas normally you can dial local numbers without an area code. In addition, we must also dial "1" before the area code when placing outgoing calls to certain neighboring area codes. It's unclear exactly why - I imagine it has t…
there's more to it than that - lots of phone/phone systems have built algorithms tell them how long a phone number is, and place a call once you've hit that length - for example "911" has a length - one thing that's been happening behind the scenes (mandated by the FCC) is that all the phones in the US have been quietly getting software upgrades to make "988" terminate at 3 digits .... this effectively means you can't dial local numbers that start with 988 .... there are no 7-digit numbers that start with 911 but some that start with 988 - there are no area codes that start with either.
It's all a tremendous ongoing hack ....
Interestingly it used to be that all area codes (and emergency numbers) had a 1 or a 0 as the second digit and no local exchange numbers did - that's why you didn't have to type that initial 1 (which is also the NA international dialing code) - exchanges could easily detect an out of area code call (and figure out the 7/10 digit thing). Then faxes and modems came along the number of required phone numbers in the US effectively doubled and they ran out
I wonder at how proving a legal path to ending life for anyone (with a lengthy waiting period and multiple psych sessions) would reduce the instances of impromptu suicide. My suspicion is that the availability of a legitimized path to the same result, but with a far less traumatizing method for both the individual and their loved ones, might allow for transitioning people into getting help when that's not the outcome…
> state authorized suicide IMO there's no way this would ever become any sort of common occurrence, because the state would never willingly give up its human capital on that scale. "Again, when a man in violation of the law harms another (otherwise than in retaliation) voluntarily, he acts unjustly, and a voluntary agent is one who knows both the person he is affecting by his action and the instrument he is using; an…
Some countries [1], [2] provide government-sanctioned medically assisted death for qualifying patients. What makes you believe these sorts of programmes can't be adopted more widely?
> state authorized suicide IMO there's no way this would ever become any sort of common occurrence, because the state would never willingly give up its human capital on that scale. "Again, when a man in violation of the law harms another (otherwise than in retaliation) voluntarily, he acts unjustly, and a voluntary agent is one who knows both the person he is affecting by his action and the instrument he is using; an…
Some countries [1], [2] provide government-sanctioned medically assisted death for qualifying patients. What makes you believe these sorts of programmes can't be adopted more widely? [1]: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assi... [2]: https://exit.ch/en/englisch/engagement-of-exit/our-end-of-li...
I wonder at how proving a legal path to ending life for anyone (with a lengthy waiting period and multiple psych sessions) would reduce the instances of impromptu suicide. My suspicion is that the availability of a legitimized path to the same result, but with a far less traumatizing method for both the individual and their loved ones, might allow for transitioning people into getting help when that's not the outcome…
> state authorized suicide IMO there's no way this would ever become any sort of common occurrence, because the state would never willingly give up its human capital on that scale. "Again, when a man in violation of the law harms another (otherwise than in retaliation) voluntarily, he acts unjustly, and a voluntary agent is one who knows both the person he is affecting by his action and the instrument he is using; an…
> the state would never willingly give up its human capital on that scale
The same state that sends its youth off to die in wars? Or that executes them when it so chooses?