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Why Aaron died

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Re: Why Aaron died

#61

Post by christensen_emc »

ErrantX wrote: post #38
thaumaturgy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will muster every ounce of decorum I can manage in responding to some random person's rebuttal to a post written by someone who actually knew and lived with Aaron (seriously, what are you thinking?!), and simply retort: "That program crashed because it halted. It was the proximate cause of its own crash so to speak. Are there other factors without which it wouldn't have crashed? Indeed, there are an infinite number…

Yes. But. (and this post doesn't intend to argue Aaron was depressed, just thinks about the premise that he might have been) As someone who suffers a lot with depression, it is quite possible to be depressed and for no one close to you to notice . We can be damn good at hiding it, especially with practice, especially with people we know well. Some time ago I was living with my partner and she had no clue I had been d…

I went through a period of depression two years back. My family and friends were the last people to notice it. I put on a strong face for them and went out of my way not to worry them. The people who did notice were professors and classmates, people who I didn't make much of an effort to "impress". When those close to me started to realize they all began to rationalize it as being the result of drugs or sleep loss or a recent break up. You just aren't the type of person to be depressed they said, it's not like you. Sad as it may be, they knew even less about how I was than random strangers on the bus. I suspect a lot of it had to do with how they viewed depression and the stigma surrounding it.

Re: Why Aaron died

#62

Post by scarmig »

rayiner wrote: post #54
thaumaturgy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This'll be my last reply; I've gotta step away from this because it's getting me angry, and it's not likely that you and I will find anything to agree about. > And some similarly tiny portion of people who are prosecuted commit suicide. What's your point? I never made the point that prosecution leads to suicide. You, however, tried to make the point that depression leads to suicide, and that's factually wrong. > She'…

> I never made the point that prosecution leads to suicide. You, however, tried to make the point that depression leads to suicide, and that's factually wrong. The premise of the article this thread is attached to is, as I understand it, is that aggressive prosecution lead to Aaron's suicide. > But, we know that Aaron's lawyer notified Heymann at least of Aaron's possibility as a suicide risk, and the response from H…

"What was she supposed to do? Treat alleged suicide risks specially?"

This is entirely separate from the rest of the injustices surrounding Aaron's persecution and suicide, but: yes, yes she should have. It's incomprehensible to me that you're suggesting otherwise: if someone is known as being a suicide risk, you make attempts to eliminate or mitigate as much as possible that risk. Even if it gets in the way of some secondary goals like career advancement or can be manipulated by certain malefactors.

Taren's wrong on this in some ways: Aaron's depression, or at least his unique mental disposition, definitely played a big part in everything. But that doesn't exonerate the prosecutors; it puts more blood on their hands.

Re: Why Aaron died

#63

Post by anigbrowl »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #35
rayiner wrote: post #10

Aaron died because he killed himself. He was the proximate cause of his own death so to speak. Are there other factors without which he wouldn't have killed himself? Indeed, there are an infinite number of them. An infinite number of things could have happened to change the course of his life. Indeed, ultimately you can trace the blame all the way back to his parents (depression is quite heritable): http://depression…

I will muster every ounce of decorum I can manage in responding to some random person's rebuttal to a post written by someone who actually knew and lived with Aaron (seriously, what are you thinking?!), and simply retort: "That program crashed because it halted. It was the proximate cause of its own crash so to speak. Are there other factors without which it wouldn't have crashed? Indeed, there are an infinite number…

I certainly wouldn't presume to tell someone close to the situation what the cause was, but that doesn't mean I uncritically accept their view. Having a history of depression and having made a couple of suicide attempts in the (now-distant) past, here are some things that come to mind while reading her argument that Aaronsw didn't exhibit the typical clinical markers of depression:

a) having a list of symptoms doesn't fully equip someone to make clinical decisions about their presence or absence, especially when one is trying to wrap one's head around them in the wake of a tragic event. Psychiatry is nowhere near being an exact science, but a list of symptoms doesn't put one the same plane as a psychiatrist who is familiar with the terms of art, statistical methods and so forth that go into the development of evaluation scales. Psychiatry may grope its way through the dark, but it does attempt to do so in a systematic fashion.

b) one might argue that the 'the Aaron she knew' didn't exhibit the typical symptoms of exhaustion either.

c) depression isn't some amorphous thing that follows one around like a personal raincloud independent of circumstances, but is rather a factor that weights a person's thought processes to varying degrees depending on time and context. Phrases such as 'pessimistic arrogance' loom large to me, as does this example:

Sam gave Aaron a quick overview of Australian politics; Aaron expressed astonishment at how easy it would be to “take over Australia”, but concluded that a country of only 20 million probably wouldn’t be worth it.

Self-esteem, needless to say, was definitely not Aaron’s problem.

Sometimes, statements tell you more about the person making them than the ostensible subject. This doesn't mean that the person is lying or concealing their feelings, but that those feelings are unconsciously attached to external subjects in order to give them an outlet. Arrogance is not a good proxy for self-esteem at all in my own case; quite the reverse.

d) What people tell you and what they do don't always match; sometimes they may conceal the truth about their feelings of activities for reasons ranging from embarrassment, to pessimism about the ability of others to understand, to not wishing to be a burden. When one is depressed, even other people's expressions of love and support can be exhausting to deal with and it may be preferable to avert them by cultivating an air of positivity. This isn't a case of dishonesty so much as trying to think oneself healthy again.

e) profound capacity for pleasure in everyday life...finely honed aesthetic sense Again, I don't find this incompatible with the presence of depression. The stars shine particularly brightly at night, so to speak.

There are a lot of factors that lead into a person's choice to commit suicide, and they're not IMHO amenable to simple binary decompositions. Just as the number of people with depression vastly exceeds the number of people who commit suicide, so does the number of people who are confronted with alarming legal burdens, both civil and criminal.

Please consider the points above as an attempt at supplementation rather than disputation.

Re: Why Aaron died

#64

Post by thaumaturgy »

xijuan wrote: post #44
ErrantX wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But. (and this post doesn't intend to argue Aaron was depressed, just thinks about the premise that he might have been) As someone who suffers a lot with depression, it is quite possible to be depressed and for no one close to you to notice . We can be damn good at hiding it, especially with practice, especially with people we know well. Some time ago I was living with my partner and she had no clue I had been d…

Do you know how psychiatrists or clinical psychologists diagnose depression? Have you read the DSM? Do you know how they come up with the criteria for psychiatric disorders in DSM? Do you know the controversies behind DSM? Do you know few decades ago homosexuality was regarded as a mental disorder? Do you know that there are researchers who want to introduce a new "psychiatric disorder" (i.e., hypersexual disorder) i…

For what it's worth, I kinda agree with what I think you're getting at -- that the diagnosis for depression needs a lot of work and the DSM isn't infallible -- but your comment here is easy to interpret as a skepticism of the existence of depression, which might be why it's getting downvoted.

Fortunately, there have been some recent advancements in neuroscience that can give us hope for improved diagnosis in the future (once the field is able to agree on what depression is, anyway).

Re: Why Aaron died

#65

Post by gsharm »

rayiner wrote: post #47
thaumaturgy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are we now to charge prosecutors with being sensitive to the details of the personal lives of the people which they prosecute? Yes. A justice system that does not behave as though it is dealing with human lives is one which will corrupt itself into encouraging prosecutors to win cases , instead of seek justice.

Do we design cars so that not a single person ever dies? Do we design medicine so a single person never dies? You can't design a realistic justice system that doesn't have unfair outcomes sometimes any more than you can design a test for cancer that never has false positives. Outside this particularly sympathetic context, I'd say people want their justice system to be fairly neutral and not swayed by the specifics of…

Any system - especially a justice system - unable to take into account peoples' circumstances is not only wasteful, but dangerous. Neutrality does not transcend doing the right thing. Justice isn't a product that is packaged and sold, it is a service, rendered on a case-by-case basis. It is done that way so that the context can be understood sufficiently well in each case. In this case it either wasn't, or they simply didn't care, or were negligent. This is wrong and it needs to be fixed.

What is your agenda? It seems as if you think the system is fine, and cannot and should not improve. Why?

Re: Why Aaron died

#66

Post by jjjjjosh »

Millennium wrote: post #17
d0m wrote: post #7

The last sentences makes me think: Ask yourself this: If on January 10, Steve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz at the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office had called Aaron’s lawyer and said they’d realized their mistake and that they were dropping all charges — or even for that matter that they were ready to offer a reasonable plea deal that wouldn’t have marked Aaron as a felon for the rest of his life — would Aaron have kill…

This would imply that the US Attorney's office made a mistake in charging him for the crimes he committed. In reality, this would have been letting him off the hook because ZOMGAARONSWARTZ. Aaron died because he forgot that civil disobedience is not about sticking it to The Man, but about getting into the sort of vulnerable position that makes it possible to win people over with dialogue. It's about paying the price,…

"civil disobedience is not about sticking it to The Man, but about getting into the sort of vulnerable position that makes it possible to win people over with dialogue."

I find that really beautiful, thank you.

Re: Why Aaron died

#67

Post by rayiner »

scarmig wrote: post #62
rayiner wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never made the point that prosecution leads to suicide. You, however, tried to make the point that depression leads to suicide, and that's factually wrong. The premise of the article this thread is attached to is, as I understand it, is that aggressive prosecution lead to Aaron's suicide. > But, we know that Aaron's lawyer notified Heymann at least of Aaron's possibility as a suicide risk, and the response from H…

"What was she supposed to do? Treat alleged suicide risks specially?" This is entirely separate from the rest of the injustices surrounding Aaron's persecution and suicide, but: yes, yes she should have. It's incomprehensible to me that you're suggesting otherwise: if someone is known as being a suicide risk, you make attempts to eliminate or mitigate as much as possible that risk. Even if it gets in the way of some…

We'll have to agree to disagree. I think short of being faced with someone who is such a high suicide risk that he should be committed for his own safety, prosecutors have no special duty to treat possible suicide risks specially.

What I find odd is that you think it "incomprehensible" that anyone would disagree with you. I think lots of people would disagree with you on this point. Indeed, I think the majority of Americans would disagree with you. We put people in jail for stealing to feed their kids, we put people in jail for killing abusive husbands, etc. We go out of our way to treat defendants uniformly.

Re: Why Aaron died

#68

Post by [deleted] »

DanBC wrote: post #58
rayiner wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your comment is not enlightening. It is not insightful. It falls flat on its face if you bother to do even two minutes' Googling to find that while somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 Americans suffer from depression ( http://www.cdc.gov/features/dsdepression/ ), "only" 38,000 die of suicide each year ( http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm ). And some similarly tiny portion of people who are prosecuted com…

> She's implying that Carmen Ortiz bears some moral culpability for the suicide, Suicide accounts for almost a 3rd of all deaths in US local jails. Things are much better in state prisons - "only" 6% of deaths are from suicide. (Behind AIDS at 9% and illness at 80%). (These are old, but accurate, figures. ( http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/shsplj.pdf ) ) Aaron meets some of the risk factors for suicide. Male,…

[deleted]

Re: Why Aaron died

#69

Post by rhizome »

rayiner wrote: post #54
thaumaturgy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This'll be my last reply; I've gotta step away from this because it's getting me angry, and it's not likely that you and I will find anything to agree about. > And some similarly tiny portion of people who are prosecuted commit suicide. What's your point? I never made the point that prosecution leads to suicide. You, however, tried to make the point that depression leads to suicide, and that's factually wrong. > She'…

> I never made the point that prosecution leads to suicide. You, however, tried to make the point that depression leads to suicide, and that's factually wrong. The premise of the article this thread is attached to is, as I understand it, is that aggressive prosecution lead to Aaron's suicide. > But, we know that Aaron's lawyer notified Heymann at least of Aaron's possibility as a suicide risk, and the response from H…

What was she supposed to do? Treat alleged suicide risks specially?

Flight risks are treated differently: they have different or non-existent bail. Systemic risk cases are treated differently: they enjoy a reduced likelihood of indictment and incur non-judicial penalties.

Re: Why Aaron died

#70

Post by thaumaturgy »

anigbrowl wrote: post #63
thaumaturgy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will muster every ounce of decorum I can manage in responding to some random person's rebuttal to a post written by someone who actually knew and lived with Aaron (seriously, what are you thinking?!), and simply retort: "That program crashed because it halted. It was the proximate cause of its own crash so to speak. Are there other factors without which it wouldn't have crashed? Indeed, there are an infinite number…

I certainly wouldn't presume to tell someone close to the situation what the cause was, but that doesn't mean I uncritically accept their view. Having a history of depression and having made a couple of suicide attempts in the (now-distant) past, here are some things that come to mind while reading her argument that Aaronsw didn't exhibit the typical clinical markers of depression: a) having a list of symptoms doesn'…

Absolutely, on all points. If anyone thinks I'm arguing that prosecution leads to suicide (even aggressive prosecution), or that Ortiz or anyone in her office is solely responsible for his suicide, then I apologize: that wasn't my intent.

I do think that there are some fundamental questions about the circumstances though:

- Was the prosecution disproportionate to the crime? (I think it was; I'd be interested to hear articulate opinions to the contrary.)

- In Aaron's specific case, should the prosecution have taken his mental health into consideration? (I think so; I can't figure out how to argue this from a moral standpoint, because I can't think of any common ground I'd have with a person who disagreed morally. However, there is at least a legal basis for it: law already considers insanity to be a suitable defense under certain circumstances, so I can't think of a legal reason why in principle Aaron's mental state should not have been a consideration in his case, especially given my opinion on the first point above.)

- In the general case, is there room for reform of overzealous prosecution? (I think so, yes.)

- In Aaron's specific case, does Ortiz's office share some responsibility for Aaron's death? (I think so, unquestionably. I think a plausible test for responsibility is whether one's actions could have been different, whether those actions should have been different, whether the actions were reasonable given the facts at the time, and whether different actions could have resulted in a better outcome. On the first point, I think it's been made clear that there was room for a reasonable plea bargain, and the prosecutors rejected it. The second point goes back to whether or not law should recognize mental health issues in cases like Aaron's, which is perhaps still debatable, though I think it should. On the third point, no, I don't think the actions of the office were, or are, reasonable: I don't think that Heymann's response to Aaron's attorney when notified of the potential for suicide should have essentially been "go piss up a rope", and I don't think that Ortiz, during the fallout from this case, should have said essentially, "there is nothing that my office could have done better." On the final point, Taren seems to be making a strong argument that the most immediate cause for Aaron's suicide was the circumstances of his case, and I don't think I'm in a position to doubt her judgement on this point.)

- Does the HN community also share some responsibility for Aaron's suicide? (I think so, unfortunately. I think it's clear from comment threads about his case that there was not much support for him here, and I think there should have been. Disappointingly, some of the tone from those earlier threads is still present, even in this one, as with Millennium's comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5165280. I think it's less clear whether or not a different response to his case on HN would have changed the outcome, but I don't see that as a worthwhile argument against behaving better.)

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