Anthony Bourdain has died

If you ignore the feelings and needs of everyone around you, death is just another choice.

I’m not an expert on it, but there is a certain impulsiveness to it that suggests to me that it’s not just another choice. Terminally ill people often or maybe frequently get things in order and prepare things, almost going out of their way with limited time to take care of things for their loved ones. These things frequently take their loved ones by surprise and there aren’t exhaustive preparations.

This will be more inappropriate, but AB had a marriage dissolve because he had to travel 250+ days a year and be away from a wife and young child. As a husband and parent of two, I find that staggering, we aren’t talking about someone without financial resources that does whatever job they can to support their family, he probably didn’t need to work. To me, it’s not even a thought, I’d do a different job or somehow rearchitect my life to keep my family near. IMO, there was clearly some priority issues or something going on. If he had this supreme rationalism and simply chose to end things, where was that when he fathered a child that he didn’t spend time with? Or was this a new found clearity he discovered? Im not try to sound accusatory but I think there might be a lot of other differences in his life if this was a healthy and rational choice.

RIP Anthony and I hope his family and loved ones find peace and comfort.

It would be upsetting because it's more than likely not their choice but people assume it is.

Depression is like a broken bone it's a physical problem with a person's body beyond their control they need help to fix it.

People who have open-heart surgery have a 40% chance of developing depression it's not that all their life they were dealing with depression this is a sudden change. That's terrifying to see depression develop so quickly like a virus suddenly changing a person almost overnight.

If a person impulsively and mortally harms themselves because they couldn't control their actions due to chemical imbalance in their brain (depression) that would certainly be upsetting.

Knowing a person's actions were out of their control and they could have been helped or healed that's quite sad. We need to help people not accept it or mock it since it is just as much a medical problem as a broken bone, and it can be treated.

Bourdain's daughter just lost her father. I can't believe anyone could rationally and deliberately choose to inflict that much pain on someone they love. That's why I would infer that Bourdain was not in his "right mind" when he acted to leave this world. And that's why I would consider his suicide to be "wrong". Of course, I can't possibly say whether it was just, somehow. I just can't imagine how it could be.

Frankly, unless he had a hidden medical issue (like Robin Williams), I also believe Bourdain probably could have restructured his life in some way to make life better and worth living again. I'm pretty sure most mental health pros would agree that most suicides arise suddenly, emotionally, and irrationally, and can be productively prevented if the impending signs are identified early and addressed with help. Personally, I believe that suicide is never the best and only option anyone has -- barring an irreversible medical/physical condition.

I think the reason we see more tolerance for suicide today is we expect less from people in general. Forty years ago, society presumed that each of us had a continuing duty to other people -- family, friends, community, and country. This duty clearly proscribed certain behaviors which would hurt others or would fail to live up to other social duties, like voluntary military service in time of war, or working VERY HARD to overcome difficulties in marriage when children were still present in the home, and would suffer from the breakup. (I've been there. It's not a delight.)

I'm very saddened by Bourdain's passing, and I'd rather not judge him. But I regret even more his loss to his daughter and his friends. The act of suicide is a terrible legacy.

> I see what you're getting at, but I think the reason that suicide is linked with mental illness is because it goes against our very nature as living beings.

So does contraception, yet we don't consider people using it mentally ill.

I only say this to imply that "going against our very nature" isprobably not the main reason we link suicide with mental ilness, not to be disrespectful or anything. My mother killed herself so I am not someone to mock suicidal people.

> If anyone as any counter points I'd love to hear them - but for the most part I think suicide stems from mental instability or an otherwise inevitable physical death (terminal illness, old age, etc).

My mother had been diagnosed as depressed so at least part of society deemed her mentally ill, so the link from that to suicide can be made. However, having dealth with a similar diagnosis myself, and having learned to properly cope with it while staying as far away from psychiatric medication as physically possible I am quite skeptic about mental diagnosis.

On "Lila", Robert Pirsig proposes the completely not medical and just-a-personal-theory idea that, however, resonates a lot with me, that "crazy" is a social thing (you're only crazy if we have 'non-crazy' people to compare yourself against) and that taking such people to anthropologists in the hope of helping them find a culture where they would be a better fit could yield better benefits than psychiatry. Personally, while I did not physically relocate to another place, I severed myself from a big part of society that I found harmful and I have been as good as can be ever since (12+ years now).

Just yesterday I watched a interview clip on new Yorker from 2017 and it was so lively. 16 hours and this news. Very much saddened. Rip.