Ah, got it; I was thinking it’d be a choice of one thing or another or another, not that we could opt for incapacitation plus other stuff. Admittedly, that opens up other questions; I’ll have to give it some thought. (Do you remember any specific questions from the bit you were remembering?)
There was a series of studies building on and testing slightly different manipulations of these ideas, so not sure if it was the exact one that concluded people are motivated by “just deserts” no matter what they say, but one was about an offender who committed a shocking violent murder of a stranger. There were three versions of the scenario. The control was just that it was just that; a shocking attack out of the blue. The second version was that the guy who did it had an inoperable brain tumor that scientists believed caused him to be more violent. The third was that the guy had the tumor, but the tumor had already been successfully removed.
As a subject of the study, of course, you would only get one of them, and you would be asked how morally outraged you were by the crime, how responsible you believed the individual was for the crime, and then what kind of sentence you would recommend.
The interesting thing from the incapacitation/“special prevention” standpoint, I think, was that people generally were less OK with the guy in the third scenario walking free than their responses about “responsibility” seemed to indicate. They would choose lighter punishments, or like, put him in a hospital for ten years, but not no punishment. Only speculation as to why, but one speculative reason would be that, you know, the guy killed someone, and you should get something for that.
This is consistent with other research on human morality - generally speaking, any moral position we take can be disproven by some thought experiment in which, for some reason, we answer differently than we think we feel. And we can’t explain why. Which adds to the evidence that our moral positions aren’t really reasoned at all, but based on some kind of unconscious gut-level process.
I want to thank all the people, especially Spice_Weasel, who have described the possible negative experiences of having a newborn. While intellectually I knew about post-partum depression and the like, I now realise I had very little internalized emotional understanding on how bad the early stages of having a child could sometimes get. It makes it even more appalling that universal paid parental or maternal leave doesn’t exist in the US.
Hinting that you should consider if what you are about to say helps or harms before you say it is NOT the same as telling you to shut up! It’s asking you to have more consideration in regards to what your words do! Do you enjoy thinking that others are being awful to you? Does your life not feel normal unless there is some kind of chaos in it? This isn’t a normal conversation I am having with you because your sense of being a victim is getting in the way of that. I’ve said what I needed to say though and others grasp my meaning.
I can’t even imagine what would have happened without my husband there. He had the first six weeks off because we had saved the money for him to take parental leave. When I think about the burdens single mothers face, and the pressures of poverty, you can see the risk of doing something drastic increases considerably. We literally could not have been in a better position to have a child. Two 37-year-old parents well-established in our careers, trying to have a child in some form or other for ten years, financially secure enough to plan for joint parental leave, no major medical complications, access to the best hospital, no issues in childbirth or delivery. And yes I have a history of severe depression, but it had been well-managed for a long time. Our general sense was that I have acquired all these coping skills, so if something came up, we’d be prepared. But the shift in my mood happened so rapidly that I didn’t even have the conscious awareness that I was depressed. It wasn’t like, “Oh, yeah, depression, we thought this might happen.” It was like getting hit by a goddamn truck.
And Sr. Weasel wasn’t doing great either. We were both intermittently sobbing, because we had no idea what we were doing. And everyone’s like, “Oh, newborns are easy.” That was not our experience. It really took the postpartum doula to help us sort things out. She suggested we did not sleep in the same room as him, so we put him in his nursery way down the hall, she suggested we alternate 6-hour shifts, which immediately guaranteed that we’d each get 6 hours of sleep a day, at minimum. Things got a lot easier after that. I know this might seem obvious to people on the outside but for us, we didn’t know what we were doing. And he was born a bit early, so our house was completely unready for an infant. So if you have the few hundred dollars and are planning to have a kid, consider a postpartum doula!
Aren’t adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) a major factor in suicide though? Child abuse and child neglect seem to have huge impacts on who attempts suicide.
I seem to recall you shared some of your story in the previous suicide-related thread. What you describe is unfortunately not unheard of, especially postpartum. Any and every vulnerability in mental health tends to rear its head in the onslaught of hormones in the first week after delivery. And what you describe about needing to give up your child is a very common theme in postpartum depressions. I can only imagine how horrible that must have been.
For me it was more the garden variety that came up after about three sleep-deprived months, I was mostly exhausted and constantly anxious. When my son wasn’t crying (which he didn’t do excessively thank God), I’d hallucinate baby cries. And I remember once when I was walking with him outside I kept having intrusive thoughts and images of him being hit by a car. Since I was already in my last year of my residency and had worked with peripartum depression patients I knew what was happening to me, but even so I was scared AF. The more insidious variant you have encountered is more rare but also more dangerous. Because it’s so hormonally driven and sudden in onset you’re already off the cliff before you know what’s happening and then you’re no longer able to think. Really nasty. Glad you made it through.
I make a point of sharing my experiences with new moms to counterbalance the pink cloud we should all be on but that’s rarely there. Caring for a newborn is exhausting and very demanding sometimes. And that’s just in the usual variety.
It never fails to astonish me how little there is in postpartum care in the US. In the Netherlands you get three months of paid maternity leave regardless, it’s state-mandated. In Scandinavia new moms get a year off. And we have at least a week of postpartum at-home care, provided for by the state.
Nathan Leopold is a case where someone who committed cold blooded and deliberate murder wound up using his time in prison in a positive and, based on that conduct, was eventually released and continued to contribute to society. Does that repair the damage he did? Hell, no - but it’s an example of someone reflecting on their actions and changing their ways, and being allowed some form of re-entry based on that. Of course, it took decades, which it should, but redemption is possible even if very rare.
Telling me I shouldn’t post in this thread because someone disagrees with my position IS telling me to STFU.
What I would do in regards to someone actually suicidal in front of me is very different than what’s happening in this thread. As @mjmartin said:
^ This.
Here’s an analogy: if someone with diabetes neglected their health to the point of it becoming an emergency I would not lecture them on diet or how they need to properly use their insulin even though I’d think they’d been irresponsible, I’d apply first aid and/or get medical help for them. At that point a lecture would be nothing but counter-productive, a different action is called for in that situation. Likewise, if someone expressed suicidal feelings when I was present I wouldn’t lecture them, I’d get help for them.
I don’t expect anyone to be a saint. We are all selfish at times, self-centered at times, make bad decisions, perform actions that can (and do) hurt other people. That doesn’t mean we’re bad people, it means we’re human. A thread on a message board is a fine place to discuss ethics and morality. A real-life crisis is not. You deal with the crisis without discussing the philosophical nuances.
Uh… WTF? Where is this coming from? What does this outburst have to do with the subject at hand?
I agree it’s not a normal conversation (I wasn’t aware that all conversations were required to be “normal”). My “sense” of being a victim? Again, you’re maintaining that the bystanders and those remaining after a suicide don’t have a right to acknowledge the pain they feel and the hurt done to them.
Sure, the person who killed themself probably has a level of pain I can’t imagine. But just because the person on the ER gurney next to me has a broken back doesn’t mean my broken arm is painless.
Funny how the whole “that first month after giving birth is wonderful!” myth was brought up - another instance where the real pain of something is downplayed, not talked about, dismissed. And look at the damage that can do.
One of the purposes of grief counseling is to help those remaining to deal with the pain of death - regardless of what causes that death. Anyone who does grief counseling will tell you that anger about death is very common regardless of cause of death. Part of that process is acknowledging how the survivor is actually feeling regardless of whether or not it fits a specific cultural narrative.
Yeah, that’s a myth.
Granted, I never had kids of my own, but I did stay with my sister after the birth of her first one (I was a second shift - mom had gone out first) and spent a “shift” each day taking care of the kid so mom could get some solid rest (dad had had to go back to work by then). Sure, newborns are “easy” in that you don’t have to chase them and they aren’t trying to disassemble the house or sneaking out with the car without permission, but they can be extremely demanding. They’re “easy” if you can hold them while they’re sleeping and hand them back to mom or dad when they start fussing, not when it’s 2 am and they’re screaming and you can’t figure out what’s wrong. Or even 2 pm and they’re screaming and you can’t figure out what’s wrong. Start adding in exhaustion and sleep deprivation… which is one of reasons I was there, to give my sister a bit of a break so she could rest up. No, it wasn’t like having my own but I was still dragging myself out of bed at times and changing poopy diapers half awake, walking a crying baby to try to soothe him, cleaning up vomit, and so on. Mom traveled and spent a few weeks with post-partum with both my sisters who had kids, not just visiting daily but living with them. Looking back, I think mom’s own experience with having kids led her to do that, so her daughters wouldn’t go through what she did. I suspect neither of them would have gotten as bad a mom did, but mom did talk sometimes about feeling alone and abandoned at times and not having the help she needed. She made sure her daughters had help after they had babies.
I wonder if sometimes new parents think they’ve been lied to. In a sense, they have. Our culture plays up the positives of babies and parenthood but wants to sweep the negatives under the rug and not discuss them. Then we wonder what the hell happened when new parents are overwhelmed.
Seems to me that’s yet another indication that we as a society doing a shit job of helping people with trauma and mental illness.
I lost a patient to suicide today. She was no longer in my care, but had been until three months ago. I get why she did it, and I don’t think anything could have been done to prevent this. However, it hurts. I just hope she’s in a place with less pain now. She drove me as her doctor and her family absolutely bonkers at times, still I hoped it wouldn’t have ended just now. She made preparations, ordered the right pills and didn’t jump in front of a train. So in my book she tried to reduce the damage. I still feel empty though. Sorry if this is a hijack, but I needed to share.
I’m so sorry.
I know four people who took their own lives. Three had terminal illnesses that they elected not to fight. IMHO they did the right thing, or at least they made a choice I can see myself making in their shoes. The fourth was a friend with acute mental illness. The “medical system” failed him miserably.
I’m sorry for your loss. 
Thanks everyone.
@Spice_Weasel I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your posts, especially the elegance in describing the account after your child was born. It really captures the extreme nature of your situation at the time.
As someone who also came from family of origin with horrific abuse, I know from personal experience that suicidal idealization is unfortunately far too common among people with PTSD. My mother attempted suicide a few times when I was late elementary school. One sister was taken to the ER with an overdose, a brother was also unsuccessful at least once.
For me, I didn’t think through the alternatives or options as deeply as you did. All I remember was the raw pain and the overwhelming need for relief. The intensity was such that the pain overshadowed all else. Fortunately, through specialized therapy for PTSD then things did get better for me and I haven’t had that level of intensity since then.
@Drsunflower1 , I’m sorry. That must be very difficult.
Second the comment on @Spice_Weasel. I’m grateful for you sharing, and you write much better than I ever will.
Thank you.
@TokyoBayer I’m sorry to hear that and glad you were able to get the help you needed. Trauma and ensuing depression/suicidality runs in a lot of families, and usually affects more than one member. Your experience is the kind of stuff that can span generations.
I have the same thing from my mother’s side; a lot of addiction and serious mood disorders and a transgenerational death wish. That has probably informed my choice to become a psychiatrist in a major way. I’ve managed to extricate myself somewhat by working with family constellations, that has at least made things clearer and made me realise that it’s not my task to make it stop, but rather accept it as is and trying to move past it. When it comes to suicide on the job there’s two things that come to mind. Unfortunately this isn’t the first, and through the years I’ve come to accept that this is the way my patients tend to die. Whereas a surgeon loses people to cancer or other deadly ailments, or a neurologist loses them to stroke or neurodegenerative disorders, psychiatric disorders tend to be deadly in the sense that they can lead to suicide. In the past nineteen years I’ve always had a kind of “hit list” in the back of my mind when it came to who among my patients was most likely to kill themselves. This particularly patient was on that list, because she had seen too much shit and was so limited in her options because of how her personality had developed that I didn’t really see a way out for her either. Plus she was in horrible physical pain, that she couldn’t be helped with because psychiatric illness made her distrustful and emotionally unstable and unable to follow up with any kind of treatment. Which made her situation untenable in the long run. What pains me most is the powerlessness, I guess. Thanks for your story and your support.
I’m sorry to hear about your loss, @Drsunflower1. Even if you view it as an occupational hazard/inevitable, the loss of someone you know and tried to help still hurts.
That’s kind. Thank you. It’s something you don’t really ever get used to, and I actually think that’s a good thing.