Well, that’s one this year so far then. 
Very interesting. As with the example of the runner/ “happy man” above that committed suicide and sent his whole family into despair, maybe it was best. Maybe it was best that he didn’t pretend to be happy anymore. Maybe sometimes a family has to be shaken into searching for happiness instead of having it handed over to them by a loved one who they THOUGHT was happy. May I quote the wise paradox “freedom isn’t free”. There is a silver lining to the cloud of depression that results from a suicide. It may be the very most difficult silver lining to find in life. But true freedom is the most expensive thing on earth. You just might find it in the silver lining of a loved one’s suicide. Just have some faith…
Are you going to tell me that just because someone pulls the trigger of a gun on themselves, they’re insane? What about people who work 8 hours a day at a job the truly hate? What about people who stay married to a spouse they do not love? What about a man who never learns to truly listen to what his friends have to say? What about a man who gets offended by his own mind and projects that on other people, hurting them infinitely? There are many tragedies WITHIN life itself that make me question whether the people in them are insane. Suicide is suicide. There’s NOTHING mentally wrong with it in itself…
I’m not sure. In ways I admire cultures where people are willing to die to fight for what they believe in, either in wars or as suicidal military actions (which includes suicide bombers, but also includes behavior like bombing raids over Germany in WW2) rather than face a life of humiliation and abuse but get to keep living. Suicide doesn’t really allow you to resist abuse. If anything people in power probably promote the idea of suicide since a suicidal person who takes their own life in their own home is better than someone who takes their rage and lack of fear of death, then externalizes it and becomes an insurgent who isn’t afraid to die. If the worst that happens due to your autocratic kleptocracy is people kill themselves, that is preferable to one where they are willing to die to fight for their rights (like bomber pilots over Germany in WW2 or the arab revolts right now).
So I don’t know if political leaders play a role in promoting anti-suicide behavior.
Mentally illness does not mean insane. It could mean a person’s suffering from an anxiety disorder, clinical depression, or some type of personality disorder. The OP isn’t talking about psychosis or a break from reality. Just any illness of the mind.
Some of the things you mentioned are in fact signs of mental illness. Like the last one. And I’d say that if killing yourself is the only way that you can see getting out of loveless marriage or coping with a job you hate, then there IS something wrong with you. It’s perfectly understandable that a person would be depressed in these situations while not meeting the criteria for clinical depression. But suicidal? And actually carrying it out? I do not think this would be normal behavior or even understandable behavior. And I say this as someone who thinks the idea that suicide is selfish is a load of crap.
I could see a teenager in deep despair (girl just broke up with him…everyone hates her on MySpace) doing something impulsively and killing themselves. But a healthy adult, one would presume, would not be so impulsive. They may feel in that moment of despair a burning desire to die. They may put themselves in a dangerous situation in response (like spending all night drinking at a bar and then driving home). But actually taking a gun and pulling the trigger, not by accident but intentionally? Just because a girl broke up with you? Or you lost your job? If you are willing to off yourself because of not mundane but not end-of-the-world stressors like these, then it seems to me you probably have a hard time coping with a lot of problems. This would be a sign of mental illness. Or at least high neuroticism (which isn’t a clinical term, I know).
With a few exceptions*, I’m having a hard time thinking of any non-health related circumstance where suicide would not be symptomatic of a mind gone wrong. We live in a world where people are brutally raped every day, where people are deaf and blind and unable to do much for anyone, where people have to work all day just to buy a loaf of bread, and yet these people do not commit suicide. A loveless marriage sounds like heaven compared to these things. I’m sure it sucks, but I don’t think it would rate very high on the list of reasons why people kill themselves. But living with excruciating chronic pain or watching your body and mind waste away? Yeah, I could see suicide being rational in such circumstances.
*those exceptions would be something like receiving very traumatic news, like finding out your whole family has died in a plane crush. Or suffering from extreme guilt, such as killing your best friend while hunting.
No; but if enough people kill themselves, you’ll run low on people to exploit.
Yes, they and religious leaders do; that’s why there are actual laws and religious commands against suicide.
If someone commits suicide because they suffer from some physical malady that leaves them in constant pain, not many people would harshly judge that person’s actions. That is suicide as a result of physical illness. Now conversely, someone who’s pain is psychological or internal in the sense of “self” and commits suicide because they simply cannot endure the pain, even though both suicides are committed as a last-ditch way to escape their respective pains’, that suicide is much more likely to be harshly judged. That is suicide from mental illness. I think it’s just a matter of redefining or de-stigmatizing what the term “mental illness” emcompasses. So, in my admittedly ignorant opinion, yes, someone who commits suicide is inherently suffering from some mental illness (absent a physical component).
I recall a cartoon I once saw in NatLamp: In an office with a “SUICIDE COUNSELING CENTER” sign, a woman is sitting with her head on a desk while a smiling man in a suit talks to her, fingers steepled. Caption: “Although most people prefer the security of guns, Ms. Martin, I would recommend pills in your case.”
Let’s turn it around. What makes people live?
Living is not a passive act for us. You have to work to provide for yourself, while at the same time cope with the various problems that life throws at you. It takes confidence, positivity.
You have to have some reasonable expectation of at least some good things happening in the future.
If you lose this confidence / positivity it’s very hard to get it back, but easy for things to get much worse.
For a minority of people it gets to the stage of contemplating suicide. But I suspect that the majority of people have the potential to get to that stage.
Interesting. I agree. Life itself pretty crazy when you think about it. We’re moving at the speed of light through space, with black holes that could engulf our entire hope of existence, and there is no God to save us from this as well as millions of other types of total and perfect destruction. Yet we still live. Yep, that is pretty clearly a sign of mental instability… I agree…
Well said. Life is not a given. If you have no reason to live, then you have no reason to live. It’s pretty simple. And to turn this whole thread around, I consider people mentally ill if they pretend to have something to live for when they don’t. Of course that can’t last forever, but to even pretend for a day is pretty radically ill. Like I said before, if you have nothing to live for, you have nothing to live for…
Labeling behavior a “mental illness” is more a value judgment than an objective description of reality. (Remember when homosexuality was considered a mental illness?)
Should suicide be considered proof of mental illness for the purpose of making treatments available to people who wish to eliminate their suicidal thoughts or behaviors? Yes.
Should suicide be considered proof of mental illness as a justification for forcibly preventing someone from carrying out their wishes regarding their own life? No.
Popularity isn’t the same as rationality. Why should anyone be obliged to live with rape / disability / poverty just because others have chosen to? And why make an exception for chronic pain, when countless people suffer through that without killing themselves?
Suicide is rational when the benefits of life are outweighed by its costs. Since we all have our own values and priorities in life, no one can judge for someone else which way the balance tilts. Having a different set of priorities than others have does not imply a “mind gone wrong”.
You sound like an absolute relativist, believing that we can’t define or judge ANYTHING as ANYTHING because EVERYTHING is relative.
I find this a pretty lame and lazy way of thinking about the world. Sure, I’m not in any place to tell a guy he shouldn’t commit suicide because his best girl dumped him. His death doesn’t affect me, and I’m sure as hell will not be responsible for cheering him up and makING his life worth living. However, I am perfectly free to judge his wisdom based on what I do know about him and hypothesize why he made the decision he made.
I don’t feel it very often, but I always feel angry when I want to commit suicide. Why? Because I feel it’s not fair that so many people would judge me harshly without trying to walk in my shoes; I’m supposed to weigh their feelings more heavily than my own for the rest of my life, regardless how much my brain hurts. But just because I personally believe it’s fair to do whatever I want to do with my own life, that doesn’t mean my choices can’t be due to irrational thought processes or emotions that are out of control.
I can think of another circumstance where suicide would not be inherent of mental illness. I’d probably try my hardest to kill myself if I was kidnapped and physically tortured for years and years, with no hope of ever being released.
I’m not, generally. But the concept of mental illness is quite a bit hazier than, say, physical illness. It’s also more dangerous since the “mentally ill” label can be used as an excuse for overriding a person’s autonomy.
I do think the widespread idea that suicidal people are necessarily mentally ill is more a product of social disapproval of suicide than of any well thought out reasoning as to what should be considered mental illness.
I’ve felt exactly the same way.
Seems to me your argument (and that of vast hordes of other similarly-minded people, don’t get me wrong) devolves here into “I think it is mentally ill of someone to commit suicide for reasons other than reasons I might tend to acknowledge as rational”.
Frankly, I don’t see what utilitarian purpose is served by labeling someone mentally ill here. Why not just say “I don’t understand this person’s rationale for this behavior” and leave it at that?
Because there actually is a strong overlap between “suicide” and “mental illness”. Saying so doesn’t automatically label ALL suicides as the product of mental illness, but given there is a correlation, when there is a suicide attempt a mental health screening is indicated so treatment may be attempted.
As for a post-mortem screening - some people would find the notion "my loved one killed him/herself due to illness" more comforting than some of the alternatives
I don’t really ascribe to the construct “mentally ill”.
There appear to be states of mind and emotion that people end up in from time to time that are generally (albeit not universally) considered unfortunate, unpleasant, and undesirable.
There is a widespread assumption that events, phenomena, situations, etc, in a person’s life are responsible (entirely or in part) for them ending up on these states of mind/emotion.
There is, in contrast to that model, a medical model of mental illness, widely touted by the psychiatric profession, by the pharmaceutical companies, by the Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and other parties, that attribute those states of mind / emotion to misbehaviors of the brain on a biological level, whether it be congenital-structural or the ever-popular “chemical imbalances in the brain”. Implicitly or explicitly, these are assumed to be other than epiphenomena of events and situations and etc in the person’s life. (That is to say, it is a part of typical treatment and intervention as well as a component of what is actively and specifically asserted about the mentally ill that their thoughts and emotions are not things that make sense in light of whatever may have happened to them, or be happening to them, but are rather specifically and directly caused by brain malfunctions).
It is the latter explanatory model that currently holds primary definition for the term “mentally ill”.
However, there exist no mechanisms for determining that a given suicidal person (or non-suicidal person for that matter) has any such condition, and for any such behavior and correlated state of mind / emotion there is no mechanism for ruling out the possibility that it is caused by events, phenomena, situations etc in that person’s life. Social and contextual, in other words, at least as primary causes, as opposed to biological.
It does seem reasonable to posit some kind of interaction between biological predispositions and contextual factors. Be that as it may, the party line from those who diagnose and act upon mental illnesses, especially those impose treatment without consent, is that mental illness needs to be and always should be understood as a biological condition of the brain and not a symptom of one’s context, so I consider it to be their term and to be embued with their meaning.
Back to suicide. Is suicide (attempt) inherent proof of mental illness as that term is used in this more narrow sense? There is no easy way to know, in any given case, that it is. And the question is usually being asked in the specific sense of “is this person, who is obviously a danger to him or herself insofar as they’re trying to close out their life-account, etc, acting this way due to faulty brain functioning, such that they cannot be held responsible for their own decisions? should we intervene and coercively prevent them from acting in this fashion?”
You do not have to believe in “mental illness” either in general or in the specific case of a specific person in order to justify some level of intervention when someone is attempting suicide. Judi Chamberlin herself once said, “I believe you may have a right to commit suicide; you do not have a right to commit suicide in my living room”.
But reciprocally I think any fully human being has the right to make the personal decision to check out, to decide not to be (any more). If they seek this outcome privately and do so in such a way that it appears they have thought it out and accept the consequences of their actions, people should be allowed to commit suicide without interference as long as they don’t create an unnecessary amount of public disturbance or public health risk in so doing.
But do psychiatrists *ever *evaluate suicidal people as mentally healthy? It seems more likely that *anyone *who expresses suicidal intentions is certain to be shoehorned into some diagnosis of mental illness, by whatever means necessary.
The only possible exception is for the terminally ill, and the thinking behind that exception is nothing more rigorous than “If I were very sick I might want to kill myself, therefore I’m not going to label very sick people who want to kill themselves as mentally ill.”
I have less of a problem with the concept of mental illness than with what it’s used for.
Labeling certain unpleasant mental states “mental illness” is in some ways just a mechanism for society to facilitate the application of resources to helping people out of those states, make insurance funds available to pay for treatment, and such.
It’s also a way of saying that we acknowledge that people don’t bring these states upon themselves, and that we aren’t casting moral judgments on them. This way, we can distinguish someone who is too depressed to get out of bed from someone who’s just a lazy slacker.
It’s when the mentally ill label is used to deny people’s right to self-determination that it becomes problematic.
As I’ve mentioned at least once in this thread, I am not making a value judgment regarding suicide. I have no problem with it.
I’m simply asking questions*:
- Does suicide fall within the normal range of human behaviors, or is it “aberrant”?
- Is aberrant behavior an indicator of mental illness?
*not in a “where’s the birth certificate?” way. I don’t have suspicions one way or the other.
[QUOTE=Isabel8]
It’s when the mentally ill label is used to deny people’s right to self-determination that it becomes problematic.
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Absolutely. That’s the core issue for me too.
[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
- Does suicide fall within the normal range of human behaviors, or is it “aberrant”?
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It’s a bit unusual but not spectacularly so. I suspect most people will consider it in a hypothetical way at some point in their life. Seriously entertaining it as a plan is probably less common and acting on it even less common.
No. Aberrant behavior is an indicator of being other than normal in some respect, which covers a really huge swath of possibilities. Even if we limit ourselves to the pathological, there are many ailments that can generate aberrant behavior that are not thought of as “mental illness”.