Posted: Oct 31, 2018 7:36 am
zulumoose wrote:I'd love to see some flesh put on this assertion, because this is the question before us. Is suicide ideation/attempt/completion necessarily a symptom of mental illness?
I would say it usually is, if you define severe depression as mental illness, which I don't.
It is helpful to put that label on it in a medical sense, but I think severe depression can be perfectly natural and not something to be treated as such, so the label is a bit of a poor fit in my view.
But aren't many illnesses, both mental and physical natural?
zulumoose wrote:
By undertaking the act you absent yourself from censure and leave others to clean up the splatter. Toilet training generally occurs earlier.
I hope this was intended differently to how it appears to me, which is a callous dismissal of suicidal people and a horrible misunderstanding of what their reality can be at the time.
When seriously considering suicide the rest of the world can be completely irrelevant, "others" can be just part of the reality that has rejected you, your ties to those you cared about can seem absolutely false and meaningless. Concern for those left behind would be a recognition of a future that does not exist in your reality. Don't make the mistake of believing that someone on the brink of suicide is thinking in a way that you would recognise and could relate to or judge. It is fantastically unhelpful and wrong to judge suicide as an act of selfishness or cowardice, since at the time those concepts can be completely meaningless.