chibamSenior Contributor
People Still Don't Sincerely Care About The Plight Of The Suicidal (TW: Suicide)
So I just watched this brief news/currant affairs segment about a mental health patient who recently committed suicide. And after all these years, the emphasis is still on the suicide, and not on the patient's suffering.
The segment was all about how her family had to go through all the death rigmarol, like ID-ing the body, and I'm not trying to deny the hardship that they go through in the wake of a suicide. But after all this time, people still don't really care about the suicidal person's suffering.
The "problem" that everybody's complaining about is that the suicidal person is dead.
The "lessons to be learned" that they were hinting at were all about creating more restrictive practices that are all geared towards making it more difficult for a suicidal person to end their life; not about doing a better job of making that person's life worth prolonging.
Nobody genuinely cares about how unspeakably agonizing a suicidal person's life is. The only thing anyone cares about is how to constrain them so securely that they can't possibly die, no matter how much they might want to. So long as the patient is alive, everything else is acceptable.
Nobody is really on our side, no matter how much they might insist otherwise. This is what it is to be truly alone.
I can't say much more because this forum is very skittish regarding the morality of suicide and suicide prevention. I've probably said too much as it is.
But if anyone of any influence does happen to see this - try, just for a little while, to considder that maybe, just maybe, the anguish of suicidal people might matter just a little more then your obsession with keeping them alive.