Acceptable Suicide (by sarah)
A few days ago one of my favourite actors died, it was suicide and the press where all over it, as was social media and the conversations in the cafes and at the dinner tables and so on.
Reaction ranged from sad to angry to hurtfully belittling. The press predictably where not brilliant at presenting it as an illness rather than 'selfish idiot' or 'weak celeb' - mental health charities and supporters riled to show how it should be portrayed and where using it to highten awareness of various mental health issues and though I think that that is kind of noble it is also kind of using the mans death and I am not sure how that makes me feel - another exploitation of the situation as it were.
As things progressed a darkness within humanity emerged - newspapers are well aware of copycats imitating what they see in the news and therefore decided to put the method of death in big letters on their front pages. Then the trolling began, trolling here means an attack on social media. Robin William's daughter proceeded to receive vile comment after comment on Twitter resulting in her deleting the apps and things on her phone so she wouldn't have to deal with it at the moment. This behaviour is something that has been becoming progressively worse over the last few years and it is becoming a very real issue and one there are not brilliant ways of address at this point in time.
Now people have a right to think that the suicide was stupid or selfish, as everyone has their own head space that is theirs and you know it wouldn't be an issue if they spoke about it with their friends or on threads that were not directly targeted at a family member who is distraught as they are dealing with a loss.
Then more information starts to trickle out and it is revealed that he had Parkinson's - a horribly debilitating disease with a distressing decline. And that is when my skin really started to crawl over comments and such over the net and in the physical.
Suddenly it is OK that he killed himself - it was just self euthenasia and he is saving his family from the grief etc...
But erm... it is still suicide - he was still suffering from depression and mental anguish - weather it was brought on by a physical situation or a brain chemistry screw up is kind of irrelivant. In either case a pre-existing condition made him feel so small and lost and vunerable or terrible and burndenistic or confused and worried that he took his own life.
The issue of suicide is a difficult one, with children of suicide victims being more likely to follow suite and those surviving attempts often saying they were grateful to be saved - but how much of this is due to our cultural set up?
If we are going from the angle that self-euthenasia is acceptable but crying down the telephone and then downing a butt load of pills isn't then we need to look at what makes a suicide acceptable?
Now with medical stuff I am in a high risk category, I am a chronic pain patient and have been for over 10 yrs, I was young and being told there is nothing that can be done to take the pain away, to give you back the life you never quiet got to lead - well that is depressing. Chronic pain suffers often take their own lives, on the pain management cause I was on at least one of the people was there because they didn't want to do the same as their mother and leave their family devistated.
But one of the questions that then comes up is - is not the families grief then being selfish to the person who is in so much pain they want to go?
And here I think it is a time to say that emotional pain can be as if not more debilitating than physical - if you can ever truly separate the two - we are complex interlocking feedback systems and as such one affects the other.
The ancient greeks - I can't remember which flavour, had thought about this and had a system where you could commit suicide but you had to public state you wanted to do so and then wait a certain amount of time in a quiet contemplantive environment, if you still wished to go ahead after that then you were at liberty to. Of course this was open to abuse - such as being given the choice of suicide or family being ruined etc... but I think that kind of happens with everything to a certain extent when people are faffing with power play.
The other thing is how different is killing yourself due to not wanting to face a future of medical deteoration verses feeling you can't face the future with all it's heart ache? There is a thing here over the likely hood of things getting better - many people look at it and say 'ah yes but they can get meds to sort their heads out he didn't have a choice' but the thing is that the meds for mental health tend to have very bad side effects and they become less effective over time for the patient and conversly: medical research is being done into conditions like Parkinsons meaning that even for those suffering now there is hope that something will come up.
See how undifferent they actually are? Having a "physical" medical condition does not somehow make a suicide more acceptable, nor should there be such stigma associated with it. All that does is stop people who want help with the feelings that may lead to suicide. And that is before we factor in the religious beliefs of not going to heaven etc...
I wonder what would happen if we had 'the right to die'?
Fri 15th Aug 2014 1:25 pm 
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