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Entertaining rant, as always. Also a juvenile preoccupation with aesthetics and going out in a blaze of glory as if everyone in the world should aspire to be a Shonen manga character like you do, as always.
I find some germs of agreement in your disgust with state-sanctioned suicide and asking someone else to do the job for you. That said, I wonder if you've ever known any genuinely suicidally depressed people? Your uncharitable projection of a pathetic need for validation and someone to "rescue" them may be true for some of the people seeking this last resort, but I would guess that many of them really, truly are in so much pain that dying seems like the only escape from an existence of undending, hopeless misery. Whether they are entirely rational (some are, some aren't) and whether there might be some cure for them (in some cases there is not) is beside the point. They really are, subjectively, suffering as much as someone with locked-in syndrome or constant physical pain.
There are a number of good arguments for requiring that people "do it themselves," but "don't be a pussy!" isn't one of them, and neither is "make it awesome." These people aren't you. They don't care about whether they make a grand statement or go out in a blaze of glory. This is like demanding that someone who doesn't believe in or care about God say a prayer before dying. Your aesthetics are not theirs, nor should your aesthetics shape public policy. Go ahead and beat your chest and use every muscle in your face to produce a sneer of epic proportions, they don't care because they are so depressed that they don't care to the nth degree. Fortunately I have never suffered from suicidal depression but I know enough people who have that I can easily imagine the response to one of them finally taking this step of asking for state assistance, and KulakRevolt sneering at them that they're pathetic pussies. Their response will be, quite simply, "Yes, and?"
From a somewhat more rational perspective, as others have pointed out, the usual suicide methods have a high enough failure rate, with the possibility of winding up not dead but maimed, paralyzed, or brain-dead, inflicting further suffering on both yourself and your loved ones, that it's not unreasonable for someone who lacks your go-jump-in-a-volcano aesthetic to prefer a surer, safer method. And the more spectacular methods (jumping in a volcano, walking off an ice flow, swimming with great whites) similarly seem to be unreliable and/or gruesome. (Ironically enough, while suicidally depressed people generally care not at all about their own lives, they do often still care about the people they will leave behind, the people who will have to clean up the mess they make, etc., which is often the only small deterrent that does keep them from doing it themselves.)
How much of the cure to an inability to cope with pain in general really is just someone's attitude? If someone is enough of a Life extremist to say to the proposal of a fate worse than death "bring it on!" (as I saw Jordan Peterson do on Lex Fridman's podcast once) they can take satisfaction in meeting with whatever comes next. It's also not even something that requires expending any effort as the real cornering that would be most difficult for any of us to face is being stuck in the present moment exactly as it is. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. This is why religion and philosophy are important even when they're not skeptically empirical. Civilisation is an invention of the human mind to regulate its emotions and all experiences are just different framings of the same hard problem of being.
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Interestingly, Yukio Mishima's suicide(I think what Kulak was referencing) was terribly botched.
Not only did his speech to the garrison at Setagaya go largely unheard (he had a commandant hostage at the SDF barracks in hopes that this would ensure he was given an audience), but his actual seppuku went badly awry.
Of the two of his tatenokai members who served as his kaishakunin (i.e. the grim one tasked with hacking off the head of the suicide after he has disemboweled himself--and I say he because although women did commit ritual suicide, for them the acceptable means was jamming a blade into their throat), managed to actually sever his head.
The first one (Morita) missed, hacking Mishima in the back multiple times, and the other (chibi Koga) had to swing more than once.
An account in more detail can be found in the book The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima
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How tragic and telling that your first revolted instinct concerning glory is "ew, anime". No appreciation for those who rage against the dying of the light? Nothing in you admires the bold Hound of Cullan, who tied himself to a stone that he might die on his feet?
I've seen you use "immature" as a slight toward others multiple times. Perhaps your inability to understand this facet of the human experience in adult terms shows that you still need to grow. It is not childish to value how you leave this world.
Of course nothing I wrote suggested that. This is a basic reading comprehension fail starting from the first sentence, if I actually believed you misunderstood me.
But you're just reaching for sticks and stones you think will sting, and while I'm more bemused than annoyed with your obsession, you need to stop. Making a personal cause out of antagonizing people you don't like is not acceptable, whether your obsession is with a mod or not.
What you wrote did indeed say that. Your abuse of the red hat is noted, but as I'm capable of wiping my own ass power tripping jannies don't intimidate me. Fuck off with that nonsense.
You're free to appeal to Zorba if you think I am abusing my red hat, but "fuck off with that nonsense" gets you a 3-day timeout since you've already accumulated a number of warnings and have been consistent in your messaging that you have no intention of taking heed.
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There's really no way to know this from outside of that person's perspective. Depression is often characterized by depressive delusions. I see no reason to take them at their word that they are suffering any more than we should take them at their word that the universe is a dismal joke.
I also don't accept that being really sad all the time is nearly as bad as being in agonizing pain.
Obviously no one truly knows what someone else is feeling. But if you think major depression is just "being sad all the time," you have probably not known someone who dealt with major depression. The fact that it's all in their head (literally) does not mean the suffering isn't real.
True, but it also doesn't mean the suffering is real, or at least that it is comparable to living with actual chronic pain.
Clearly the suffering is real unless you believe they are outright lying. As for whether it's comparable, what's the difference between telling someone living with chronic pain "it's not that bad" and telling someone with depression "it's not that bad"? How do you ajudge that someone with depression isn't "really" suffering as much as someone in chronic physical pain? It's not as if chronic physical pain is any more objectively measurable outside the head of the person suffering it. (Hence skepticism about things like fibromyalgia.)
Most of us have no trouble believing in physical pain because we've all experienced it, but if we haven't experienced mental anguish like chronic depression, it's easy to think "They're just sad all the time, that's not comparable to real pain."
I do not think people who claim to suffer from depression are any less reliable reporters of their own subjective experiences than people claiming to suffer from physical pain. In both cases, there are certainly people who exaggerate their suffering or for whom the pain is literally "all in their head," but the fact that the suffering may come from something other than stimulation of pain nerves doesn't make it less real.
No, there's a third possibility, which is that they're sincere but deluded. Which we know is the case on many other axes, since depressive delusions arrive in the box with depression.
There's also a mechanism that makes sense. Nerves send a pain signal to the brain, and brains translate that signal into the qualia of pain. Pain that originates within the brain is much harder to understand. Dysfunctions of the brain present a malfunctioning mind, as opposed to a properly functioning mind responding to a malfunctioning body. If the mind is compromised, we have every reason to treat its claims with suspicion.
I'm not sure there is a meaningful difference between "You are experiencing psychological pain" and "You suffer from a delusion that you are experiencing psychological pain."
I'm not saying we should encourage people with depression to kill themselves, obviously. Just that if you accept that some people experience so much suffering that suicide is a rational option, I don't think you can draw a hard line between "people suffering from physical pain" and "people suffering from psychological pain" and say the suffering of the former is real but the suffering of the latter is not.
OK, here's my effortpost. I have a few minutes, and I haven't given this topic the treatment it deserves.
Partly because I follow Andrew Sullivan and Chris Rufo on Twitter, I've seen a lot of detransitioner stories. These are usually natal women who transitioned to become boys in their adolescence, and then ended up regretting it. What strikes me about it is how many of them report having been depressed, having been introduced to the world of transgender ideology through the usual very online spaces, and then seizing onto it for three specific reasons: (1) because gender dysphoria is elastic enough to be a plausible cause of their unhappiness, (2) because it is a salient transgressive ideology and therefore permits them to scapegoat their families and culture for their misery, and (3) because transitioning is a big project that they can start one step at a time and work slowly toward along a well-lighted path, with social support and a feeling of accomplishment at each step along the way.
There has been a boom in adolescent girls transitioning, and this is a population known for booms in various sociogenic mental health illnesses: eating disorders, self harm, even sociogenic Tourettes, the last of which pretty squarely indicates its sociogenic fingerprints.
Now, many of these sociogenic illnesses are no joke. Eating disorders, self harm, and medically assisted gender transition have potential lifelong consequences. But the Tourettes thing! The reports indicate that somehow its sufferers get "stuck" in their sociogenic Tourettes -- who can fathom what that feels like "from the inside," but it is a clear case of girls suffering from some kind of delusion, where neurology conclusively rules out the usual Tourettes etiology, where they nonetheless insist they are unable to stop their tics even while they protest that they wish they could. There is no known neurological basis for their disorder, but they swear they are unable to stop their tics. Do you believe them? It's hard for me to really commit to a clear yes or no on that question. The best I can say is that there is a real disorder there, but it's hard to know where the disorder stops and the mind starts. Probably the self and the behavior, via the borrowed identity that the behavior is premised upon, have become conjoined. It isn't a meaningful question to ask whether they are capable of stopping, because doing so assumes the distinct identity of a rational mind that can observe the behavior from outside of it, in the way that someone with a broken arm can observe the source of the pain -- or even that someone with classical Tourettes can observe the source of the errant neurological signals, because they show up on the relevant diagnostic tests. I think there's an analogy to depression here, a meaningful analogy which at least requires us to raise an eyebrow to any sort of confident equivalency between depressive misery and physical pain. How unlike do we think they are, really? Is a clinically depressed person more or less able to get out of bed, shower, and have a productive day than a sufferer of sociogenic Tourettes is to stop exhibiting tics? Intuitively they seem to be in a similar category.
Anyway, imagine that we broadly accept the concept of medically assisted suicide as a treatment for severe depression. We'll put in lots of checks and balances, lots of consultations, require doctors to line up and swear on their souls that there's no alternative: pick your policy suite. What occurs to me is that we started with the same policy suite of checks and balances to avoid premature transgender HRT and surgery. And those checks and balances weren't enough. Arguably the checks and balances contributed to the problem, in the sense that they engendered online spaces dedicated to guiding people through the process, and presented a neat and exciting problem for depressive people looking for social affirmation and a sense of accomplishment in breaking down a big challenge into bite sized chunks and overcoming them step by step.
So whatever procedural safeguards you set up around medically assisted suicide for mental illness, as soon as that pathway is open legally, a subculture will spring up to guide people through it. They will study the criteria and share stories about meeting or not meeting the criteria, about their experience with this doctor or that, which will cumulatively provide a series of beacons for passing through all of the checkpoints that you've established. It will become a project for exactly the population of adolescent girls who are currently transitioning.
And the worst part is that these girls, the ones who fall prey to sociogenic Tourettes, sociogenic transgenderism, sociogenic eating disorders and sociogenic self-harm behaviors -- they usually grow out if it if they can be kept safe for a few years. They are usually fine in the long run! So the result of legally assisted suicide for depressed people, no matter how hard you try to prevent it, will be a lot of dead girls who would have grown up to be healthy and well adjusted women, and a lot of bereaved families who could perhaps be forgiven for believing that society murdered their little girl.
What we need to do, IMO, is to find alternative ways for girls in this group to try on some new and transgressive identity that does not cause lasting harm. Bring back the goth subculture. Have them try out being a lesbian. Let them practice witchcraft, or voodoo, or satan-worship. Maybe try being a Christian to rebel against particularly new-age parents who can't be shocked by the old ways: have them sneak out to attend church when they're supposed to be at volleyball practice, furtively study a bunch of catechisms, discreetly get baptized, and have their shocking and tearful coming-out announcement to their parents. The trick will be in setting up the subculture and making sure that it all feels properly transgressive. Maybe these Tourettes influencers on Tiktok are the answer to all of these problems, and by boosting their signal we'll be able to crowd out all of the other avenues of harm. But for fuck's sake, don't help them kill themselves.
grouping tiktok tourettes, which is more like 'an emo phase', and being trans together in the 'they usually grow out group' is justified how? Your twitter feed evidence is selected for detransitioners, because they're the best way to make being anti-trans seem like a progressive 'saving the vulnerable girls' narrative as opposed to right-wing.
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I appreciate the effortpost, but I don't think we're really disagreeing about the same thing.
I'm not arguing we should accept everyone's self-evaluation of their internal mental state at face value, and I am ambivalent about allowing state-assisted suicide under any circumstances. All your concerns about the failure modes of the system, even with supposedly rigorous safeguards and checkboxes, are valid. As are the concerns about the mental health of adolescent girls in particular.
All I am saying is that, "all in their heads" or not, "social contagion" or not, some psychological conditions are, for the sufferer, as "real" as anything we can definitively trace to a biological origin. I say this as someone who knows (multiple) people with severe, sometimes crippling depression. I do not think they are faking, I do not think their condition would be fixed by some good therapy and hitting the gym, and it's kind of dismissive to say their suffering isn't real. Because I know these people, I would absolutely oppose any move towards giving them an Easy Button to kill themselves with the state's help. But at the same time, not being in their heads (but believing what they say about their own experience), I don't buy the argument that what they feel can't be compared to physical pain. It doesn't really matter if it's 100% psychological and they just need to go outside, or if there is a pill that would help them, it's still as real as any other pain. To the degree that the comparison to teenage girls catching Tourette's from social media is relevant, it's kind of like saying those girls don't really have uncontrollable tics that make them miserable and which they wish they could stop. Are some of them totally faking, and they really could stop any time they want to? Maybe, but I think most of them are suffering as much as someone with real Tourette's Syndrome.
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This makes a lot of sense. People with major depression probably lack the will/motivation to come up with elaborate ways to end their lives. They want it over quick.
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The line from The Wizard of Lies about a French fund manager who invested with Madoff who carefully positioned a trash can to protect his Persian rug before slitting his wrist at his desk has always stuck with me as somehow admirable.
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