Johnny Fact-Checker, on the loose again.
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Originally Posted by alnorth
People who kill themselves are not automatically insane. Depression is not insanity.
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Correct.
Quote:
Originally Posted by alnorth
Millions of people suffer depression, and almost none of them kill themselves.
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Technically correct, though a little harshly put. Depression is a major risk factor for suicide, and the suicide rates are something like 4 to 6 times greater for people who have it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by alnorth
If you kill yourself due to depression, you are probably an ego-driven idiot who cared about yourself more than your family.
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Incorrect. Even though it's not 'insanity' per se, it's a mental disorder, and when someone is suffering from it, they're not thinking correctly. Whether they're an ego-driven idiot or not doesn't enter into it.
[QUOTE=alnorth;8590999]If suicide was just random out of the blue crazy, we should be seeing wealthy and happily married people suddenly snapping at the same rate as everyone else, but they don't. Somehow, when you are handed a divorce or you are staring down the barrel of bankruptcy (like Seau), you tend to kill yourself a lot more often. Though insane people killing themselves does happen, that is not random insanity, that is ego-driven "if I can't have her/money, then I don't want to live", without much thought for family.[QUOTE]
Please remember there is conditional depression - I lost my job, my girlfriend left me, Christmas sucks, that sort of thing - and clinical depression, which has nothing to do with how well someone's life is going, and hits wealthy and happily married people at just the same rate as everyone else. To wit: Rod Steiger, who suffered so badly from it that he didn't get out of bed for years, until medical technology caught up with him.
Quote:
Originally Posted by alnorth
Automatically presuming all people who kill themselves were crazy, and we need to try to understand their pain and not come down on them seems like enabling to me. Many people who kill themselves want everyone to know how much of a tortured soul they were and react by sympathetically trying to understand them. If they knew instead that the reaction would be very negative, that after the shock and grief wears off we'd all remember them with anger as someone who was selfish, maybe they would think twice. If we incorrectly tarnish the memory of someone who was really crazy, so what? They are dead, we're not hurting them.
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Moving away from fact-checking now, I can kind of see your concern here. It stands to reason that there are people who will take advantage (consciously or sub-consciously) of the sympathy that depression gets, and it must be hard to get them to knock it off, or to see past it. Also, I can tell you without fail that there are people who pretend like they're going to kill themselves for the attention, which is vile and selfish. Mixed in with them, though, are people who are really suffering from a terrifying, ghostly disorder that you can't always see (unlike the first two kinds of people, they're generally not out for attention). So, it's really dangerous to just figure they should man up and get over it, because it could really push someone who serious has the big-time disorder, right over the edge.