5 ms·

Though I'm still on the fence about the validity of the comparison, an argument that I've seen online regarding these stats is that it echoes similar trends in

Though I'm still on the fence about the validity of the comparison, an argument that I've seen online regarding these stats is that it echoes similar trends in addiction and suicide that manifested in post-USSR Russia, which were arguably driven by an increase in general despair and decline in quality of life. Here's an interesting qualitative description of the phenomenon: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/sep/02/dying-russians/ http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/sep/02/dying-russi... Now, back to the contemporary statistics: the correlation between increased mortality and socioeconomic groups 'hardest-hit' by recent economic concerns (globalization, the recession, and income inequality) seems quite clear, but I'm wondering if the correlation with mortality associated with drug poisoning would hold true if the same information were collected about a country with a less dysfunctional approach to narcotics and addiction management. I have a hunch that it wouldn't.

mbrutsch 11y ago
> an increase in general despair and decline in quality of life. Yet in our own country, suicide is treated as a "mental illness", and rarely does anyone acknowledge the circumstances which make suicide the rational option.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  Please don't call suicide a rational option. One can argue that oppression and malaise are driving people to despair. It's another argument entirely to say that wasting a life makes sense.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Assisted suicide is regarded as a human right by some. There are good rational arguments for that. Lets not be too PC to have the conversation.
    - skwirl 11y ago
      I didn't get the impression that mbrutsch was referring to assisted suicide. Check out the quoted line. He/she was referring to suicide as the rational option for "an increase in general despair and decline in quality of life."
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Ok, but same response. Folks' lives are their own to keep or 'throw away'.
        skwirl 11y ago
        A society that treats suicide as a rational way to treat mental illness is not a society I want to have anything to do with.
        icegreentea 11y ago
        I think the original point was that suicide is not always a sign of mental illness.
        Karunamon 11y ago
        Guess it depends on how you define mental illness- humans have a very strong biological drive to survive.. there's an argument to be made that a thought pattern that contradicts that very basic need is aberrant.
        gknoy 11y ago
        Sir Terry Pratchett decided that he'd rather die while able to make the decision, rather than letting his mind be destroyed by Alzheimer's. (Granted, his passing was natural, but he campaigned eloquently for the right to make such a choice.) I also knew someone who suffered great pain on a daily basis, and I have a hard time considering his suicide irrational. I knew a guy (a friend of a friend) who, through foolishness in his youth, ruptured three of his spinal discs, and had damaged two other ones. He was in constant excruciating pain. In the trailing decade of his life, he could not get sufficient pain relief to hold a job, could not get/afford treatment because of that, and basically was in a pain-filled hell, as he put it. At some point, after he'd been in near-constant excruciating pain for twenty years, he decided he no longer wanted to live. I don't think either of these men were mentally ill, or making irrational choices.
  - hitekker 11y ago
    I don't believe "rational" should be conflated with "ideal." Some people have pain inflicted upon them for longer and harder than their tolerance for pain allows. It is not irrational for those poor souls, if all other possible options have been exhausted, to consider and then execute suicide. In my mind, the people who chose to jump out of windows of the Twin Towers, instead of being engulfed by rapidly encroaching flames, made the only rational choice available at the time.
    - ParadigmBlender 11y ago
      > ...chose to jump out of windows of the Twin Towers, instead of being engulfed by rapidly encroaching flames... This stopped me in my tracks. Still not sure what I would have done but I would think I would try to find a way down. Now if I knew there was no way out...
  - bcabs 11y ago
    I think the point of mbrutsch's comment is that part of why mental health is so terrible in the US is that we do a terrible job empathizing with people who suffer from it. Instead of seeing the internal logic of suicide, we force ourselves into a naive optimism. It's the same prudishness that people have with respect to sex. To engage and promote mental health, it is better to try and see where people are coming from. Admitting that it is a rational option is not necessarily an endorsement. If you think it is, you need to reevaluate why you believe that all things rational are identical with all things good.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - fredkbloggs 11y ago
      > part of why mental health is so terrible in the US is that we do a terrible job empathizing with people who suffer from it This isn't just a US problem, though it may be worse there in some ways. There's also the problem that "mental health" is not well understood scientifically, yet the medical community acts as though it were. You can thumb through the DSM V and find countless seemingly well-defined "diseases" described using the language of science, yet for few is any underlying cause known and very often the "symptoms" are vague and useless for differential diagnosis. Ultimately all of this is defined by a group of people who have a particular agenda that does not necessarily serve the rights and best interests of the individual being diagnosed as potentially "ill". That does not mean there is no such thing as a disease of the brain or body that affects behavior, only that anyone who tells you they know what behavior is a sign of disease and what is not, or of which disease it is a sign, or the cause of that disease, much less a proper course of treatment, is usually at best guessing and at worst lying. The psychology and psychiatry communities are roughly where the rest of medicine was in the early 19th century: deeply paternalistic researchers with impressive titles and great big books full of fancy language that amounts to little more than guesswork and superstition, who are nonetheless at least trying to pursue difficult knowledge in what they best understand to be a scientific manner, and a much larger body of clinical practitioners who are for the most part little better than self-serving quacks. Until that changes in deep and fundamental ways, I'm not ready to condemn anyone to forced treatment, nor to criticize any self-treatment short of criminal injury to others. Medicine couldn't save you from TB in the 19th century (too often, it still cannot), and it may well be that neither can it save you from addiction or myriad other brain diseases today. The solution to that was and is the scientific pursuit of knowledge for the future, not the mockery or damnation of those who decline the usually ineffective (or "heroic", or otherwise horrifying) treatments on offer at the time. > To engage and promote mental health, it is better to try and see where people are coming from. Admitting that it is a rational option is not necessarily an endorsement. If you think it is, you need to reevaluate why you believe that all things rational are identical with all things good. Very true. Moreover, people are far too quick to criticize others' decisions as irrational when the other person's value system differs from the critic's. Very often the choices being made are rational in the context of the subject's value system, but the critic cannot or will not understand or accept that the subject does not share his or her values (or indeed that multiple value systems are possible), and so criticizes their choices under their own and concludes that they are irrational. A declaration that someone is irrational says a great deal about the critic but rarely anything much about the subject. Getting past this block is perhaps the most important aspect of useful empathy.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Suicide can be a rational option, in the face of certain agony followed by death. The vast majority of suicides don't qualify, but we shouldn't say it's always irrational any more than we should say it's always rational.
- drumdance 11y ago
  It can be a rational options, but for most I'd bet it it's irrational. People are irrational about a lot of things, so I don't see why suicide is exempt. For the rest of the cases I think of suicide as the ultimate result of mental illness. When someone with cancer dies, we say cancer killed them. When someone dies of suicide, for most cases it was mental illness that killed them.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Your post is why campaigners refer to assisted dying or euthanasia, to create some distance between that and suicide. Because suicide is mostly a symptom of mental ill health - although sometimes the person isn't in contact with services and doesn't have a diagnosis.

mbrutsch 11y ago

> an increase in general despair and decline in quality of life. Yet in our own country, suicide is treated as a "mental illness", and rarely does anyone acknowledge the circumstances which make suicide the rational option.

humanrebar 11y ago
Please don't call suicide a rational option. One can argue that oppression and malaise are driving people to despair. It's another argument entirely to say that wasting a life makes sense.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Assisted suicide is regarded as a human right by some. There are good rational arguments for that. Lets not be too PC to have the conversation.
  - skwirl 11y ago
    I didn't get the impression that mbrutsch was referring to assisted suicide. Check out the quoted line. He/she was referring to suicide as the rational option for "an increase in general despair and decline in quality of life."
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Ok, but same response. Folks' lives are their own to keep or 'throw away'.
      - skwirl 11y ago
        A society that treats suicide as a rational way to treat mental illness is not a society I want to have anything to do with.
        icegreentea 11y ago
        I think the original point was that suicide is not always a sign of mental illness.
        Karunamon 11y ago
        Guess it depends on how you define mental illness- humans have a very strong biological drive to survive.. there's an argument to be made that a thought pattern that contradicts that very basic need is aberrant.
        gknoy 11y ago
        Sir Terry Pratchett decided that he'd rather die while able to make the decision, rather than letting his mind be destroyed by Alzheimer's. (Granted, his passing was natural, but he campaigned eloquently for the right to make such a choice.) I also knew someone who suffered great pain on a daily basis, and I have a hard time considering his suicide irrational. I knew a guy (a friend of a friend) who, through foolishness in his youth, ruptured three of his spinal discs, and had damaged two other ones. He was in constant excruciating pain. In the trailing decade of his life, he could not get sufficient pain relief to hold a job, could not get/afford treatment because of that, and basically was in a pain-filled hell, as he put it. At some point, after he'd been in near-constant excruciating pain for twenty years, he decided he no longer wanted to live. I don't think either of these men were mentally ill, or making irrational choices.
- hitekker 11y ago
  I don't believe "rational" should be conflated with "ideal." Some people have pain inflicted upon them for longer and harder than their tolerance for pain allows. It is not irrational for those poor souls, if all other possible options have been exhausted, to consider and then execute suicide. In my mind, the people who chose to jump out of windows of the Twin Towers, instead of being engulfed by rapidly encroaching flames, made the only rational choice available at the time.
  - ParadigmBlender 11y ago
    > ...chose to jump out of windows of the Twin Towers, instead of being engulfed by rapidly encroaching flames... This stopped me in my tracks. Still not sure what I would have done but I would think I would try to find a way down. Now if I knew there was no way out...
- bcabs 11y ago
  I think the point of mbrutsch's comment is that part of why mental health is so terrible in the US is that we do a terrible job empathizing with people who suffer from it. Instead of seeing the internal logic of suicide, we force ourselves into a naive optimism. It's the same prudishness that people have with respect to sex. To engage and promote mental health, it is better to try and see where people are coming from. Admitting that it is a rational option is not necessarily an endorsement. If you think it is, you need to reevaluate why you believe that all things rational are identical with all things good.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - fredkbloggs 11y ago
    > part of why mental health is so terrible in the US is that we do a terrible job empathizing with people who suffer from it This isn't just a US problem, though it may be worse there in some ways. There's also the problem that "mental health" is not well understood scientifically, yet the medical community acts as though it were. You can thumb through the DSM V and find countless seemingly well-defined "diseases" described using the language of science, yet for few is any underlying cause known and very often the "symptoms" are vague and useless for differential diagnosis. Ultimately all of this is defined by a group of people who have a particular agenda that does not necessarily serve the rights and best interests of the individual being diagnosed as potentially "ill". That does not mean there is no such thing as a disease of the brain or body that affects behavior, only that anyone who tells you they know what behavior is a sign of disease and what is not, or of which disease it is a sign, or the cause of that disease, much less a proper course of treatment, is usually at best guessing and at worst lying. The psychology and psychiatry communities are roughly where the rest of medicine was in the early 19th century: deeply paternalistic researchers with impressive titles and great big books full of fancy language that amounts to little more than guesswork and superstition, who are nonetheless at least trying to pursue difficult knowledge in what they best understand to be a scientific manner, and a much larger body of clinical practitioners who are for the most part little better than self-serving quacks. Until that changes in deep and fundamental ways, I'm not ready to condemn anyone to forced treatment, nor to criticize any self-treatment short of criminal injury to others. Medicine couldn't save you from TB in the 19th century (too often, it still cannot), and it may well be that neither can it save you from addiction or myriad other brain diseases today. The solution to that was and is the scientific pursuit of knowledge for the future, not the mockery or damnation of those who decline the usually ineffective (or "heroic", or otherwise horrifying) treatments on offer at the time. > To engage and promote mental health, it is better to try and see where people are coming from. Admitting that it is a rational option is not necessarily an endorsement. If you think it is, you need to reevaluate why you believe that all things rational are identical with all things good. Very true. Moreover, people are far too quick to criticize others' decisions as irrational when the other person's value system differs from the critic's. Very often the choices being made are rational in the context of the subject's value system, but the critic cannot or will not understand or accept that the subject does not share his or her values (or indeed that multiple value systems are possible), and so criticizes their choices under their own and concludes that they are irrational. A declaration that someone is irrational says a great deal about the critic but rarely anything much about the subject. Getting past this block is perhaps the most important aspect of useful empathy.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Suicide can be a rational option, in the face of certain agony followed by death. The vast majority of suicides don't qualify, but we shouldn't say it's always irrational any more than we should say it's always rational.
drumdance 11y ago
It can be a rational options, but for most I'd bet it it's irrational. People are irrational about a lot of things, so I don't see why suicide is exempt. For the rest of the cases I think of suicide as the ultimate result of mental illness. When someone with cancer dies, we say cancer killed them. When someone dies of suicide, for most cases it was mental illness that killed them.
DanBC 11y ago
Your post is why campaigners refer to assisted dying or euthanasia, to create some distance between that and suicide. Because suicide is mostly a symptom of mental ill health - although sometimes the person isn't in contact with services and doesn't have a diagnosis.