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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.
ionised 11y ago
Most suicides being attributed to mental illness is one of the great (not necessarily deliberate) deceptions in our society. There was a great article posted here on HN a while back by a number of highly-regarded psychologists that stated most suicides in men (who make up most suicides in raw numbers) are not actually due to mental illness at all, but rather cultural and philosophical factors combine with certain events in their lives leading to a sense of irreconcilable failure. Hell, seppuku is a form of ritual suicide that has nothing at all to do with mental illness but it arrived at by a set of personal and moral values. I'll see if I can dig the article up.

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.

ionised 11y ago

Most suicides being attributed to mental illness is one of the great (not necessarily deliberate) deceptions in our society. There was a great article posted here on HN a while back by a number of highly-regarded psychologists that stated most suicides in men (who make up most suicides in raw numbers) are not actually due to mental illness at all, but rather cultural and philosophical factors combine with certain events in their lives leading to a sense of irreconcilable failure. Hell, seppuku is a form of ritual suicide that has nothing at all to do with mental illness but it arrived at by a set of personal and moral values. I'll see if I can dig the article up.