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Here's one of many such egregious examples: > committed suicide > died by suicide > Ableist language that trivializes the experiences of people living with men
by bartread 4y ago
Here's one of many such egregious examples:
> committed suicide
> died by suicide
> Ableist language that trivializes the experiences of people living with mental health conditions.
I had a friend commit suicide, and one of my mum's colleagues - also an acquiantance of mine, who I'd chat with in the pub semi-regularly - also committed suicide many years ago. I've suffered with depression for much of my life since my teenage years (undiagnosed until I was well into my twenties), and I have a close family member who's spent maybe a quarter of their life over the last 20 years institutionalised, with much of the rest of the time in close contact with mental health authorities. I've had many friends and colleagues over the years who've suffered with mental health issues.
But apparently "committed suicide" is "ableist language that trivializes the experiences of people living with mental health conditions."
No.
It isn't.
It is a brutal term that aptly captures the daily visceral struggle of both those with mental health issues who are battling suicidal thoughts, and those who are left behind after a friend or relative does commit suicide. It very well captures the trauma and impact of such an event. It also avoids the final indignity of stripping the unwell person of their agency, and therefore their humanity. It is 100% certified appropriate (were such a certification to exist).
The only thing harmful about this list is that it exists and that somebody, or some group, got paid actual money (presumably as part of their day job) to compile it. In 200 years time, if somebody authors a book called, "The hideous and shameful annals of bullshit jobs in the early 21st Century" I have no doubt at all that this will rank very highly.
Let's call this list what it is: thought policing. Whoever is behind it sits somewhere on the same spectrum as the real world Morality Police of Iran, or the fictional Thought Police (and the Ministry of Truth, who control language - and in particular are replacing it with Newspeak) in George Orwell's 1984.
The word toxic has become heavily overused, but this list is an absolute examplar of it: it is a product of deeply warped and corrupted thinking. Some terms on the list (which I don't think need repeating here - racial slurs, and the like) are considered pretty universally offensive but that does not justify the presence of the rest.
Overall what we have is a pretty transparent and unsophisticated attempt to control people by those too stupid to understand the negative impacts of their actions on wider society.
I would have hoped for a lot better from an institution such as Stanford with a rich history of valuable contributions (including to hacker culture).
- smodo 4y agoI also ran into that suicide phrase. My experiences are not unlike yours and I don't like to think of my friend who committed suicide as a patient who was overcome by disease. Rather, they were very meticulous and precise about ending their life. It begs the question: can we represent this thing (somebody ends their own life) in precisely the right way? No, language is insufficient. All cases are different. When I went to school and learned about linguistics and cultural analysis etc the appropriate way to deal with this insufficiency of language was to use many descriptions and ambiguities. So that you create a general field of meaning around the inexpressible thing. Apparently we were all wrong; we just lacked the proper wording.
- bartread 4y agoYeah, I think that's right. I don't really have any objection to either "committed suicide" or "died by suicide". Language can only ever be an approximation of experience so I think it's fine and sensible to use a variety of terms in these types of situations.
- ModernMech 4y ago
- coldtea 4y ago>What I see is the Stanford IT department’s internal guidelines on language that should be avoided on its own websites and code. Stanford is a university. One of the most well known. Universities set the general tone in many areas of life (through tuition, scholarship, participation of professors and students in public discourse, and so on), and what they have as "internal guidelines" serve to legimatize and broadcast such guidelines and the need for such guidelines outside of it too. If not for anything else, for the obvious reason that the very role of a university is to teach and shape the minds of young, impressionable, people. It's exactly a university that should promote free speech, and be above mass hysteria about words. They can very well have internal guidelines of some terms to be avoided - just not silly ones that show a total giving in to BS. And of course, we can stick to a narrow reading of this, and see it as an isolated, unrelated to anything, list of internal guidelines, or we can see it as part of a general trend of something seen everywhere, and discuss that.