Greetings,
dear reader.
Today I
want to talk about suicide. This is a topic that doesn't get nearly
the coverage it deserves – something that's painfully apparent by
the attitude toward those who ideate and say so in public.
First, an
update for those who've been following my twitter feed. I recently
posted that I can't find the strength to go on. I'm far from out of
the woods yet, but I'm still fighting, and so is Hallie. It's an
uphill struggle, not least because we're presented with barriers at
every turn. I'll come back to that, because some of it is apposite
here.
A couple
of days ago, I posted that I was having a hard time having a reason
to keep going, and that I thought I'd run out of fight. Some things
have happened since, some that have made it worse, and others that
have made it slightly better, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Some time
ago, I penned a piece about a particularly horrible bit of advice
given by celeb agony aunt Mariella Frostrup in the Grauniad. It
reflected a very common attitude about suicide, and was possibly the
single worst piece of advice she could have given. It would have been
bad advice in any event, but the one saving grace is that this dreck
wasn't actually given to somebody contemplating suicide, but somebody
who was grieving the suicide of their spouse. I'll link the piece at
the bottom.
In the
aftermath of my tweet, I received the same comment, among others. I
won't belabour the point about what a shocking approach this is to
somebody close to completing, because I cover it all in that piece.
However,
while this piece of advice was shockingly bad, it wasn't the worst
possible response to somebody talking about their contemplation of
suicide. I want to talk about some of the really bad approaches to
somebody who's actually contemplating ending their life.
The first
thing to note is that I advocate suicide, if that's what somebody
wants. This might seem a particularly strange thing for me to say,
given the hundreds of hours I've spent talking people off ledges on
social media since my first serious brush with suicide. However,
while I mostly think that people can recover from such situations –
I did, after all, albeit only to return to it – there's one point
that seems entirely lost on the vast majority of the population when
it comes to this one thing that the same majority would be horrified
to encounter in another situation, and it's central to what it means
to be free: bodily autonomy.
The notion
of bodily autonomy is one that underpins every bit of ethical and
moral reasoning we have. I've previously talked about freedom of
speech as the single right from which all others flow but, in fact,
freedom of speech is merely an expression of bodily autonomy, or the
right to self-determination. All of the rights we talk about have as
their core the notion that your freedom to swing your arm ends where
it meets my nose, and other such notions, yet we feel entirely
entitled to intervene and violate this freedom when we think somebody
is going to take their own life. Why is this?
It's
fairly understandable in some respects, of course, but it's the
product of really poor thinking, and that's why it finds voice in
this venue, where we inspect such things.
We don't
like death, generally speaking. When somebody we know – and
especially somebody we care about - talks about or dies by suicide,
we get angry at being forced to face our mortality; our inherent
frailty. We're a social species, and the societal bonds we form are
strong, and when they're broken in such a brutal manner, we realise
just how tenuous life really is.
Are we
justified in taking away somebody's right to determine their own
fate? Of course not, even though it's entirely true that most can
find a way out of it and continue to live.
Let me be
clear before we go any further: I'm not currently contemplating
suicide. I really hope that nobody reading this feels compelled to
have me sectioned, because my mental health is pretty good at the
moment, better than it's been in decades, in fact, despite the very
difficult circumstance we find ourselves in. We've been offered a
lifeline, and we're taking it.
Now that's
out of the way, let's talk about that tweet.
I can find no reason left to go on. Going to get somewhere warm so I can at least be comfortable when I go.— Josef K (@hackenslash2) October 14, 2018
For those who still care, I'm sorry. The fight is gone from me.
So, there
it is. When I penned that tweet, things were pretty grim.
Circumstances haven't changed appreciably in terms of the fact that
the world seems determined, apart from a few tiny pieces of it, to
want to separate Hallie and myself, whether temporarily or
permanently, but we're not entirely devoid of support. Most of that
support is from people who can ill afford to give it, yet give it
they do, because they're wonderful and caring people who want to keep
us in the world and keep us together.
Some of
the responses I received, however, were exactly the opposite of the
right thing to say. One person, whom I've long considered a friend,
managed to parse the tweet entirely incorrectly, and thought I was
saying that suicide was warm and comfortable when, of course, it
clearly says no such thing. Part of the problem we have as a species
is something that I've talked about before, most notably in a debunk
of a certain apologist who shall remain nameless; passive listening.
Passive
listening is a real problem, and almost always ends in some form of
conflict. In customer service training circles, it's recognised as a
particularly pernicious problem. It's when we listen only for key
words and phrases and begin immediately composing our response,
despite the very real issue of not having heard exactly what's being
said.
So my
friend read 'warm' and 'comfortable' and 'suicide' and immediately
berated me for promoting and glamourising suicide which, clearly, I
didn't do. I never said or remotely suggested that suicide is warm
and comfortable. I was in Denver, Colorado at the time, and had been
for over a week, excepting a brief stopover in the UK prior to coming
straight back only 24 hours later. For those unaware, Denver is at
almost a mile elevation, and the air is very poor in O2. It was also
very cold, snowing, in fact, at the time of the tweet. What I was
expressing was a simple desire to feel the warmth of the sun and be
able to breathe prior to ending it, entirely aware that simply being
able to breathe properly might improve my perception immensely.
Another
person, one whom I have generally found to be a clear thinker,
actually slated me as a potential murderer, for the simple reason
that we would go together, making whoever was driving entirely
responsible for the death of the other. This is asinine, of course,
because the decision is the thing; the only thing.
These, my
friends, are exactly the sorts of thing that can drive somebody who's
genuinely contemplating suicide to complete. Of all the things that
can be expressed in response to a cry for help, because that's what
it almost always is when somebody openly talks about suicide in this
manner, the very worst thing one can do is express anger, or to
employ that favourite bit of emotional manipulation known as
gult-tripping.
Some
months ago, a very dear friend for whom I have the utmost love and
respect asked for my blessing as they contemplated ending it. This is
not some idle musing, but is the plea of somebody who ideates like
the rest of us breathe. This friend had even picked a date. It
stopped me cold. At this point, after my own close brush, I'd been
doing my best to counsel people in difficult situations, and I wasn't
immediately ready to answer. Like many, I'd have considered such a
blessing to be a violation of my own ethics. However, the request
coming from where it did, I thought about it for a while, and indeed
I discussed it with Hallie, who gave me some much-needed perspective,
and that's what I pass on to you here today.
She quite
rightly pointed out that this is a bodily autonomy issue. It's all
about the right to self determination. To fail to give my blessing
would be to violate the one principle that underlies all of my
ethical thought. Once I grasped this, it became clear that I had to
give my blessing. What I in fact did was not only to give my
blessing, but my phone number, and made my friend promise that they'd
call me when they decided to complete so I could be with them so they
didn't have to go through it alone.
I do not
promote suicide. I think it's most often a terrible thing to end your
life. However, it's your life, or mine, and to violate bodily
autonomy in this manner is no different than any number of such
violations that we would find abhorrent.
Here's the
thing; we're always operating on the basis that anybody who wants to
complete must be irrational, or mentally unstable, or some other such
thing, that we think gives us the right to violate them 'for their
own safety'. The problem is, of course, that the underlying premise,
that living is preferable to not living, is a simple imposition of
our own values on others and, without having been subjected to their
emotional journey, we can't reasonably say that living is preferable,
nor that not living is preferable. We simply can't logically or
ethically support either position on behalf of somebody else. I can
find no logical basis for asserting that living is preferable to not
living, and I've thought long and hard about it.
So please,
my friends. Think long and hard about how you respond, because you
may well be doing more harm than good. Can you really justify your
position on behalf of somebody else to the degree that you're
confident making a value judgement on their behalf? Of course you
can't, and there can be perfectly rational reasons for not wanting to
live, rational reasons that can be explained simply by anybody who
can express them without being subjected to anger and vilification,
especially when you may simply have misread or misheard due to not
paying proper attention.
I should add that advising somebody you barely know on the basis of very little information to seek help from a professional is a very poor thing to do. You once again bring your own assumptions to the table, and never once question whether they're justified.
Tomorrow,
we're going to try to get to a friend's place in Canada to ride out
the visa application process, taking the opportunity to meet and hug
one of the most special individuals it's ever been my extreme
pleasure to interact with. I'm not going to say who, because
everybody who's shown us any kindness so far has been subjected to
the most vile abuse by those who wish me ill. I hope that we can
overcome the challenges before us, because I have no intention of
living without Hallie for even a moment now that we've found each
other.
Think.
Further reading:
Selfish! Weak!
Selfish! Weak!