Quote:
Originally Posted by loramin
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
Does telling a cancer patient they have cancer take away their dignity? Mental illness has a stigma because it's "mental", but the reality is it's just another physical organ failure that people have no control over, and blaming them for an illness they can't control seems a lot more undignified to me.
I've been checked in to a hospital mental ward ... twice. It wasn't my fault, it wasn't because I made bad decisions, it was because some chemicals in my brain decided to go haywire out of the blue one day. Once I got some medicine from a doctor to balance out the chemicals I got my life back ... exactly the same as sufferers of other (non-mental) diseases.
So yeah, I know a little bit about having your body turn on you in a way that makes you act crazy (or, in particular, suicidal). And I know that pretending someone has agency when they don't is as cruel as blaming someone who dies of thirst because they were too weak from malaria to go get water. People suffering from any disease, physical or mental, deserve compassion ... it just might take a bit more empathy to have that same compassion for crazy people.
|
Who says suicide has to be caused by an illness? It can be a perfectly logical and ethical choice and, I'd argue, a basic human right. The fact that you equate suicidal with crazy speaks to the perversion of humanist values in our society by religious ones.
I mean, when suicidal ideation or any other non-normative thinking would be cause for a diagnosis of 'mental illness', of course suicide is almost always going to be associated with mental illness. But when you look at it closely it's far more of a value judgment than it is clinical pathology. It's deviant behavior more than disease. And that's suicide I'm talking about, not clinical depression, although they are related.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by David Foster Wallace
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
|