Suicide is painless
11 months later, I still agree, I wish this place were popping because I can't handle the reactionary nature of Outragebook.
Suicide is something that I was fucking weaned on, my mother talked about killing herself from my earliest memories. I knew she was going to kill herself, so for most of my young life was spent in anticipation of that moment, it came when I was 9 years old.
It's not like she didn't tell everyone she was suicidal. She saw a psychiatrist as well. Maybe SSRi drugs weren't an option in the mid 1970s, and IMHO, a great deal of her problem arose from taking a lot of medications that quite likely had conflicts that were unknown at the time, lumping more on might have made it worse, not better. I don't know what else was going on, but I have suspicions that my father was having (an) affair(s), that she felt very overwhelmed holding down the fort because he worked on the road most of the time, plus she was in a constant state of tension with her own family (parents, sibling). I also think that she had hormonal problems due to an early hysterectomy. However, the biggest problem she had was that she was an alcoholic. She drank to inebriation every single day. Cause and effect on all those matters is purely speculative, but they certainly were cumulative.
So, comments like "Mental health is real, just like Crohns, cancer lupus. People need to feel they can talk about it in order to find relief and help.", is clearly a statement made in utter ignorance.
If someone wants to die, they're going to die, and clearly no matter how much you "talk" and how much help you seek, it will not make a difference if that is the what they want. It's not so simple as saying "mental health is like cancer" because it fucking is not like cancer. That's a simplification that is fucking annoying to those of us who, well, lost our mother at age 9. And trust me, I didn't really want her - the burden she put on me at that age was too large, life was better for me after she was dead. That makes no difference though, whether you wanted your "loved one" to live or felt an immense sense of relief because now you don't have to do that anymore, the fact is that the assumptions that all a suicidal person needs is to "open up to someone" and it can all be fixed makes me want to punch people in the face.
Clearly my mother's mental health issues were not like cancer. They were a result of addictions, conflicting medications, physiology, real world struggles and stresses, and who knows what else? Not me. It's not something a pill can fix, nor a nice series of chats with a therapist either, each problem had to be identified and solved - and the solutions can't be found at a one-stop shop, nor would any one person likely be able to identify them all. Even if they could, there's no guarantee that she would be willing to solve them, or capable for that matter. Addictions are a lot nastier than people who have none can fathom, particularly when the triggers to abuse substances are still there. Simultaneous solving of all those things would be nearly impossible, also - the one that might have been the biggest factor, the hormonal imbalances due to the hysterectomy, are not so easily solved. I'm not sure if they even could be at the time, maybe now you can do HRT, but one more issue (hypochondria) with the risks of that (cancer) when her brother had died of an aggressive cancer, tells me she wouldn't have gone for it even if all this happened now.
This person I speak of, my mother, was suffering from a lot. Even with socialized health care here in my country and my father making a more than decent income at the time for the things that were not covered by either that or his company's benefits - could not unilaterally solve everything that ailed her, and even if by some major miracle it could - the cure would have been worse and likely pushed her over the edge. She was destined to die, like Kurt Cobain, who could neither give up the heroin, nor live with the addiction, and the underlying causes of both their addictions were not so easily solved. Nor were their life issues that were caused in part by the addictions.
It is NOT just so simple as not being judgmental and allowing people to "open up" for fuck sake. Ignorant people should shut their fucking mouths.