I’ve Struggled with Suicide My Whole Life–But Not During the Pandemic | Hacker News Reader

I’ve Struggled with Suicide My Whole Life–But Not During the Pandemic

theatlantic.com

48 pointsfortran7718 comments

Melancholia the 2011 movie is exactly about this. A clinically severely depressed woman is the best one a dealing with the upcoming end of the world.

Great movie btw. Highly recommend if you have struggled with clinical depression.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1527186/

> My adult life has been an ongoing struggle with addiction, depression, anxiety, chronic suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts.

In my experience, addiction tends to be the "hemorrhaging femoral artery" of mental issues. It is certainly not the only one, and maybe not even the worst one, but, while it is active (i.e. the addict is using), everything else is untreatable.

I sincerely wish the author well.

Completely agree. I would anecdotally say 90%+ of mental issues are drug induced.

I think that’s probably a bit specious in that a lot of drug seeking originates from seeking escape from mental health issues. They provide a short term surcease, but induce worse rebound and a feedback cycle. But I don’t think it’s drugs that induce mental health issues but rather exacerbate and compound.

I think often depression develops when one has an ongoing struggle for years and years. Something you cannot solve no matter how hard you try. It could be a physical disability, a mental disorder or addiction. With all those things there is a tendency that no matter how hard one tries to overcome it, it just might not work. Over the years a deep depression can develop. In a way it is a systemic issue. Because if you try and try and no matter what you do, you can't fix your issues in the system you have to act in, what can you realistically do next.

I was thinking how addiction and depression are not always a simple cause-and-effect relationship. Sometimes it's the other way around, as in self-medicating behavior ("to drown your sorrow in a bottle"), and other times they're aspects of a larger complex feedback loop. The root cause of depression and suicidal ideation can be an intertwined whole, both inside and outside oneself, arising from the interactions between the self and the social environment, including family, work, media landscape, relationships and collective psychology.

There's no societal support for addiction, or mentally ill people that use substance, but aren't addicted. The absolute worst place to go for help is the mental health industry, which will actively work to ruin your life, and cut you off from important medical treatments for the rest of your life.

https://archive.is/Bhs8E

I believe most of suicides are a result of the overall system failure, the failure cause depression and mental issues that lead to suicides, during pandemic, that known system became uncertain, improvised, and doesn’t follow the norms that cause such depression leading to suicides sometimes.

> Many of the most dangerous nations in the world have comparatively low suicide rates: The annual suicide rate in Afghanistan is six suicides per 100,000 people; in Turkey, 2.3; in Honduras, 2.6. In 2021, America’s was 14.5.

I disagree with this, it isn’t about being dangerous correlates to a lower suicide rates, but if you look closely, most countries with muslims majority have lower rates because it’s a different system overall than the US for example, spirituality, community, laws, financially, and others, where each one of these can have a major impact on suicide rates.

When a country is dangerous, doesn't that mean that there's an incentive to let people like that perform fodder -work and that wouldn't count as suicide?

I think we might not be getting the best data, but I do think that struggling to survive can weirdly blunt suicidal behaviors. However there's a strong urge to not believe the death of a loved one is a suicide.

There was an interesting Fresh Air about this recently, too: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/03/1167733332/living-with-suicid...

I’m seeing a resurgence of these lockdown excuse pieces.

“I actually shouldn’t admit this (wink wink) but I really quite enjoyed lockdown life” so I don’t mind forcing everyone to give up their freedom so I can enjoy my lockdown life! Because hey, how hard is it for others to give up all those unimportant things I really don’t care about!

I don't think that's what this OP is about, and oh my god are we still debating the lockdown?

You say "lockdown excuse" as if it was a clearly bad idea, which it wasn't.

You say it wasn’t a bad idea, which it was, and articles like this are people trying to find an excuse why it wasn’t so bad they forced their bad idea on everyone else.

And the next trick is ‘oh my god are we still debating the lockdown?’ Yeah let’s just forget about that thing where you just forced your bad ideas on everyone else.

We’re not going to stop debating the lockdown, it’s getting clear and going to get ever more clear that it didn’t help and hurt a lot and made a lot of people distrustful in science, just because a few phonies twisted it to back their own little flawed lockdown theories.

You can’t tread on peoples rights like this and expect them to just take it. If you had just locked down yourself and not forced your ideas on others then we could just talk about whether it was a good idea or not. Which it clearly wasn’t. But that’s not what happened. You had to force your flawed idea on others. And now they are going to keep telling you it was a flawed idea from the start, you could have known, your politicians could have known, your science figureheads could have known, but they didn’t, they are phonies spreading fake science to trick you and your politicians into their flawed lockdown ideas. And you fell for it.

Here’s the clue: COVID is over because it mutated into something that is not dangerous anymore. Just like it always happens. Lockdowns delay that process so it drags on for longer. Which is totally pointless and wasteful and antisocial because the progress of the epidemic is a burden that you then put onto others that can’t afford the lockdown. Either because they are in some county that can’t afford it or because they are in your country but have to work anyway, they are in some essential industry creating your food, or they are providing your care. Do you think people in Africa could just shelter at home for a few years?

And then this delay may have been useful when there was a wait for the vaccines but unfortunately it turned out they didn’t really work, they don’t prevent spread and they only work for a very short time. Too bad. And that’s the moment where there is no more benefit to lockdowns, only harm, and any real scientist should have told you that and any scientist that didn’t is a phony political fake scientist. A harmful flunky that you shouldn’t listen to. And that’s the real story and it’s going to be told whether you like it or not. And whether you paper over it with excuses or not. You took peoples rights because you were scared into believing in flunkies so badly you couldn’t think for yourself anymore. Because if you did anyone could have seen it coming.

I don't know that many "real scientists" that agree with you. This has nothing to do with making "excuses" for the lockdown; you're shoehorning your politics into any COVID adjacent discussion.

Your tone is absurdly condescending, for someone that's provided a ton of text, and little substance. I'm not interested in debating you. Someone just pointing out that the lockdown was good for them personally is not justifying the whole thing.

I suppose it’s a matter of perspective, if you love the lockdown these pieces are just confirming your own beliefs, otherwise it’s making excuses for some pretty ridiculous policy.

You are correct that these excuse pieces are not justifying the whole thing. On the contrary, the whole thing justifies ridicule. At the very least.

Wave away the ‘little substance’ whatever you want. It’s not going away, it’ll be in your face for a long time and ultimately history will look at the handling of this pandemic even worse than the way we look at middle age medicine. Because we could have known better, for whatever reason we just chose not to.

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