Comment by MarkTee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MarkTee | Hacker News Reader

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> What would you do if you were facing those charges?

Are you asserting that suicide is the most reasonable option in a situation like this?

I've noticed this sentiment a lot lately (you hear it all the time in discussions about youths who commit suicide after having been bullied excessively); as if outside forces are overwhelmingly responsible for when a person takes their own life, and any personal culpability that that person might have had is thrown out the window.

I'm not saying that the events that contribute towards a suicide should be ignored, but it's important to remember that suicide, by definition, is always a personal choice. We should be doing more to assist, or even empower, those who feel as if they have to make that choice.

Instead of doing the easy thing and blaming a scapegoat (to say that "[Aaron] was practically murdered by the state" is ludicrous, and not at all productive), why don't we look at the root of the problem - what really caused Swartz to do what he did (i.e., a poor state of mental health, something that currently affects millions of Americans) - and work towards preventing it from happening to others?

Suicide is a symptom of acute mental illness. Framing it in terms of personal responsibility is often cruelly ignorant because it ignores much about the actual experiences of the person involved.

Would you blame a diabetic who loses his foot because he was unaware that he'd contracted an infection? Would you give a lecture on personal responsibility to the mother of a child whose first asthma attack ever was fatal? If someone dies of an infection contracted because someone else threw them in a septic tank; is it their fault for swimming in sewage?

In Aaron's case, we don't know exactly what was going through his head when he killed himself; but we do know he was being put under extreme pressure by prosecutors who were less interested in justice than in punishing him for imagined slights, especially the PACER affair.

> Would you blame a diabetic who loses his foot because he was unaware that he'd contracted an infection? Would you give a lecture on personal responsibility to the mother of a child whose first asthma attack ever was fatal? If someone dies of an infection contracted because someone else threw them in a septic tank; is it their fault for swimming in sewage?

No, I wouldn't, and that's exactly why I think that more time, money, and effort should be spent on improving America's (mental) health care system, and why effort should be made to break down the social stigma of mental illness. We should look at cases like this as an example of what can happen when people don't have access to an adequate support network.

I edited my post because after rereading it I realized that it could be taken in ways that I hadn't intended it to. What I meant to emphasize was that suicide is predominantly motivated by the individual; that's who we should be focusing on helping. Fixing the judicial system is great, but I don't believe the judicial system was the principal factor behind Aaron's death; it was only a contributing circumstance.

The comment that I replied to was framing the situation as just another example of the big, bad, authoritarian government flexing its muscle. Saying that Swartz was "murdered by the state" only obscures what, in my eyes, is the real tragedy here: that a man dealing with incredible stress, pressure, and mental/emotional strain felt as if suicide was his only option.

Thank you for pointing this out. People shouldn't be 'blamed' for taking their lives. However, I always feel this uneasiness around people when, like you said, the fact that suicide is a symptom of mental illness is brought up. It's as if people associate having mental illness with being some sort of 'good person club' outcast, or having some character flaw.

Technically, mental illness is a character flaw ("a limitation, imperfection, problem, phobia, or deficiency present in a character who may be otherwise very functional"[0]).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_flaw

No, it's not. it's an illness. Your quote is about 'character flaw' as a literary critique concept. I was going to say in my post (the grandparent) that it could be argued, though not technically. Technically, it's not a character flaw.

Fair enough; I wasn't aware that there was a difference. I've always thought that a person's "character" is "the aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing"[0], but it looks like the most common usage only refers to concern moral/ethical characteristics.

To be clear, I'm not singling out people with mental illnesses; as a person with a physical illness, I would have considered it to be one of my "character flaws".

[0]: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/character

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