RIP Chester Bennington

[Lhancelot]

Originally Posted by Pokesan [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

based on previous comments and demographics, it's a safe bet Cecily is better acquainted with the topic than you. Dismissing her as a troll isn't helpful or useful.

I dismiss her earlier comments as troll (which they were) and as far as measuring up my demographics and comments to Cecily's on the topic of mental health to prove who is more acquainted on the topic isn't necessary. We can share perspectives and discussions without pulling out the epeen measurer I hope?

I aint here to prove my knowledge is greater than someone else, I was simply expressing my opinion on the matter. My opinion derives from personal experiences and working in a field that put me in direct contact with mental health patients for over 13 years, so take that as you may.

I can recognize that topics like this are very complex and often times there's no "right" answer to them, and if someone is giving an honest perspective I always listen to them with open ears.

This exchange with Cecily began with flippant insults on Cecily's behalf and ended with a snarky know-it-all attitude so taking any post in this thread on this topic with any seriousness written by Cecily is a bit hard to do.

[Pokesan]

Originally Posted by Lhancelot [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I dismiss her earlier comments as troll (which they were) and as far as measuring up my demographics and comments to Cecily's on the topic of mental health to prove who is more acquainted on the topic isn't necessary. We can share perspectives and discussions without pulling out the epeen measurer I hope?

I aint here to prove my knowledge is greater than someone else, I was simply expressing my opinion on the matter. My opinion derives from personal experiences and working in a field that put me in direct contact with mental health patients for over 13 years, so take that as you may.

.

thought we not measuring peens bud?

you have a PM [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Cecily]

Originally Posted by Lhancelot [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This exchange with Cecily began with flippant insults on Cecily's behalf and ended with a snarky know-it-all attitude so taking any post in this thread on this topic with any seriousness written by Cecily is a bit hard to do.

Yeah. I don't like the band. Don't really care if he died and have to confess I'm kind of happy they can't put out anymore music. Although the sad irony is I really did like the last single all their fans hated precisely because it didn't sound like Linkin Park. He IS kind of a dick to kill himself with 6 children and he has every right to do so. And as someone dealing with wanting to die every day for roughly the past 20 years, I don't appreciate forum armchair mental health professionals performing a postmortem analysis of how healthy his brain probably was. You don't know what you're talking about unless you've personally experienced life from this perspective. In closing.

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Cecily [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Oh he was mentally ill takes away from whatever shred of dignity remains to the person.

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.

Originally Posted by Cecily [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If you aren't suicidal and can't relate, pigeonholing someone as mentally ill makes sense, but that's crazy. Bunch of people with no idea what they aren't talking about.

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.

[Lune]

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.

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.”

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Lune [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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.

You are totally right: there are 100% rational reasons to kill yourself, like "someone has your child and will murder them if you don't", or "you have a painful terminal illness with no cure". But the vast majority of suicides either come from a physical failure in the body, or extreme environmental conditions (eg. being raped) .. or both.

[Lune]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

"you have a painful terminal illness with no cure"

Like untreated major depression?

Remember, for many of these people, treatment isn't realistic. Most can't afford it, half of it doesn't work, and countless more face an unimaginable social stigma, including the prospect of losing their job (military, public safety).

It sounds to me like the proper course of action is to advocate for better treatment and social understanding, rather than try to rob these people of what may very well be their only way out of suffering.

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Originally Posted by http://www.npr.org/programs/death/980429.death.html
ARANGA: What we really think that is happening in suicide is that the person is unable to inhibit the desire to go ahead and kill himself or herself.

TRUDEAU: After a decade of work studying over 175 brains, the research group in New York has found that the serotonin braking system is defective in many suicide victims. Their brains are anatomically different than the brains of people who have died of natural causes. Specifically, Aranga has discovered a malfunction in the area of the brain right above the eyes called the pre-frontal cortex, the place where executive decisions are made dictating what feelings we will act upon and what feelings we will inhibit.

...

TRUDEAU: Another team member, neuroscientist Mark Underwood (ph), is looking at a different part of the brains of suicide victims, at the back, an area called the brain stem. Enlisting the power of the computer, Underwood counts the number of serotonin nerve cells. There too, the serotonin system looks faulty.

MARK UNDERWOOD, NEUROSCIENTIST, NEW YORK STATE PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE: We have found hat there are approximately 30 percent more of these serotonin neurons in the suicide victims than in the controls. To find more neurons would suggest something very fundamental, such that you may in fact be born with your biological risk for suicide behavior.

It's socially irresponsible of them as clinicians to attribute a difference in the structure and function of serotonergic neurons to "faultiness", when it could very well be that these people have a clearer conception of the abstract reality of their situation, which is the entire point of the prefrontal cortex in the first place-- abstract, executive cognitions without interference from primordial fight or flight or survival impulses.

Oh wait, they aren't clinicians, they are neuroscientists.

That's not to mention we have NO IDEA how the serotonergic system works at a detailed level and it's totally irresponsible to make the kind of claim they're insinuating.

[loramin]

P.S. I've also had Bell's Palsy once, which is when an infection near a cranial nerve makes half of your face paralyzed for months, sort of like being a stroke victim. With both the Bell's Palsy and my mental illness the exact same thing happened: something went physically wrong in my brain.

But, no one ever said that I was making a choice to have my face paralyzed, or blamed me for my right eye going dry because I couldn't blink.

[Lune]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

P.S. I've also had Bell's Palsy once, which is when an infection near a cranial nerve makes half of your face paralyzed for months, sort of like being a stroke victim. With both the Bell's Palsy and my mental illness the exact same thing happened: something went physically wrong in my brain.

But, no one ever said that I was making a choice to have my face paralyzed, or blamed me for my right eye going dry because I couldn't blink.

Consider a 75 year old woman (my grandmother) who lived a rich and fulfilling life, and stared down the barrel of totally untreatable Alzheimer's disease. Her brain progressively rotted and robbed her of her very humanity before she died in agony, placing an unimaginable financial and emotional burden on her caregivers. She muttered "I want to die" for years, right up til the very end.

If I were ever in that situation I'd kill myself. And it would be the right decision.

[AzzarTheGod]

Originally Posted by Lune [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Consider a 75 year old woman (my grandmother) who lived a rich and fulfilling life, and stared down the barrel of totally untreatable Alzheimer's disease. Her brain progressively rotted and robbed her of her very humanity before she died in agony, placing an unimaginable financial and emotional burden on her caregivers. She muttered "I want to die" for years, right up til the very end.

If I were ever in that situation I'd kill myself. And it would be the right decision.

Not hawking u nemore pal I read some of the thread and ordered a stand-down of my neurotransmitters