Everyone is an a Continuum Relative to Suicide.

Visualize this. On the far right is the person so determined to do himself in that he'd bite his own wrists open. That's the extreme. That's the person that can't be talked down.

On the far left is someone who doesn't want to die. Period. You could put them in a concentration camp and they'd keep fighting to stay alive. This is the person who, after a 100 years of misery still says, "I'm not ready to die. I want to keep going."

This continuum is defined by extremes. A genuine extreme is something beyond which there could be nothing more extreme. As such, these endpost personalities aren't likely to be represented in reality.

And that means that everyone is somewhere on the continuum of relative tenacity for life.

Let's place some types.

The soldier, who is willing kill to stay alive, but also to actively risk death on behalf of his country, is right around the middle. The parent who lives for her kids, but- if it was her or them, wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice her life. She's right in the middle. Even the Kent State sniper, despite his glioblastoma, was somewhere in the middle. He knew that by killing others, he was killing himself. And yet, he acted as if he was defending himself from death. There's no question that his behavior was extreme, but it doesn't represent an extreme on this continuum.

Both extremes indicate pathology. On the "life at all cost" end, we may have a sociopath who values his own existence more than anything, or anyone, else. Most of the time, he'll keep his head down and no one gets hurt. But when pushed, he's capable of murderous preemptive self defense. At the life extreme, nothing can be more important than personal survival.

On the opposite side- on the "death by any means necessary" side- we can only define such compulsion as an extraordinary insanity. Not to oversimplify, but severely suicidal depression isn't characterized by a preoccupation with death itself, but with the experience of intense psychic pain. Psychic pain that is in no way different from physical torture, only the cause is invisible. If the pain is improvable, then- the complexity of human psychology notwithstanding- the subject should be expected to slide left. Left towards life.

As a society, we view suicide as a binary problem. Either you are or you aren't. It's as if there were two extremes and *nothing* in between. This is an artifact of our culture, and of our shame, and not of the underlying reality. I'm not proposing that serious psychologists see things in such black and white terms, but they belong to a system of thought, a cultural bias, that pushes them toward a binary definition of "suicidal tendencies."

At this point, you either agree or disagree. Either way, I'm continuing on with the next stage of my case.

First, we need to acknowledge that we are all somewhere on a continuum. It is not "unthinkable" that either we or anyone we know could be an a one-way trip to the right. Most people who succeed at suicide would have preferred to succeed at something else. They would have preferred to have been surrounded by different circumstances. Suicide becomes a final solution only when the problem is fully defined as unsolvable. And that point of apparent insolvency occurs at different places on the continuum for different people. What I'm saying here is that the continuum doesn't have the same extremes for everybody. Most people will never experience an extreme. In some cases, or in most cases to some extreme, attempted suicide (or self-defense murder, for that matter) is a reaction to the experience of an extreme.

One piece of evidence for this assertion is that exposure to suicide, even in fictional depictions- increases the incidence of suicide among people that otherwise might not have killed themselves.

I assert, without delay, that we need to expose people to stories of survival in better-than-equal measure. Stories of overcoming extremes. Heroes that overcome- on both sides of the continuum.

Another facet of my general assertion is based on risky behavior. We don't call motorcycle accidents where the deceased was going 140 mph without a helmet a "partial suicide" but it's no great stretch to imagine that, if this person was a bit more tenacious about staying alive, they might not have bought a motorcycle in the first place.

I'm not saying that people who engage in risky behavior are "suicidal." That, again, is the binary assumption speaking. I'm saying that, just like soldiers, parents, and brain-tumor victims, they are on the continuum. We are on the continuum. It is not for me, or anyone, to say that riding a motorcycle is a right-leaning indicator. It may represent a left-leaning love of life (perhaps obfuscated- at least in the eyes of non-riders- by a motorcycle-specific definition of what it is to "be alive" in the first place).

So, if the point of insolvency comes at different points for different people, then we're not talking about an objective continuum anymore. We're talking about a personal, invisible, inscrutable continuum that is only superficially connected to humanity as a whole. By that I'm saying that, if someone kills themselves, it is not different that if they were all the way to the right. Same results.

One of the problems with suicide is that it's seen as a rare problem. But suicide is one of the top-ten killers in developed nations. It probably would be a top-ten killer in undeveloped nations as well if it weren't for AIDS, TB, malaria, measles, and other childhood killers. Comparatively speaking, if suicide were a disease, thousands of people would be working on developing a vaccine. If only it were a disease, right?

I believe it is a disease. It's a cultural virus. The very idea of suicide is a fatal meme.

Because we define "suicidal" as a binary condition, we consign the desperate among us to ask the question, "Am I now, like those before me, ready to kill myself?" In a binary world, the answer is either "no" or "yes." And if the answer turns up "yes" then one would hope they'd ask again before acting on this conclusion.

We need a different approach to the desperate question. We need to ask a qualitative question. "How bad is it?" "How much worse do I feel compared to yesterday?" "How much harder is it to continue this life?" Essentially, the question should be, "How far am I to the right?" Because if we openly treat suicide as a continuum, and define healthy, average, statistically normal people as representing the center- if we admit that any of us can be moved to the right- then we're not abandoning the desperate to think of themselves as separate, different, untenable in society's eyes.

If someone is truly at the end of their rope; if all they want is death- and there are miserable circumstances that make death into a rational option- and only the individual knows their own pain- then that's one thing. I don't think suicide is 100% avoidable. But if someone is contemplating oblivion because of changeable circumstances, the last thing they need is to feel that "being suicidal" has been added to their disenfranchisement.

For my own part, I own life insurance. I rock climb. I drive a car. I expect to die someday. What scares me about death is that, no matter when it happens, there's no way on earth that I'll have finished doing the things I wanted to do. And the longer I live, the more I see, the more I want to participate. It bothers me that, to make a soldier- someone willing to kill and be killed- you need a young person who hasn't learned to think like this. Someone who hasn't had time to learn to lean hard to the left. Someone blank and malleable. It bothers me because I know that if war were the exclusive domain of middle-aged men, it would be more rare, and for more intractable reasons.

We're all on the continuum, but some of us are where we've been put by others.

So, aside from admitting that the desire for life and death is not binary, we need to do more for the cause of life. Part of the cure is to have the power to control your risks. Not just your actuarial risk, but your existential risks.

People need purpose. Not "peoples need purposes." They need something they can control, something they can master. They need room to grow. They need to be able to experience the benefits of their efforts. We may now live in a society where a well-designed video game gives a person a greater feeling of empowerment than the eight hours they spend at school or at work. We may be doing intolerable violence to our psychic selves by never attempting the impossible.

Here's a quote from the blog that got me thinking about this:

"A 2005 article in Psychiatric News says some jumpers aren't necessarily depressed or chronic suicide attempters—sometimes people are simply overwhelmed by a sudden desire to leap—and that thwarted jumpers rarely go on to kill themselves in other ways. One researcher followed the lives of 515 people who were pulled from the Golden Gate Bridge: After an average of 26 years each, 94 percent were either still living or had died of natural causes. Another study, of the Duke Ellington Bridge in Washington, D.C., showed that its suicide fence caused no increase in suicides at the Taft Bridge, which has no fence and is only one block away."

What do you think?

Punishing Obnoxious Advertisers With Attention

I've never manage to write a short blog yet. Maybe this will be the one.

Let's say you're visiting a website and some advertisement insults you in some way. Maybe it uses weasely language, employs scarevertising, guiltvertising, or tries to sell you something you find morally objectionable.

What do you do?

In most realms, the best answer would be to simply ignore the advertising, right?

Let's think about that. For most forms of advertising, the advertiser has already paid for the privilege of assaulting your senses. Online advertising is different. Advertisers pay a relatively small amount for "views" and a relatively large amount for "click throughs." So, if you want to punish an advertiser for insulting you, click their ad, visit their site, and then leave without buying anything. Make them pay for their ineffective advertising.

Obnoxious advertisers will benefit by seeing that click-throughs aren't turning into sales. Hopefully they'll realize what's going on and change their ways.

(BTW, PLEASE DON'T DO THIS ON MY BLOG)