One thing that pushes us this way is the desire to deny that people who kill themselves are being selfish or cowardly. It wasn't a choice, the pain made him do it, people say. But of course suicide is a choice. I think it's bizarre, at least in cases like Williams', to call it selfish or cowardly. How much unhappiness are people supposed to put up with? How much was he living with? More than he could take, obviously. But it's insulting to deny that he acted of his own free will. Why can't the decision to commit suicide be accepted and respected? I don't mean by people who really knew him--far be it from me to tell them what they can or should accept--but by strangers and long-distance fans.
Because it's so horrible, I suppose. And that's why it's considered selfish. You are supposed to keep the horribleness inside you, quarantining it until it can be disposed of by a doctor, or talk it out therapeutically. Not put it in the world. Don't bleed on the mat, as they used to say unsympathetically at the judo class my brother and sister went to. But that is selfish. If you have to bleed, bleed. People often say that we should not bottle up our emotions, that men should not be afraid to cry, and so on. This, I think, is partly right and partly based on a mistaken idea about the effects of expressing painful emotions, namely that once they are expressed they will be gone. But this is not true. They don't go away once let out of the bottle. It's partly also, though, a kind of hypocrisy. We don't actually want to see people's emotions, not the really bad ones. No doubt we do want to see some emotions, including painful ones, and quite possibly more than are often on display, but there is a reason why we don't wear our hearts on our sleeves.
It's hard to think well about suicide. Here's Chesterton:
Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self. Grave moderns told us that we must not even say "poor fellow," of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny. In all this I found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life.I think he's right that there is something monstrous about suicide, and there is something really nightmarish about Archer's idea. But what I want to do is to say "poor fellow." Not to praise nor to blame. And not to regard suicides as anything other than fellows, with as much free will as the rest of us. And along with that sympathy to feel some relief that the person's suffering is over.
What are your thoughts on this?
ReplyDeletehttp://harpers.org/blog/2013/06/on-suicide/
Thanks. That's a good piece.
Deleteexcept that there are good reasons to doubt "with as much free will as the rest of us", nothing settled yet but serious scientific concerns nonetheless so unless your being defensive of freewill (whether your own or in general) this seems a premature closure/conclusion. What bothers me is the general theme of the reporting was that there is already adequate care to prevent such suffering/deaths and obviously there isn't.
ReplyDelete-dmf
except that there are good reasons to doubt "with as much free will as the rest of us"
DeleteYes, I probably shouldn't have said that. I have no idea how to measure how much free will anyone has. What I don't like is the idea that people who commit suicide must not have free will at all, that in order to deny blame we must deny agency.
gotcha, also not good to pathologize all choices to end one's own life, sometimes a reasonable choice and or at least not a necessary sign/symptom of a psychiatric condition.
Delete-dmf
but what WOULD you say here? Is there rally no pressure here on the idea that the suicide has free will? For myself, i'm reluctant to talks in terms of degrees here (that is, i don't quite want to say he has "diminished" free will). But i do feel my language here is being tested.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to talk about degrees of free will either, although it was me who introduced that idea. I wish I hadn't. I'm not sure that the idea, or that talk, of free will is very helpful here. It can seem as though there is some identifiable thing called free will that we either have or don't have or perhaps have to some extent. But I have very little sense of what this thing is supposed to be.
DeleteIf we talk instead about rationality then of course some people with mental health problems are going to have diminished rationality. Perhaps Williams was such a person. Beyond that I don't know what to say. If a depressed person commits suicide I feel as though we (who are far on the outside, not immediate family members, for instance) understand well enough what happened. If we then criticize the suicide as selfish or try to excuse the act by denying free will then we seem to betray the understanding that we had/have. The first response ignores the person's suffering, the second ignores their humanity. The desire to make a moral judgment (innocent or guilty) seems to push us to apply models or theories or pictures or forms of language that don't really fit.
Yes, I agree, but what will fit?
DeleteI mean, I agree with you that this (kind of?) case shows how rigid and artificial the theories and pictures you mention can be. But what I'm wondering is if we have other better—non-theoretical, or even literary—resources to describe. I worry that in some way these kinds of cases challenge the limits of description. I sound dramatic.
It connects to the discussion about understanding human behavior, right? You say: "If a depressed person commits suicide I feel as though we [...] understand well enough what happened." - But there is also a sense in which we don't, isn't there? I mean, we cannot usually find room for that action in our life, or can we? And in that sense we don’t understand. am I wrong?
I don't know how to distinguish here b/w the sense in which we do understand, and the sense in which we don't. In the discussion about your previous post, we made a distinction b/w external and internal understanding. But it seems to me that the distinction now--even if we use the same terms--ought to be different. Do you agree? I mean, the difference between us and the strange wood-sellers is not the same as the difference between us and the suicide. “External” and “internal” do not quite mean what they meant in the wood-seller’s case, right?
I'm not sure, either, how to distinguish between the sense in which, or extent to which, we understand, and the extent to/sense in which we don't. If suicidal depression is at the end of the sadness road then we can all say that we have traveled on that road, and in that sense understand. But none of us has committed suicide, so how do we know, or by what right can we think, that suicidal depression is only different in degree from what we have experienced? I suppose we can only go by what words people use. We can read work by Sylvia Plath, say, and see how much we can relate when she describes feelings of depression. In that sense, at least, I think we might feel that we understand. It's pretty much out of the question as an option for me, but not in the way that the wood-sellers' behavior is. That's outside my world whereas suicide is more right at the edge. It's what you do when you reach your limit.
DeleteYes. I think you are right. Its like--finding the way to the wood-seller's world requires finding intermediate links. Finding the way to the suicide's world... i'm not sure what to say here. there is s/t wrong here. The suicide problem is exactly that they doen't have world. and if so, there is also no finding a way to their world. It's like what Ian Hacking says about multiple personality. Those people, he says, don't have more than one personality, but less than one. I'm not sure what finding my way to that would involve, although as I think you are saying, it is somehow in already part of my world, the limit. Or at least, it is not a part of a different world.
DeleteYes, thanks, I think this is right.
DeleteAll sorts of complex issues arose out of Williams' suicide, didn't they? First there was the (to my mind) astonishing eulogising over his career. This seems to be part of a wider trend, and it's one that leaves me feeling puzzled and slightly annoyed. There's something a bit phony about it. It's as if a celebrity death represents an opportunity for a communal outpouring of emotion and so the merits of the deceased are ratcheted up in order to justify the pre-existing social urge. In a way I think this shows disrespect to the dead; a real human being has died and people are using it as an excuse to throw a pity party.
ReplyDeleteThen there's the whole messy business of suicide. Like you, I think it's hard to speak sensibly on the subject. It's astonishing how prone we are to (a) contemplating it, and (b) doing it. "Poor soul" probably is the most decent response.
And then there's the whole question of depression. Over on Twitter it didn't take long for the Depression Lobby to mobalise. My timeline was swamped with rather self-righteous (and often contradictory) messages about the need to understand depression, how it was an illness (or even a disease), and so on. To be fair, a lot of this was prompted by nit-wit comments along the lines of "he was rich and famous, what did he have to be depressed about?" But I'm both fascinated and alarmed by the growing trend to view this hugely complex social phenomenon in simplistic medical terms. Certainly in some respects it is similar to an illness, but in the majority of cases it is brought on by deep-seated problems in people's lives. Often it is difficult to recognise these problems and even more difficult to resolve them. They become suppressed and bouts of depression are a response to this. Viewing depression as akin to, say, diabetes (which many depressed people themselves seem eager to do) is, I think, a further form of denial. It in effect takes away our right to feel distressed by the way we're living - to feel that there's something fundamentally wrong with our current situation. Instead, we're encouraged to see ourselves as sick and therefore candidates for pharmaceutical treatment. In other words, we're drugged into compliance.
It is fascinating to see how, when it comes to physical disabilities, pressure groups are adamant in rejecting the so-called "medical model" - it's not the disabled person who's the problem, it's society. Yet in the case of depression the argument is completely reversed. The sufferers themselves are clamouring to be seen as ill. I can understand why, in some ways, this seems like an attractive option but ultimately I'm not sure they're doing themselves any favours. They're allowing themselves to become alienated from their own unhappiness.
Thanks, this says a lot that I think is true and better put than I've managed.
DeleteI won't deny that depression is an illness because supposedly some people get depressed just randomly, when they really have nothing to be depressed about. It's hard to know whether this is really the case or whether there is some cause that simply hasn't been admitted or identified though.
And with physical disability what's rejected, of course, is not so much the idea that it's the disabled person who's the problem but the idea that the disability itself is a problem. See the, to my mind, extraordinary comments over at NewAPPS where, as far as I can tell, Jon Cogburn is saying that disabilities are often bad, and that we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge this fact, and in response people are reacting as if he's saying that disabled people should be killed or aborted before they can be born. I suppose the somewhat parallel idea that the "mentally ill" are really saner than everybody else has been tried already and given up.
Anyway those are footnotes. Basically I agree with everything you say.
with physical disability what's rejected, of course, is not so much the idea that it's the disabled person who's the problem
DeleteAlthough I suppose there are people who think of disabled people as the problem, and then other people who reject this idea.
Footnote to my comment above: The comments section at NewAPPS has grown now and includes comments that make the reaction to Jon Cogburn's post more intelligible. I still think that the core of what I take him to mean, however imperfectly he may have expressed it, is at least reasonable.
DeleteYes, must admit I'm strongly on Cogburn's side too. The "medical model" argument has a strong, central point: there are all sorts of structural changes (many of them relatively minor) that society could introduce which would enable many disabled people to live better lives. However, when taken to extremes (and it all too often is) the argument just becomes an absurd dogma based on a bankrupt form of sociological relativism. Human nature is remarkably flexible, but it ain't infinity flexible - and that's what the extremists argue.
ReplyDeleteGetting back to depression for a moment, I do recognise that in some cases it is an illness in a straightforward sense. People with thyroid problems, for example, can sometimes develop depression as a side-effect. But the majority of cases aren't like that. You are 10 times more likely to become clinically depressed today than you would've been in 1945. It really is a function of the way modern society requires people to live.
Even so, I can see an argument for calling it an illness (a bit like a psychosematic illness), and I wouldn't die in a ditch over that - so long as we remain clear about what the "illness" really amounts to in such cases.
Sorry, by "medical model argument" I meant "anti-medical model argument" - it's a bit like "private language argument" in that respect; people who use it assume you know they're against it!
DeleteGot it. Thanks.
DeleteYes, I agree with all that, with the possible exception that I'm less confident than you seem to be about how likely people are now, or were in 1945, to become clinically depressed. Perhaps we pay more attention to it now, perhaps it's over-diagnosed, etc. I just have no idea.
The Cogburn business struck me at first as bizarre, then it made more sense, and now, apparently, he has left NewAPPS over it. I'll try to come back to it and say more because it seems like a potentially huge issue. Not for the blogging politics aspect, so much, but the ethical aspect.
The figure I quoted on depression rates comes from the clinical depression UK website. They're quoting research which claims to take into account changes in definitions/reporting techniques over time. Obviously, I can't vouch for the integrity of the research, but the site itself seems reasonably sane.
DeleteIn that case you're probably right. Thanks.
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