{"id":222,"date":"2004-01-27T11:41:31","date_gmt":"2004-01-27T19:41:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2004\/01\/27\/the-motives-of-suicide\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:17:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T00:17:15","slug":"the-motives-of-suicide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2004\/01\/27\/the-motives-of-suicide\/","title":{"rendered":"The Motives of Suicide"},"content":{"rendered":"

An excerpt from an eloquent treatise on why suicide should not be dismissed as “merely” an act of irrational behavior. From the blog of Antonio Savoradin<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nSo I do ask, under such circumstances, in which the sufferer of depression is mocked, is disbelieved, is denied treatment, is blamed for his illness, is acused of selfish whining, is discriminated against for having accepted treatment, or is given inadequate treatment and told to hope for the best (“Here’s a script, follow directions. Expect serious nausea and other side-effects. Your hair won’t fall out, but you may never experience orgasm while taking these. Come back in 2 months if you don’t feel better.”)– all the while the symptoms he feels cannot be seen or measured — under such circumstances, if the depression is severe enough, is ending one’s life truly irrational? Are the circumstances, the “suicide’s situation,” less comprehensible than those leading to suicide for political purposes or to preserve honour, to save face?<\/p>\n

There is no doubt depression in all its varieties affects the sufferer’s capacity to think with perfect clarity. But to dismiss a depressive’s suicide as merely the result of a thought disorder, without taking note of the awful conditions against which she has battled, is to do her a great injustice. <\/p>\n

I’m not saying we shouldn’t do every single thing that is within our power to prevent a suicide when recovery is a plausible possibility. We should. We must. But let us also realise it is not so simple as saying “suicide is madness.” It is far far more than that. Sometimes suicide is despair; sometimes it is escape from pain; and sometimes it is rage. <\/p>\n

How do you approach the severely depressed? You do not deny the reality of his prison. You say, I see the walls of your cell. I see the bars and the door and the lock. But there are many keys (we’re making more, as we speak) and we have to try them *all* if we must. We’ll tear the building down brick by brick if necessary. We know the pain –physical and psychic– is real. We’ll give whatever relief we can for as long as we must. And you have to mean it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(via The Coffee Sutras<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An excerpt from an eloquent treatise on why suicide should not be dismissed as “merely” an act of irrational behavior. From the blog of Antonio Savoradin: So I do ask, under such circumstances, in which the sufferer of depression is mocked, is disbelieved, is denied treatment, is blamed for his illness, is acused of selfish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13110,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions\/13110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}