suicide is just insanity,well if your christian that yeah it is. Also what like clipmaster said people think its a better way to die like in the war people would ofter do that(like the guy who started the WW)
I agree with Devoidless. Something in a person's life is making them feel depressed. It could even be a person. Would you rather have the depressed person kill the other person or just the depressed person kill themself? I know it seems odd but the person causing the depression is not the one to blame. Like Devoidless said, if someone wants to kill themself, let them.
Suicide is bad unless you are doing it to save another person's life. Like if your daughter could only live if got a fatal surgery.... then suicide would be good. but mostly suicide is bad :C
idk why, but there are alot of suicidal people nowadays. most are on depresent medication or their overdosing on it. many are teenagers whose lives are troubled or have a low connection with their parent(s) or guardian(s). Its really sad once you think about it. suicide usually starts by people cutting themselves, burning themselves, getting hooked on many drugs, the works. its sad that the parents of those children don't notice something different about their child before its too late. i'm not saying anything about what my religion says, because people have different points of veiws. but, to me, suicide is not the way out of trouble or whatever is making you think of suicide. if you put a gun to your head, before you pull the trigger put the gun down and take a minute to think about what your doing. if your trying anything else to try and kill and yourself, stop what your doing and take a minute to think about your friends and family and those you care about. if that doesn't help, sorry.
It is a bloody falsehood that cutting or injuring one's self always/directly leads to suicidal tendencies. Same for drug usage. People just always assume that, and instantly think that the person needs immediate help.
Sorry, that always touches a nerve when I hear/read that.
All I have said applies to people who truly want to die, not people that do it just for attention or pity.
More often than not it's a cry for help. With this understanding, many of the analysis of suicide I see here seem to obscure or downplay the potential to help someone in need. Obviously if they have already gone through with it, whether they truly "wanted" or not, it's too late to help them, but one should probably give the benefit of the doubt since I don't think there's any way to know for sure whether suicide is what some would rationally want. I have to wonder if suicide is ever wanted. At most it may just be what people think they want in a temporary phase of confusion - making invention all the more urgent.
More often than not it's a cry for help. With this understanding, many of the analysis of suicide I see here seem to obscure or downplay the potential to help someone in need.
If someone really wanted to go through with killing themselves, they would not just go around and let people know. They would just do it one day. If someone goes around talking about it or blatantly threatens to do it...they do not really mean it. Thus the "attention" part. The line between "Crying for attention" and "Crying for help" is a very thin one, if not totally blurred altogether.
I think that's a generalization, Devoidless. On the one hand, you may witness a lot of people within that category of appearing suicidal, especially on the internet where actual death may be the least likely, but even then the best assessment comes in retrospect...too late. Naturally with this kind of categorization, the "cry wolf" factor comes into play, which may be 'tough medicine' in some circumstances, but a tragic mistake in others, as the conditions of the emotional instability that lead people to talk about suicide are subject to rapid change. I also believe there are some cases where people do let people know, and then are in real danger of going through with it.
In that case, Darwinism takes over. If an individual is that unstable to begin with, no amount of medication or therapy can change their genes. Then if they have children, the children may have a disposition towards mental illness and suicidal tendencies. Repeat cycle.
In the end, it is better for Homo sapiens if individuals that do not have the will to live are not reproducing. Unless, of course, a whole species of animals that lives only to die is viewed as desirable. For the planet, it would be a great service. However I doubt that most people share my views.
The way I see it is: If someone wants to end their life, regardless of the reason, let them. It's their body and life, they choose what to do with it and we can't stop them.
Let's not be too hasty. Social Darwinism is already questionable in itself in terms of its validity and moral integrity, but the claims you're making lend themselves to particular doubts above and beyond the general sort. I'll try to break this down.
First, the kind of a instability I'm talking about, is just that it is subject to change, for better or worse. Change is an intrinsic part of instability after all. Given that suicidal urges can come and go in this sense, I doubt that there is a strong genetic basis here.
Also, suicide in general is much too complicated a consideration to be reduced to speculative genetics. I see no reason to believe that those who display suicide qualities at some point in their life will pass on those same qualities to their children. Even if you could demonstrate some statistical correlations across generations, this would be still obscured by the shared environmental conditions that members of a family shared in their development.
Furthermore, even if you could highlight a Darwinistic trend of a failure to reproduce due to suicidal tendencise, it would be a purely descriptive observation, which does not in itself imply any value judgements or moral conclusions about what ought to be done or not done. The kind of judgements that you read into such a trend would be your own, and can be challenged on a separate basis.
In the end, it is better for Homo sapiens...For the planet, it would be a great service.
Why is it better for humans? Why is it better for the planet? Wouldn't those who don't have a will to live tend to be the same people who don't have a will to reproduce? If reproduction is seen as a good in itself, then it shouldn't make a difference what people do - no further good or bad could come it this way. Even if suicidal people did reproduce, by this same logic, it would be seen a good thing, even if the offspring failed to reproduce, because it will still be an instance of reproductive success for the present generation. As for the "good of the planet", I don't think the issue is within the scale where we can talk in terms of noticeable consequences for the whole planet. It is a social issue that primarily concerns individuals so I'm not sure how to address it beyond that level of analysis.
I agree. Single suicides dont really have any bearing on the overall condition of the world. As far as carrying on some sort of "suicide gene", the law of averages would disallow a strain to last too long, due to the innate desire to bloody well off it.
The reaction of most people towards the subject of suicide (the shock and a heartfelt belief that it is just...just wrong) is very interesting to me. While I understand that most of these people have been raised with religious abhortion towards the guaranteed damnation of the poor unfortunates soul, I wonder if there is something more primal about it. Is it possible that we, as a species, find an individuals unwillingness to desire life, to survive,.. unsettling? The fight/flight response is in every species on earth. I doubt anyone hearing "fire" in a movie theatre would put their legs up and rejoice that, at least their popcorn would stay warm. Perhaps we have made it a MORAL sin because purposefully chugging a bottle of pills or swan-diving off of a bridge goes against our basic wiring.
Forget Social Darwinism, I am going with good old straight Darwinism. Do you see a whole mess of giraffes walking around that want to kill themselves? Nope. XD Survival for a whole species and a desire to die are not generally held hand in hand.
Suicide is a result of mental instability. And last I checked, mental illness can indeed be passed down to later generations. Somewhere between 80-99 percent of all suicides are due to some kind of mental disorder. In general, mentally well people do not just wake up one day and suddenly go "Hey, offing myself sounds like a swell idea!"
In theory, a species could become suicidal as a whole. The genes that cause mental disorders which can lead to suicide could be spread and passed down to later generations on a large scale. After several generations, suicide would be seen as a socially accepted and normal thing. And so on. Granted, that would never really happen. But hey! It could. ^_^
Oh, and it would be better for the planet because humans as a whole are parasitic, destructive and wasteful beings. A plant sans humans would be a good one, give it time to heal and recoup.
Do you see a whole mess of giraffes walking around that want to kill themselves? Survival for a whole species and a desire to die are not generally held hand in hand.
..that would be because humans have certain cerebral capacities that animals do not, that allow them to make decisions that override instincts. I'd sooner believe that there is a genetic basis to this self-preservation instinct which would explain why suicide is prevalent in humans but not in animals. It is precisely because of suicide's non-genetic determinants that it is a human problem. If it reason why we don't see suicidal giraffes were because it was eliminated by Darwinism evolution in the past, we would expect that the same thing would have already happened with humans - humans being the far more evolved species. On the contrary though, making arguments that attempt to use simplistic Darwinism logic seems to support my line of reasoning more than it supports yours.
mental illness can indeed be passed down to later generations
Some mental illness can, but what of it? People react and adapt in different ways to the same sorts of challenges, and even then, they may also face different challenges - not necessarily the sort that lead to suicidal tendencies. Also, having a mental illness is by no means a "dead end" from neither a human nor a Darwinism standpoint.
