What if suicide is not a public health issue but one of social justice?
How would that change our approach to reversing its epidemic rates?
vol. 4 issue 6
Greetings,
Please forgive the interruption to your Sunday, a day I personally love to leave open so that I can give my whirring brain a break, but it seems an important Gestalt as I make myself a cup of bean soup for breakfast…
What if we reframe the astounding suicide epidemic in the US not as a public health crisis, but as a critical juncture of democracy v. corporate power, thus making it a social justice issue?
Giving suicide over to the medical professionals and public health officials who are agents — wittingly or unwittingly — of the pharmaco-insurance cartel, is only going to prolong and exacerbate the epidemic, which now stretches for the first time in measured public health history, across nearly every single demographic.
From my citizen scientist’s perspective, I have observed that as we have brought discussions about depression out of the shadows, the pharmaceutical industry has kept up, making sure we know that antidepressants are always available, and that we should not be ashamed to take them. And then the medical industry, I mean profession, ensures they are delivered in kind.
In other words, in a pernicious way, I think that by profiting off our pain, which is akin to enslaving us, Capitalists are delighted with our depression, the correlative being that suicide threatens their establishment.
In fact, consider that it wasn’t that long ago that suicide was considered a sin, a major taboo that is still not listed in most obituaries as the cause of death. Why? Here’s a crazy notion: because if you need a large class of people who are afraid of the power at the top, then, you’re going to want to thwart any means of them escaping that power.
Bluntly put: if we didn’t have the working class to exploit, how would the One Percent stay in power?
As for the sin part, although I have hinted at it in here before, and will do so more in the near future: what is sin really but a monopolization of moral code, packaged as a way to instill fear and obedience to a hierarchical regime?
This is not a rant against Capitalism, however, so please, don’t sniff off if you tend to recoil any time you hear anything remotely anti-profit.
That might just be your tongue-in-groove programming, making this post perhaps an exercise (however tiny) in testing your willingness to consider innovative paths to liberation, with or without your pockets full of cash, your choice.
Setting up my point: putting aside those whose depression has become so ingrained in their genetic coding and their nervous systems that medication has become the only way they can function — and there actually are data in support of that comparatively small cohort of such patients internationally (my own personal insight into epigenetics, unsupported by any study other than interacting with people over 5+ decades, is that unhealed trauma is inherited through our DNA, and can manifest as refractory depression) — consider that if the greater part of the citizenry is medicated, that is to say, their parasympathetic and autonomic nervous systems are tamped down, then digging to the bottom of the depression is less urgent.
Which likely means it will be that much harder to make contact with what so often is described as roiling at the rock bottom of depression: FUCKING RAGE.
And why is there so much rage? Uh, let me get my list. For starters, there is the systemic denigration of anything that does not support the status quo (see statement above about the One Percent), which is entrenched for one purpose only: to support the Capital, ie, the head. But also, the money, the “capital”, the top, the thing that rules all the rest of us.
Some of us do prosper, regardless of whether or not we fit the status quo mold. To argue otherwise would be ignorant. But at what cost to our ultimate freedom and sense of autonomy? Because even if you manage to make a mint and can live more sequestered from the crap that the majority of humans have to deal with, you’re making that money off of a system that is utterly exploitative of the Earth, because that is the nature of Empires.
So, no matter what, Earth is currently going to either have to keel over or chew us up and spit us out. And you are part of that dilemma, even if it crushes your soul to reconcile with that, and to acknowledge the fact that, as Dylan said, “you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”
But anyway, back to the rage thing. I say, it’s a rage against conscription. And just as powerful is the rage against the cognitive dissonance created by The System telling us that we are not conscribed to some fate of always flowing our power upwards.
As an aside, it has always intrigued me that The System chose Freud over Jung, since Freud liked to focus on heads and penises, while Jung was concerned about the universal Mother consciousness. But, I digress, other than to say it was out of Freud’s one-track mind, and not Jung’s until recently anyway, that psychoanalysis — the Ur-talk therapy of the 20th Century — has flowed.
Which is to say that, regardless of its genesis, there was a time in the mid-last century when psychiatrists were trained in far more words-based methods of therapies for treating depression. Words are perhaps even more powerful than even the tiniest of molecules that comprise nearly 100% of the drugs on the market, because words are made of letters and letters of the alphabet are made of symbols.
And symbols? Well, aside from being free to distribute, they transcend all barriers, if you happen to speak the language of the peope whose thoughts they describe, and so are known to magically filter through and impact several regions of the entire brain, knitting it together in ways science, because it doesn’t have the capacity yet to ask better questions (given its adherence to empire/empiricism), has barely even begun to map.
History shows that words are so powerful, a conquered land’s native language is among the very first thing an empire abolishes and destroys. I suppose you could even consider that the pharmaco industry, in its pervasive way that transcends the agency of the individuals who conduct clinical trials or those therapists who truly do bring compassion to their work, has sought to wipe out language in favor of pharmaco-treatment. An Empire of Drugs.
Anyway, words establish narratives. And people who are depressed have a common theme: they want to be free of the pain. Whatever the reason for their pain, they want to escape it.
Jeeze, sounds like depression can be equated to slavery. And that idea I just had of us living in an Empire of Drugs isn’t too far off.
Regardless, if enough people start creating and sharing narratives of freedom, eventually we can kiss Empire and all its fallacies of hierarchy goodbye. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass, My Dear Leader! Mwah!
But medication, not words, is what gets prescribed, paid for (if you’re lucky to have the insurance that will cover it), and promoted. It’s what is taught to our medical professionals because it is largely pharmaceutical money that is funding our halls of medical academia.
Sure, there is lip service (ha!) to combined therapies which include “talk modalities” plus medication, but the controlled studies that compare purely talk therapy to medication, are few in number and somehow seem to always suggest that they are inferior to any method that includes drugs. Why? Because guess who pays for clinical trials? If you answered drug companies, you are correct!!!
Which is why therapists will eventually only be meaningfully recompensed for their time if they throw some drugs at you.
Here’s the step just before my point: suicide bypasses all of this nonsense where someone else is in charge of your freedom.
It’s a wholly autonomous route to effect utter liberation. It sucks for the people left behind, but it seems to work. It’s only with the nascent literature on psychedelics that science is starting to have to admit that there is some kind of life on the “other side”, so for now at least, I have to conclude that if a person chooses suicide, then they leave here and go “there”, wherever and whatever that means, and no longer have to be a “subject”, as in a slave to some outside authority’s bullshit construct of what life is all about. (One day I think we will actually know what the “other” side is, and factor it into our policymaking, but maybe I am getting ahead of myself.)
Which is to say, why not go to the other place if the more painful life is here in a society where you are told you should be ashamed of yourself for simply being you?
And here’s my point: It seems to me that diminished freedom correlates with a decreased fear of death. So, if we would stop pretending that our society actually is democratic, free, and committed to staying that way, and actually release our grip on resources, and let people alone to choose how to live their own lives, they will almost certainly stop looking for the permanent exit from this shit hole reality.
That is not anarchy. Anarchy, the kind we’re told to fear anyway, is actually just unfocused rage that finally blows out the center as it seeks to obliterate the top down structure that forces people to compact their hearts and minds. In other words, anarchy is what happens when people are enraged, ie, forced to swallow their rage.
So, we could say that antidepressants in an Empire of Drugs are anti-anarchy pills.
So, if rage is at the bottom of depression, why not work to mitigate what is outrageous so there is less rage to express? What is outrageous to me is disrespect for a person and that person’s choices. That disrespect is what seems to be leading people to fear death less and less.
There is a conundrum here. If you’re one of the ones who needs frightened and numb people but you can’t drug them into submission anymore, then what? If the masses don’t fear death, then you can’t control them as easily.
But for the people who love those unafraid to die, death is not the preferred outcome.
So what is the solution?
Which is the thought I had that sent me scurrying to the computer to get it out of my head: to prevent suicide, we have to prevent death from becoming the only remaining autonomous route to freedom.
And guess what that means? You have to find ways to be loving. Tolerant. Kind. Patient. And we have to do it en masse so that the shitty system will collapse faster, and so that subsequently, the more humane one, budding through the soil though it is, also rises faster.
Ugh, I know! It sounds so Jesus-y, but yeah. Don’t be an asshole. Do what you can to support the freedom of others, and then you will automatially help lower the rate of suicide. Forgive grudges. Ignore top down instructions. Think for yourself.
Or, put in a less Sunday, more midrash-meets-science, kind of way: suicide seen as a social justice issue that you can do something about by interrogating the nature of your own freedom and how to improve it, and then actually taking action, seems more likely to result in less deaths than if we outsource it to public health officials who are just going to do what they are told to do, ultimately, no matter what they personally might think and feel…
So, my bean soup is done now. Be good to each other.
Peace,
Whitney
I love this so much. I've never been one to do the knee jerk platitudes of suicide being "so wrong" or "cowardly". Sometimes we just have to go; to a place that we ALL end up and at least that way, you do have some sovereignty over your departure from this plane. And I agree 100% that the nihilism that has seemingly come out of nowhere in epidemic proportions, is a result or reaction to feeling a complete loss of control to 'the machine' that is modern life. Coloring outside the lines is not allowed, for the most part, particularly for those who are left out of the economic hierarchy. I also have my own theory about the necessity of a great human 'die-off', that may be only just beginning. Very good stuff
Self termination comes in two flavors: 1. Once your body ceases to allow for a self-sufficient life, either due to age or illness, you may decide to end it, which I consider a fundamental human right. 2. Suicide out of desperation and/or depression. For what it's worth, I completely agree with the above essay and it's view on the latter case. Especially the reflexive prescription of questionable Psychopharmaka by the medical establishment is counterproductive, unless you own shares in Pfizer.