And you are taking the exact opposite stance. Suicide is the one crime where the person is both victim and perpetrator. You can't just choose to look at one and not the other. He is victim and perpetrator in one.
People treating suicide as pure-victim is absolutely wrong, not in the least because it tends to make it look much more appealing. The real victims of suicide are the loved ones and close friends. They are the ones that suffer, and they are the ones that are truly blameless "victims" (in so much as anyone can be blameless). There is a reason why suicide is considered to be a selfish crime. I am not lambasting Aaron here, but you have to treat suicide for what it is, rather than turn it into a heroic act of defiance and finally sticking it to the man. If only to make people think twice about taking the "easy way" out for themselves.
> The real victims of suicide are the loved ones and close friends.
This is bullshit. And so fucking insensitive. This idea, that anybody owes it to their ‘friends’ to force themselves to stay alive when they want to die, just so those ‘friends’ can continue to feel good about themselves and don't have to deal with the reality that their friend wants to die, is completely fucked up. Have some empathy for the people dealing with those feelings, not their selfish ‘friends’.
I think you're being a bit harsh here. As many people have pointed over the last day, most suicide decisions are made in less than an hour, often less than 5 minutes. A substantial portion of people who 'want to die' don't really want to die all the time - they have more and less depressed periods, and during one of those periods they make an impulsive decision.
Suicide has a lasting impact on friends and family; it significantly increases the risk that another family member will also attempt to kill themselves. I don't know if you've ever dealt with depression, but the impact on friends and family is the one thing that consistently stops me when I have suicidal thoughts. I don't think it's a stretch to say that, if your friends and family support you (or don't know), killing yourself impacts them in a substantial way that you should consider.
You're right that most people who want to die don't want to die all the time, and suicide decisions are impulsive to the extent that that they're made when the suicidal person wants to die (which is only some of the time) and not when they don't.
However, I think even when the decision is "impulsive", it's a decision to execute a plan whose details have been worked about over a long period of time. Usually suicidal feelings aren't acted upon the first time they surface. I'd imagine that it's actually very difficult to kill oneself, and it takes a lot of preparation to do it right, and a lot of determination to will oneself into following through with it.
I think "I love my friends and if I kill myself now I'll never get to see them again" is a valid reason to keep oneself alive. But shaming and pressuring suicidal people, making them feel bad (as if they don't feel bad enough already) for the impact their decision will have on others is totally out of order. Everybody has the right to choose to end their life and they shouldn't be shamed for it. At the same time, that choice does not exist in a vacuum, and it's worth looking at the external pressures that influenced the person's decision, and external entities can absolutely be blamed (and held responsible) for a person's suicide.
(I have dealt with some suicidal feelings before, but who hasn't? I don't want to come across as authoritative on this: I'm speculating based on my own experiences and those of other people with whom I've talked about this stuff. I'm completely open to correction and to hearing other people's perspectives and I appreciate your comment. I have no time though for the kind of victim-blaming that some people are doing in this thread.)
I've seen a lot of comments, here and otherwise, with regards to Aaron's suicide with many of them trying to skirt the issue, or apparently not understanding the subject at hand in the slightest. Many of these being people seemingly believing that he didn't think anything through and as if his brain was a processors that received an execute command and simply followed through the actions. However, this post is one of the few that provides insight, a lot of insight into the minds of Aaron Swartz and others like him, and how he may have actually been thinking things through over the course of time. Suicide isn't a person jumping off a ledge it's someone standing at a ledge slowly being pushed off by a thousand little things behind them until they slip.
I was going to write this on the parent, but I didn't because I thought it was tangential. You have to realize this is my personal experience, but it speaks volumes.
The scariest, closest to suicide moment I ever experienced was when I was shopping at a mall. It wasn't very busy, and I was feeling very... manic might be the word. Head down, headphones in, speed walking between errands. I had to keep moving, no matter what. I noticed the sort-of cut-away in the floor, so you could see from the top floor down to the ground. It was only 3 stories, but I had a really strong, sudden impulse to vault over the railing and see what it would do to me. Maybe I could land on my head, that might work. It was something I had never really considered before, it wasn't a very efficient way to do things, but it just gripped me very suddenly and all of a sudden it was a huge crisis.
Being suicidal, generally, is death by a thousand cuts. You have a predisposition, and all the stresses in life push you in that direction (as you've said). But the jumping off the ledge moment is crucial; personally, I have strategies for daily temptations like putting away knives in the kitchen. It's the spur of something unexpected, the sudden, strong, irrational impulse that really scares me.
Did you not see the quotes around it? Some people do turn to suicide because they perceive it to be a solution to their problems. Painting suicide victims is heros and martyrs as doing no one a service.
Can you point me to where I said they were heroes or martyrs? I said there was complex psychology involved, not pop-psych extremism.
duairc's point is that multiple parties can be responsible for something - that it's not appropriate to just blame the victim. duairc wasn't painting Swartz as a hero, a martyr, a villain, or even just a regular guy - or even that he's not primarily responsible.
We really need to get away from the idea that responsibility can only ever be assigned to one entity.
People treating suicide as pure-victim is absolutely wrong, not in the least because it tends to make it look much more appealing. The real victims of suicide are the loved ones and close friends. They are the ones that suffer, and they are the ones that are truly blameless "victims" (in so much as anyone can be blameless). There is a reason why suicide is considered to be a selfish crime. I am not lambasting Aaron here, but you have to treat suicide for what it is, rather than turn it into a heroic act of defiance and finally sticking it to the man. If only to make people think twice about taking the "easy way" out for themselves.