I read that the police were extinguishing the guy who set himself on fire yesterday only two minutes after it began. Obviously, the guy did not want to live. Putting out the fire so quickly does not ease his suffering and would only increase it if he were to live. As long as nothing else is at risk of catching fire perhaps it would be best to stay away. What do you think?
I’ll be a bit blunt, but at what point shall we leave some things to natural selection… Very often, those who set themselves on fire, die very soon after due to infections…
The bigger problem is, in this case, the inability of the system/society to recognise and deal with mental health issues on time or at all… About a quarter of Americans reported Mental health issues… In the EU only about 10% or less in countries with high social awareness…
So, I’d rather ask how to prevent those things happening in the future?
They have done a lot of studies and the best way they’ve found is not to highlight and report on suicides to avoid copycats, not to validate their reasons for doing it to avoid others feeling it’s a worthwhile option and to provide easy and repercussion free mental health counseling as well as practical material support.
Sadly no one takes any of these seriously, the press have got better at reporting deaths by suicide respectfully and quietly but social media always spreads them twice as loud, even lemmy was pretty unanimously angry at meta for doing the right thing and reducing engagement on news stories celebrating and validating the last person to do this because they supported his message - now everyone is passing this giuys manifesto around and saying he had some good points, don’t be surprised if it happens again.
The real problem for this guy was biological and cultural, he had a problem in his brain which our culture made hard for him to deal with in any reasonable way and I think the amount of hyperbole and exaggeration in the common discourse is a huge part if it. Especially on weird corners of reddit and bubble communities like lemmy.
Yes billionaires are awful and there are cultural problems but it’s the same issue with so many things, the individual people are just regular humans in a good position in a bad society - they’re not actually evil in the true sense of the word, they’re not hell bent on destroying the world- just like most of us they think they’re good people doing good things. Likewise the government is just our best attempt at organizing the country and its a complex mess with all sorts of problems which lead to people making poor or selfish choices but it’s not a conspiracy to hurt people and they don’t have plans to enslave us or turn us into weird human animal hybrids…
[OK so Saudia arabias linear citie did plan to make human animal hybrids using gene editing but they scalled that back and it certainly wasn’t a plan other governments were in on, I don’t think his own government was really in on it]
If we want to help calm things we should try to remind everyone that really humans aren’t so bad and that life is difficult, uncomfortable and often tragic but it’s also incredibly mundane and fairly meaningless which is OK, actually its kinda nice.