Technically correct, practically a useless distinction? It's not like "stop suffering, keep living" solutions grow on a tree. One has to contend with:
- Irreversible or hard to reverse brain damage/dysfunction. It doesn't matter if the cause is traumatic experiences, innate conditions or substance abuse, effects are equally hard to remedy
- Irreversible or hard to reverse physical health problems
- Low social capital at late stage in life. If someone wants to have loving friends and family at 50 starting from being lonely and estranged, are they really going to have same results as someone who has been building these up from childhood?
- Financial constraints and difficulty of learning new marketable skills in adulthood
- Clash between reality of surrounding society and expectations that are a deeply ingrained part of one's character
The solutions proposed seem to be drugs (either sanctioned ones like SSRIs or increasingly street ones like ecstasy and mushrooms) and talk therapy premised on one having a Freudian complex in one's head rather than experiencing genuine hardship. I am not saying any of these are totally useless. Even having a few drinks gives one a holiday from endless gloom and can spur one to form social connections or reach conclusions that are still meaningful while sober. But on the whole, I am not sold on treating people like houseplants who are considered diseased if not perfectly happy just sitting around with basic needs provided for. I would rather see more effort to improve human lives in more fundamental ways. And, as a last resort, acceptance that for some it was really not worth it at the end rather than labeling them insane to assuage our own discomfort and avoid questions of our own responsibilities
It's not a useless distinction. People downplay other's suicidal ideations all the time because they underestimate other people's pain or are unsympathetic to it. Those people need to know that this is everyone's problem.
That would be nice, but "A Man named Otto" is fiction, not a documentary. It's even more far fetched to suppose that entire society is going to change than to expect that any single person will pull themselves out of the abyss by their own shoestrings or using magic potions cooked up by Pfizer. People want all kind of things like life without suffering or drinking without hangovers, but they also come to realize that reality has limited options.
- Irreversible or hard to reverse brain damage/dysfunction. It doesn't matter if the cause is traumatic experiences, innate conditions or substance abuse, effects are equally hard to remedy
- Irreversible or hard to reverse physical health problems
- Low social capital at late stage in life. If someone wants to have loving friends and family at 50 starting from being lonely and estranged, are they really going to have same results as someone who has been building these up from childhood?
- Financial constraints and difficulty of learning new marketable skills in adulthood
- Clash between reality of surrounding society and expectations that are a deeply ingrained part of one's character
The solutions proposed seem to be drugs (either sanctioned ones like SSRIs or increasingly street ones like ecstasy and mushrooms) and talk therapy premised on one having a Freudian complex in one's head rather than experiencing genuine hardship. I am not saying any of these are totally useless. Even having a few drinks gives one a holiday from endless gloom and can spur one to form social connections or reach conclusions that are still meaningful while sober. But on the whole, I am not sold on treating people like houseplants who are considered diseased if not perfectly happy just sitting around with basic needs provided for. I would rather see more effort to improve human lives in more fundamental ways. And, as a last resort, acceptance that for some it was really not worth it at the end rather than labeling them insane to assuage our own discomfort and avoid questions of our own responsibilities