Rational Suicide

I think suicide is very often irrational, but on the basis that most judgments like that are founded on incredibly complex underlying, and often hidden, motivators. It’s never so cut-and-dry as a conscious thought process, despite appearances, and despite what one may wish were true, as that would greatly simplify problems like this. The logic of the human mind isn’t merely logic. There are hidden emotional and cognitive stressors that can skew one’s train of thought in a particular direction even despite the possibility of better ways of approaching a given problem. We’re creatures of habit for the same reason – brains have a tendency to learn how to do brain-stuff better as time goes on, which can potentially weave frescos of distorted pathways in thought. That ultimately leads to people viewing their circumstances in a way that excludes any potential for betterment, while cementing the notion that there is no alternative, both of which are almost never the case. With few exceptions, anyhow – physical pain and physical illness can cause similar thought processes, but physical problems have the potential to be much harder to change or escape. It’s probably safe to assume the thought process is at least near-rational in those cases.

Now, you mention the problems of getting involuntarily institutionalized and how that impacts employability later on… and you’ve got a damn good point. A lot of this stuff only serves to reinforce mental illness, and social instability in the very people these services exist to help (supposedly). If it’s a truism that not being completely honest with a doctor is the smart thing to do, that’s indicative of an systemic problem in the institution.

Rationality isn’t a system of pie-in-the-sky beliefs, it’s got its own underlying rules governing which ideas can or cannot be attributed with the quality of “rational.” Generally speaking, suicide is something that a person comes to because of pain, be that psychic pain or physical pain, and pain has a subtle tendency to blind people to what’s going on, since the pain is very hard to factor out of the equation. As a result, a person who has a limb mangled might think there is no hope for medical help and try to remove his limb immediately, despite the existence of other possible courses of action which might better relieve the pain without causing unnecessary damage in the process. People never think clearly when their mind is full of an excess of any particular emotion, and that’s only one factor in what might distort a person’s decision-making. Cognitive biases are exceptionally hard to isolate and mitigate by oneself, since they are emotionally resonant ideas, and they tend to latch onto any thought-process which might hold relevance to them, which is a lot like going swimming in the ocean after attaching 20lb weights to either leg, then wondering why it’s so difficult to stay afloat.

That being said, the pharmaceutical and psychiatric field is ripe with all sorts of problems that make it harder for the doctors who actually do care about their patients, to do the right thing by their patients. It’s upsetting for everyone, and no less for the doctors caught in the middle of the bureaucracy. That doesn’t mean the system can’t help people who need it, but it does create the need for an unnecessary level of self-advocacy and careful thinking to avoid pitfalls.

@benna: I had a similar experience following a total breakdown when I was a teenager – jumped in my car and just drove south-east as far as I could, wound up in some mountains, stranded, working day-labor and sleeping in my car. There must have been something in the mountain air, because I haven’t seen the world the same way since then. It’s funny how your perspective snaps back into an intense focus sometimes, and you realize how dumb you’ve been acting, how the things you’ve been doing don’t make any sense even though they seemed reasonable when you were doing them. Perspective can be a huge jumblefuck of confusion and it’s annoying sometimes. Those moments of pure clarity are the only reason our species hasn’t nuked itself off the face of the Earth, I think.

Emotional pain is an emotion. It’s got the word right there in the title. Physical pain is a different story, a lot of the time, because there exist a huge host of incurable, painful medical conditions that can’t be adequately treated, which leaves very little room for positive advancement or relief from the pain they cause. Emotional pain can be helped much more easily, in a lot of cases. In theory, anyhow. It’s often hard to figure out why someone’s emotional pain exists, or why it won’t go away. Usually, some outside insight and perspective is necessary. Which means a willingness to even try things that may be uncomfortable, because sometimes it is exceptionally uncomfortable to wrestle with the monsters of the mind. It’s just as uncomfortable to plot a course towards suicide and start down the path that leads to it, though.