Comment by tjwebbnorfolk
6 days ago
I say this as someone whose father killed himself when I was in 5th grade:
The "victims" who suffer after a suicide are the living, not the dead. These kinds of "modernizations" are transparent PC nonsense made up by well-intentioned do-gooders who have no idea how to represent the interests of other people who have a lived experience that they don't understand.
The person is dead either way. There's literally no way to sugarcoat this fact. We'd rather you just speak in plain, honest language than trying to make it sound less bad somehow.
What makes “committed suicide” any more plain or honest than “died by suicide”?
I don't have a big issue with that particular phrase itself. Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here. Attributing a suicide to anyone other than the actor starts to appear oxymoronic very quickly. Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.
But really it's the transparent and ham-handed attempts by some others to smooth over the sharp edges of reality merely by re-phrasing how things are written.
People generally don't want pity, but these re-phrasings accomplish nothing other than to make clear that one person feels sorry for another.
> Attributing a suicide to anyone other than the actor starts to appear oxymoronic very quickly.
No one is an island. We’re all deeply intertwined/interconnected. We’re the sum total of our lived experiences and without a doubt some have lived far more challenging lives than others and are influenced by factors that would lead just about anyone down a dark path.
The grief felt by those left behind is the result of that aforementioned interconnectedness.
Getting back to the quoted bit, isn’t this a bit like saying “attributing grief to anyone other than the person experiencing it is oxymoronic”?
My point is not to diminish the impact on those left behind in any way. Clearly this is a traumatic event that causes excruciating grief.
But I think we also need to be honest about the environmental factors that lead to suicide. Hopelessness is one of the large causes. If there are systemic reasons causing people to feel hopeless, and if those systemic problems could theoretically be changed/improved, and such improvement lowered the suicide rate, there’s a strong case to be made that the systemic factors share the responsibility.
> Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.
I don’t think it’s a given. Clearly some lives are far more complicated than others. There exists a subset of people for whom that complication will become an insurmountable problem. Often those people have been traumatized, or have never learned the tools necessary to work through their feelings.
Some people are bullied into killing themselves. Should that be attributed wholly to the person who was bullied?
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> Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here.
No, passive voice is not in general designed to conceal or obscure the actor. Especially not in the sentence here.
There were valid similar complains about crime reporting. But the language there was different. The sentence "The innocent McKay family was inadvertently affected by this enforcement operation" is trying to hide culpability. We can discuss that. These two are incomparable:
- A deputy-involved shooting occurred. (Ok, we are avoiding the actor. We do not know who was shooting.)
- A person died by Suicide. (Clear to anyone who done what.)
The latter implies that suicide just happened to the person, like they got hit by a bus.
The former correctly attributes the action to the person who killed themselves. Certainly the motivations and causes that drive people to suicide are complex, but ultimately it is a choice the person makes.
"Committed" is perhaps not the best word, since it's associated with crimes (and suicide is not a crime in many places anymore), but it's at least more active.
It assigns agency to the person who died.
Think about it this way: I have relative who is vegan, so she has been trying to convince me to kill myself for many years now.
I can still choose whether I do it though, and obviously I chose not to so far, although during COVID I didn’t have much other social interaction, so I nearly went through with it.
I had agency throughout though. I’m not dead because I chose not to go through with it.
That’s the difference.
whats veganism got to do with comitting suicide?
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Comparing nagging from a relative to wrongful prosecution is asinine. You might as well say that you had heartburn and it didn't kill you, so what's with all these people dying from heart attacks?
What?
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Because the latter implies some external attribute to it?
That's what makes the latter more accurate.
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That's a really hard thing to go through. I'm sorry you had to bear that as a fifth grader.
It's possible that both you and your dad are victims in different ways.