The blog post itself discusses the perspective of protecting the depressed members of the hacker community; but there are many parallels from the hacker community to the academic community.And what I learned was that this view is wrong. Suicide is no more a heightened reaction to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than depression is just being extra sad. Most of us won’t kill ourselves, no matter how bad things get. The common thread among people who commit suicide is that they are suicidal.
Wednesday, 23 January 2013
“The common thread among people who commit suicide is that they are suicidal.”
Remembering Aaron by taking care of each other
1 comment:
Comment policy:
We reserve the right to edit all comments. In particular, we will not tolerate phobic content (race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, mental health status, etc.) nor personal attacks or threats toward another commenter, significantly off-topic, or is an obvious trolling attempt.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Thank you for this.
ReplyDeleteI have generally been very impressed with one part of the reaction to Aaron's death. Many people have said "the best way to remember Aaron is by stopping" X, for various X. (E.g. stopping closed journals, the prosecution of crimes like that).
But most people have quite rightly avoided saying that X caused his death. His death was a complex tapestry, most of which we will never know.
This came up with the poor woman in the Kate hospital phone call prank. It was so easy to accuse the pranksters, but in the same way her death was not caused by them, and it's important to understand the difference.
So again, thanks for this.