MODERN SCARLET LETTER CRISIS
E. Perryman
6.8.18
For those folks reacting with disbelief over recent suicides, I have some thoughts to share. Unfortunately, as chemically balanced people cry out about how suicides need to stop happening and how they can be avoided, children and adults suffering are pushed further away, diminished, and marginalized. As we speak, the mentally frail cringe. These voices can’t call out and now will shrink back inside as a result of shame and fear for being weak and selfish. This historically redundant scarlet letter isn’t worn by the living. This demarcation is eternally embedded past the grave on the selfish people who took their life.
1. What kills a suicidal person isn’t an act of self; it isn’t them. How can you be selfish when you have no true sense of self? Unfortunately being blamed for “taking your life” adds insult to injury and perhaps insures that someone else will succumb.
2. The words “suicide” and “taking your life” are themselves judgmental. How do you take a life when you are unable to control your mental state?
3. Mental illness is treatable not curable.
4. People with a chemical imbalance aren’t always able to be “helped” by medicine or hotlines. Perhaps some people would rather live with temporary happiness over a lifetime of numbness and detachment. Terminally physically ill people face this devastating “choice” too.
5. How many “have everything” people around us do we make sure to check on? Who is struggling right next to us who we ignore because they have achieved material gains?
6. So by the logic of WHY did they do it, they had EVERYTHING to live for, I guess if you DON’T have everything, it’s more understandable to END your life and you are inherently less worthy. I reject this.
7. When has shame worked effectively with people? Doesn’t there need to be some healthy ego to take pride for living for others? Are you a martyr if you know you are martyring? How does that work if you feel like you don’t exist?
8. By all means, help people as much as you can but as in cancer, sometimes the disease takes over and hope is gone. We can only honor the lost and work with the living. If it is scary and unhinging for us as survivors, I can’t imagine how it must feel for those who cannot escape the pain.
#akintsucrooner
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