Reply #62: An important read concerning mental health

[stickdog]

http://www.indybay.org/news/2004/12/1710156.php

Society doesn’t allow us to talk about suicide. Fuck society. I’m going to talk about it now. Have you ever told a friend that you were thinking of killing yourself? Do you know what happens when you do? You will be told, “get a therapist.” You will be accused of blackmail. People will view it as “not normal,” and look for easy answers: substance abuse? Mental “disorders”? What does the DSM-IV book have to say in diagnosing you? The great majority of people panic at the mere suggestion of suicide: They want to wash their hands of your pain, and turn you over to the psychiatric “authorities.” If you confess suicidal ideations in the United States, you can be committed to an asylum against your will. You can’t trust anybody. And that, of course, compounds your sense of isolation, the sad understanding that nobody, absolutely nobody, is there for you or cares enough to help as you define the exact help you seek. The moment you confess you are thinking of suicide, you become an enemy to the illusions of peace of mind that others cling to desperately.

I know something about suicide. It is never a solitary crime. As Antonin Artaud once wrote about Vincent Van Gogh taking his own life: “Van Gogh was suicided by society.” I know a lot about suicide and the kind of people who choose it. Suicide is always an alteration of the social order; an assault on “normal” life, whatever that is, and the assumptions that prop up the big lies that deform our cultures. A suicide is insupportable for those who live careful, comfortable and cowardly lives although they, on some level, also detest things as they are. Suicide, when committed by the courageous, is a form of speech, a protest, as much as that of the self-immolating monks of Vietnam or the suicide bombers of postmodern times.

Do you want to know how to kill an Authentic Journalist or a revolutionary? Do you want to know how to provoke a truth-seeker and truth-teller into taking his or her own life? Play a con game on him and her: that’s how. Tell her you love her. Tell him you love him. Tell him and her that you’re different than all the dishonest people out there. Take the steps to show him and her that you are different, that you are like him and her, a truth-seeker and truth-teller. Get him or her to drop his or her guard, to open up. He or she will love you more intensely and generously than you have ever known. There is nothing he or she won’t do for you, so happy to feel, for the first time in probably a long time, that he is loved, that she is not alone. And then, when he or she are at their softest and most tender point, lightly drop the hint that it’s all been a lie. Reveal that you have successfully deceived him or her, in the very exact ways that you promised him or her with gooey eyes and poetic tones that you would never, ever, do to him or her.

That’s the first part: The suicides I have known have almost all been about love promised and not delivered. Let me be very clear: It is not the fault of the lover who could not love him or her enough. It is the fault of the entire community and culture for being unable and unwilling to support revolutionary love. The suicides I have known have mostly been in Gringolandia, where there is no support for love, where “the problem club” recruits daily, where the “self help” and addictionology industries prey on weak gringo minds selling the bullshit that a human being is a nation-state, that the human has “borders” or “boundaries” and has to “set those boundaries.” The "professionals" who peddle those inhuman theories have their fingers on the trigger, too.

There, in the United States, where, red state or blue state, it’s the same fucking fascism of cars and auto insurance, of illness and health insurance, of jobs at alienated labor, of “educations” that teach nothing except what must later be unlearned, or of unemployment, ignorance, illness, homelessness or prison, it is forbidden to love a revolutionary. If you do, if you are sincere at it, you will receive no support from your “friends” or “community.” If you love someone like Gary, like Abbie, like Ellen, like Jeff, someone intense and truth-telling and truth-seeking, you, too, will become isolated. You cannot find support. He or she is too overwhelming for you to handle by yourself, but nobody will help you. In fact, they may hypocritically blame you after he or she has checked out. They… the people who are really to blame, will turn on you for having followed their advice, and they will blame you. Think about that.

A hero simply loves more and gives more than an ordinary man or woman: and so do those who choose to love him and her while suffering the slings and arrows of the problem club and the jealous non-support of the slow class all around them. That’s the first part of the story. But there is a second part, beyond the impossibility of loving a true revolutionary under capitalism. There is something else that assures a suicide when combined with deception and it is very much related to capitalism: The person looking down the barrel of the gun must lose his or her sense of place. That usually happens economically: the loss of a job or income, the loss of a home.

So, here’s my advice for you if you worry that another truth-teller is about to bite down on the gun barrel: don’t you dare tell him or her to get a therapist. For all you know, he or she already has one but can’t even tell you that because it will harm your faith in him or her, and cause society to paint him or her as a freak. Don’t do it. Therapists lose patients, too. Just ask one. They don't have the answers. Those who tell you they do are dangerous. Chances are that your suicidal friend has thought about turning himself or herself in to the therapeutic authorities already and have their own reasons for either doing it or not doing it. So what can you do? What could you have done for Gary? Just two things: Send him money or give him love and attention as he defines his desires: not as you define “what is good for him ,” but as he defines it.