I wouldn't call them evil. A lot of them are genuine people that try to help. The only problem is that they're not actually helping, but ruining our only hope. They are just misguided people that do not understand how we feel and what it's best for us, and I don't blame them. We live in a society that heavily discourages suicide by portraying it as something heartbreaking, depressive, bitter and sorrowful, as it is something that must be avoided at all costs. These people are just following what society told them to do.
Other than that, I would be devastated if SaSu was to be shut down. It made me feel understood for the fist time and actually kept me alive a little more, unlike the rest of the world.
Agree with you completely, it's a lot more grey and nuanced than
good versus evil. While I would say there are bad actors out there, who purposefully keep others alive against their will for less than altruistic motivations (i.e. Viewing people as human resources to be used as a means of orchestrating profits or productivity in the case of many business models) most people just have no clue what it's like to want to die, and parrot whatever they've heard in the media about suicide.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions as they say, and this idiom fits the suicide prevention doctrine like a glove. The vast majority of people don't want loved ones or strangers to die, especially if they see their death as being preventable. They view all suicide prevention measures as being life-saving, healing interventions that will always steer a person down a path that will lead to a happy and healthy life.
I know someone who volunteers for a hotline, and they genuinely believe they are doing life-saving work, and practicing stewardship as a good samaratin. There is no question in their mind that the script they read from during those phone calls is saving lives and improving the wellbeing of those strangers on the other line, although they do have some minor criticisms of how the hotline is run. The service is viewed as a noble and charitable pursuit, albeit one with a couple flaws.
No matter what, these services and guidelines are perceived as something inherently righteous from a moral perspective. The authorities who are calling the shots when it comes to influencing the public perception of suicide genuinely believe that they are doing a good deed that is akin to saving a drowning stranger from the sea when they take away an individual's ability to choose life or death for themselves. Once you become cognizant of this, you realize that they do have the most of pure of heart intentions, it is simply the execution that is seriously flawed.
The issue lies at the crux of how suicidal ideation is portrayed in media, public policy, and scientific literature. For decades, a very rigid narrative has been pushed, wherein all suicidal ideation has been characterised as a temporary ailment born from a brief stint of "mental illness" AKA depression. No matter your background, health history, environment, or existing comorbidites, you will always be shoved into this temporary problem box when you present to anyone else with suicidality.
Now, imagine if we took this approach with any other health condition (To be clear, I don't believe suicidality should be automatically classed as a disease in itself because of how dynamic and variable it presents, although that's an entirely different discussion to be had). For example, if we treated a person with a longterm autoimmune disease the same as a person who has a short-term bacterial infection. The symptoms may appear the same initially, but the underlying etiology and pathology are very distinct beasts.
It would be seen as negligence and medical malpractice if we continued to push penicillin onto someone with Chron's dease, knowing that they don't have a bacterial infection in need of antibiotics. However, ignoring the root cause of symptoms (and the failure of certain inventions to ameloriate them) is perfectly acceptable and standard practice when it comes to dealing with suicidal patients.
This creates a negative feedback loop, where suicidal people continually receive the same bunk advice over and over again, as if eventually the one size fits all approach will finally put the shoe on the right foot. There is no humanistic method to this madness, no attempt to understand what drives a person to become suicidal in the first place, only sterile clinical assumptions that any suicidal feeling is born out of pure irrationality. It is treated like irrefutable truth that we are all loved and have bright futures ahead of us no matter what.
Rationality does not prevail in the so called mental health industry. There is such an obsession with litigiousness and accountability, and this culture binds the hands of consultants, therapists, social workers, and other mandated reporters. They are not allowed to ever acknowledge that some people cannot be helped by the rudimentary techniques we have at our disposal today, even if the evidence is staring them right in the face.
A massive cultural cognitive dissonance exists when it comes to suicide, wherein the default assumption is that everyone can be saved, and there are no exceptions to this rule. When it comes to any other disease out there, we can admit that some people will not improve, and cannot be cured, even with modern medical science. When it comes to suicidality though? Blasphemy to even suggest that some individuals cannot recover from it no matter how hard they try.
The cruelty isn't intentional, most people do sincerely believe that the basal state of being alive is a blessing in itself, and that anyone who would willingly terminate their own life regardless of its quality is a heretic. Your everyday live live laugher cannot fathom what it is like to go through hellish physical or emotional pain every day for years upon years, with no reprieve or break from it. People tend to view life as a series of up and downs, not realizing that some may never reach the highs, or experience them for such a miniscule amount of time that those good moments have vanished in the blink of an eye.
Fundamentally, they just cannot understand that there are those of us out there who do not want to nurse our wounds until we inevitably expire from old age anyway. The relentlessly optimistic mindset dictates that a new leaf can always be turned over, it's always darkest before the dawn, but this isn't the sacred truth of the universe. In my situation, I will continue to be in worse pain as I age because I have a degenerative condition, yet people are blind to that and think that trying to cheer me up or instilling false hope or positive delusions is the way.
They don't know harmful it is to just not give people the choice to let go when they've endured so much pain that they can't hardly bear it any longer. To me, that is vehemently unethical, but to the majority the mindset that force should be used to keep a person alive is something noble and righteous, because they always think happiness is just on the horizon.. No matter how naive or false that assumption may be.
