You know what depresses me more than anything else?
The amount of bad information still being expressed about Covid-19, six months into this epidemic, in spite of all the efforts my colleagues in health care have been making to INFORM people, and in spite of the deaths of large numbers of those colleagues.
Covid-19 is not mysterious at all. Its appearance (or the appearance of something like it) has been such an inevitability for so long that Hollywood has even made films about it.
We know what it is, how it spreads, how it evolved... and no, the Chinese weren't particularly secretive about it. The U.S. and Western Europe were well-warned about what it could do back in FEBRUARY and most of those countries CHOSE to ignore it or spouted happy-crappy about "herd immunity" and "vertical isolation".
This isn't a conspiracy (although the studied lack of adequate State response in the West may well be).
Furthermore, the disease has killed far more than a million people, unless you believe that Russia, China, the U.S., Brazil, and India — all led by authoritarian populist right governments — are providing the WHO with accurate death statistics, in spite of their leaders' multiple pleas and orders to health authorities to not do this.
For every person who dies of COVID, twenty have long term damage. And, I assure, however much you want to die now, your life will not be improved by neurological issues created by this disease.
The fact that people are so fucking stupid that they can't retrieve the easily accessable scientific information on this disease and/or absorb it, and are still seeking out its secret lizardmen propagators is the most depressing thing I have encountered in 2020. With all our technology and science, the average person in the street would STILL be happier hunting witches or burning Jews to appease God and take away teh plague. Meanwhile, my colleagues and students, on the frontlines of this, are dying in record numbers.
Every time I think about that, I come to this site and start boning up on suicide methods.
And why are people more upset about this than suicide?
First of all, I'd say people ARE pretty upset about suicide, given that this forum is almost illegal and that every time I google "suicide" I get a list of automatic results telling me to talk to a hotline's 'bot or something. We're constantly invaded by assholes who want to shut this site down. I'd this say folks take suicide pretty seriously.
Secondly, FFS, isn't this site's mantra "suicide is a choice"? COVID-19 infection ISN'T.
You might reasonably complain that people don't care about mental illness or that they don't care about YOU and that this leads to a lot of suicides. Fair go. But that's an entirely different kettle of fish from complaining that people don't pay enough attention to suicide.
We could use much more attention to public health — especially mental health. But fuck me if I want the world to "pay attention" to suicide as much as it does to Covid. This site would be immediately shut down, just for starters.
Sorry, OP: but it sounds to me like YOU want attention. This may well be completely justified, btw. I am not judging you on that. But don't mix that up with cries of "why doesn't the world care about suicide"?
It does. Far too much, in my opinion.
www.theguardian.com
