The truth comes out: “Suicide is expensive”

[DyingAlf]

In the UK telegraph newspaper on the 10th Sept there was an article.... "The algorithm designed to spot people at risk of suicide before it's too late"... I'm not tech savvy enough to be able to put a link here. It has also featured in other newspapers around the world.

I'm quite concerned about the privacy issues around the use of the algorithm but the main reason I'm posting this here is, after the conversations we've been having about Suicide prevention day/month, the very telling paragraph, which surely goes some way to explain why there is so much effort put into suicide prevention is this.....
"The arguments are economic as well as ethical. Suicides are expensive. Last year the Department for Transport estimated suicides caused 847,000 minutes of delays on the rail network - at a cost of £68 million ($130m). In 2004, a study put the cost of suicide to families and the wider economy at £1.29m per death, the equivalent of £2m today - £13.7bn for all 6859 deaths in 2018."

 

[reggiesaurus]

I was reading an article on why you should seek help your depression or suicidal thoughts. They actually had the gall to bring up employers missing out on their employee's work hours.

 

[braketimez]

Wow.

 

[Shades of Grey]

I was reading an article on why you should seek help your depression or suicidal thoughts. They actually had the gall to bring up employers missing out on their employee's work hours.

Pretty sure I've seen this one, too... all I could think was, 'this right here is part of the problem'.

 

[SipSop]

It makes me sick to read this.
Culture decides what is more important, the wealth of nation or well being of the individual? Do we own ourselves or the government owns us?
By doing so they admit that we are serfs, tax cattle. And that the good of the many is more important than the good of indivirual even if they have to break their own laws and moral code.
"Their code of honor is a bad joke.
Dropped at the first sign of trouble.
They are only as good as they are allowed to be.
When the chips are down, those civilised people, will eat each other."

I did not choose to be born to be given this rotten hand in life. I wish it wasn't like this, to experience better things, but this is the onoy reality for you and me.
If I am to own myself, then I get to choose when to opt out of this life. If you own me then of course you do not wsnt me do die as long as I pay you the money I worked for.
They found their scapegoat in their article.
If they do not want to people to interfere with society then assisted suicide must be legalised.

 

[nitroautnz]

Damn everything is money related nowaday, this world is sh***. Personally i will be ctb trying to have my affair in order and enough saving for not be a burden on my family, they have other shit to deal with.

 

[marcusuk63]

So basically suicide prevention is all about cost savings not the welfare of the individual , anyone on benefits and does not delay anyone getting to work or an order being filled is fine .

 

[BitterlyAlive]

I was reading an article on why you should seek help your depression or suicidal thoughts. They actually had the gall to bring up employers missing out on their employee's work hours.

We're all just fucking cogs in a machine. Wow...

In the UK telegraph newspaper on the 10th Sept there was an article.... "The algorithm designed to spot people at risk of suicide before it's too late"... I'm not tech savvy enough to be able to put a link here. It has also featured in other newspapers around the world.

I'm quite concerned about the privacy issues around the use of the algorithm but the main reason I'm posting this here is, after the conversations we've been having about Suicide prevention day/month, the very telling paragraph, which surely goes some way to explain why there is so much effort put into suicide prevention is this.....
"The arguments are economic as well as ethical. Suicides are expensive. Last year the Department for Transport estimated suicides caused 847,000 minutes of delays on the rail network - at a cost of £68 million ($130m). In 2004, a study put the cost of suicide to families and the wider economy at £1.29m per death, the equivalent of £2m today - £13.7bn for all 6859 deaths in 2018."

Can't say I'm surprised, just pissed off. Has suicide prevention ever truly been about the individual?

I do want to apologize for my tone. I'm just in a funky mood this morning, I guess.

 

[reggiesaurus]

We're all just fucking cogs in a machine. Wow...

Can't say I'm surprised, just pissed off. Has suicide prevention ever truly been about the individual?

I do want to apologize for my tone. I'm just in a funky mood this morning, I guess.

Nah, lol, go off, sis!!

 

[TheQ22]

There was an article produced some years back by someone like the director general of the world bank, who said we should export all of our toxic waste etc to 3rd world countries because a) they had a shorter life expectancy, and b) they were worth less per head because those countries had a lower gdp.

They tried to play it off as a spoof type thing later, but that's what we all are to them - a value on a spreadsheet.

 

[woxihuanni]

We go out trying not to hurt anybody else, tidying up our things, putting in that last day's work, etc. If we all burnt the world around us as we went down, our deaths would be so costly that they would *actually* try to solve the problems that lead to it. Our death are only annoyingly expensive, not terrifyingly expensive.

 

[puppy9]

So let a peaceful option easily available to many. And they wonder why suicide is on the rise.

 

[grungeCat]

After talking with my normie family I concluded they just don't understand how it feels to have mental issues. It's very hard to describe severe mental pain to someone who has never felt it before. It's like describing how the red color looks like to someone who is blind from birth. It's just fiction to them. Yet the culture requires rescuing suicidal person so they do. They don't care if it leads to more pain, they just mindlessly copy the schemes.

 

[Silver]

I've read articles before that imply it's the financial cost rather than the social and societal cost that the government is concerned with. They want to prevent the many lost years of revenue that are caused by a suicide, rather than spend money by changing the reasons behind suicide.

 

[mahakaliSS_MahaDurga]

In the UK telegraph newspaper on the 10th Sept there was an article.... "The algorithm designed to spot people at risk of suicide before it's too late"... I'm not tech savvy enough to be able to put a link here. It has also featured in other newspapers around the world.

I'm quite concerned about the privacy issues around the use of the algorithm but the main reason I'm posting this here is, after the conversations we've been having about Suicide prevention day/month, the very telling paragraph, which surely goes some way to explain why there is so much effort put into suicide prevention is this.....
"The arguments are economic as well as ethical. Suicides are expensive. Last year the Department for Transport estimated suicides caused 847,000 minutes of delays on the rail network - at a cost of £68 million ($130m). In 2004, a study put the cost of suicide to families and the wider economy at £1.29m per death, the equivalent of £2m today - £13.7bn for all 6859 deaths in 2018."

This makes me want to ctb out of spite.

 

[262653]

I was reading an article on why you should seek help your depression or suicidal thoughts. They actually had the gall to bring up employers missing out on their employee's work hours.

I find this to be much more ludicrous than infuriating. I can't tell if they're treating suicidals as imbeciles, telling that they shouldn't off themselves because someone who treats them like cattle would lose profit, and believing that it's going to convince them not to CTB, or if they're themselves foolish enough not to realize how it's not a convincing argument.

 

[sadworld]

Well if they care so much about the money why don't they just legalise assisted suicide? People would pay for that too so the government could earn even more money... oh nevermind i forgot, there would be less tax payers and less workers. Theres no way i waste my whole life just to work for these people.

 

[mahakaliSS_MahaDurga]

This article reveals a sad truth - nobody's life is worth anything if it cannot be utilized to help someone else profit financially.

 

[Sprite_Geist]

There are certain points this article brings up that makes it sound like life is being treated as a business. If this is the case then it actually makes sense that people want to end their own lives; given that your life is only valuable because it has monetary worth. From my understanding the way market competition works in a capitalist system, is that a business makes profit through selling a product. This is accomplished by providing a better deal than rival businesses. If you don't then your customers will leave and go elsewhere; in the same way that people will end their lives, because although suicide is expensive living is costly too - even more so than dying, so suicide is the more appealing item.

So keeping with the economic theme of this article - here is a capitalistic, consumerist and business-minded suggestion: how about making life the cheaper alternative? Instead of trying to stop suicide instead provide a better product.

In the UK telegraph newspaper on the 10th Sept there was an article.... "The algorithm designed to spot people at risk of suicide before it's too late"... I'm not tech savvy enough to be able to put a link here.

There are 2 ways to put a link in a post. The first method is the simplest. It shows a small preview of the website with the title/subtitle and any images if the page has any. The second method shows the website link as a piece of text without anything else.

Method 1. Just copy and paste the link into your post- that's it. Below is the article for anyone interested, and to show the OP how it looks.

The algorithm designed to spot people at risk of suicide before it's too late

Data scientists at Stigma Statistics are hoping tech can help reduce suicide rates and save lives

www.telegraph.co.uk

Method 2. When you are making a post there is an icon that looks like rings linked together. If you hover over it with your mouse it should say: "Insert link". Click on this icon. There are now 2 boxes: the first says "URL" - this is where you put the address of the website that you wish to link. The second box underneath says "Text" - in this box you type in whatever you want the link to show up as.

This is method No.2 of putting a link in a post. If you click this text it will take you to the linked website

We're all just fucking cogs in a machine. Wow...

Can't say I'm surprised, just pissed off. Has suicide prevention ever truly been about the individual?

I do want to apologize for my tone. I'm just in a funky mood this morning, I guess.

It's not possible to speak for each individual that is against suicide, but from a collective standpoint (societal/governmental): No. It is not about the person that's suicidal, but about protecting the interests of the group. When a suicidal person is alive they are an inconvenience because others view them as a burden. Likewise when they die they are also viewed as an inconvenience because they are not around to contribute anything. The only way to escape from this Catch-22 is to suppress any unhappy thoughts and tendencies, and act as though there is not a problem.

It's a dark, twisted form of utilitarianism - You are valuable so long as you produce something that benefits the group. Your own emotional and mental needs are irrelevant.

 

[DyingAlf]

There are 2 ways to put a link in a post.

Thank you!

 

[Broken Chimera]

I just read some of the article and saw something interesting. Apparently they want to start using data to try to predict if a person is going to commit suicide. When I read that part I thought about authorities reading everything a person could or would write here.

How they would send the police to a person's house if they made a goodbye thread or even if they claimed that they're buying what they need to ctb. The forum is already being watched and people have been reported for just having SN.

I'm just thinking about how messed up it is that people would accept others being under surveillance for "suicide prevention" but against it for themselves. That's a slippery slope to arresting people for thought crimes. I'm not even going to go into how disgusting it is that people care more about lost revenue because of a suicide instead of a hurting person ending their life.

 

[DyingAlf]

I just read some of the article and saw something interesting. Apparently they want to start using data to try to predict if a person is going to commit suicide. When I read that part I thought about authorities reading everything a person could or would write here.

How they would send the police to a person's house if they made a goodbye thread or even if they claimed that they're buying what they need to ctb. The forum is already being watched and people have been reported for just having SN.

I'm just thinking about how messed up it is that people would accept others being under surveillance for "suicide prevention" but against it for themselves. That's a slippery slope to arresting people for thought crimes. I'm not even going to go into how disgusting it is that people care more about lost revenue because of a suicide instead of a hurting person ending their life.

Yes that's what I meant when I said that I'm "concerned about the privacy issues" (they can't really track you from here tho as long as you are careful to remain anonymous) but I was most caught up in the astonishment that they had actually been so crass as to put a monetary value on peoples death by suicide & print it in a newspaper article.

 

[Mercury6737]

It makes sense. The average lifetime earning expectancy is in the $2 million range. For that reason, I don't think there's a reasonable dollar figure that any government would sign off on to allow CTB, especially for young people.

 

[TAW122]

I believe I may have read a similar article (may be the same) in the past, about two years ago. At any rate, yes this is rather unsettling of how society is willing to put profits before the civil rights and liberty of individual citizens!

On another similar thought, well if they care so much about profits and revenues, what if say, suicidal people decide "well we won't die, but we'll make it where you'll still lose revenue?" By refusing to be as productive, disrupting society, sabotaging (in some cases), etc. Would these invasive pro-lifers change their tune then?

 

[Broken Chimera]

Yes that's what I meant when I said that I'm "concerned about the privacy issues" (they can't really track you from here tho as long as you are careful to remain anonymous) but I was most caught up in the astonishment that they had actually been so crass as to put a monetary value on peoples death by suicide & print it in a newspaper article.

I didn't have much to say about that that hasn't already been said. Suicide prevention was never about the person they're trying to "save" as much as it's about their own feelings and what they're going to lose because of the suicide. It's disgusting on so many levels. Being reduced to a dollar amount.

 

[TMC]

If anyone axtually cared this would be covered by insurance. I want to just go to the doctor and be put to sleep. that Would be the best way.

 

[Wayfaerer]

I take great pleasure in knowing this.

 

[MrAsclepius]

Yes, it's the same as society shoving pills down your throat whether or not they improve your wellbeing in the long run. If there's money involved, many other factors become obsolete.

 

[Matthias_k]

It's a good thing. If people start to realize that assisted suicide is less expensive than treatment or suicide, it will definitely help to facilitate access to it.

 

[MrAsclepius]

It's a good thing. If people start to realize that assisted suicide is less expensive than treatment or suicide, it will definitely help to facilitate access to it.

We can hope.