Suicide advocates

This is a quick idea based on my recent experience of the Samaritans. (Yes. Things are that bad).

They were of no value because they’re fundamentally flawed in what they offer. A safe space to talk is useful given the suicide taboo but as the only option from this country’s number one suicide organisation it is woefully inadequate. It’s why I’ve not contacted them before most of my suicide attempts. It’s not what I’m looking for.

Who would I communicate with before killing myself? The answer may not be practical but it’s true nonetheless: someone who could fix things. An advocate for the suicidal who can attempt to change the things which force people to their deaths.

Take debt and the catastrophic effect of bad debt. Many die because of it. Now though, thanks to an important victory by mental health organisations (namely Mind’s Debt and mental health campaign), health and social care professionals can intercede on a patient’s behalf and the industry is more mental health aware. This is ultimately social change but those who advocate for someone’s mental health play a vital role. This saves many suicides.

If this already established system to reduce distress and despair not by talking about it but doing something about it was widened to encompass other causes it’s clear more lives could be saved, lives of people who otherwise might never engage with anyone about their suicidal feelings.

Suicidal people need solutions, not empty words. Suicidal souls need protection against further suffering and a suicide advocate could be the buffer between those suffering intolerable despair and the world of inequity which harms them. This is how lives could be saved: not leaving the vulnerable unprotected.

This might be the remit of current mental health services but they have a history of failure, perhaps because they eschew real solutions in favour of medication and words alone. Thousands a year die when resolving the circumstances which made them suicidal could save lives.

An after thought is the possibility of this sort of idea as an early intervention in an assisted suicide pathway. Not everyone can be saved and anyone who is involved in suicide intervention must accept this truth. Its logical conclusion is the legalisation of assisted suicide because no one should have to suffer the torture of extended unfulfilled suicidal ideation. It wouldn’t be right.

Angel of the Abyss; suicide aspect: legalisation of assisted suicide (prong 1 of 3)

Prescript

Hmm…the title of this piece could win worst title ever. It’s not very interesting or communicative.

The Angel of the Abyss project has come a long way and it’s gotten complicated. There’s a three pronged or ‘bladed’ (my war fetish makes me think of ideas as swords) set of objectives to achieve the suicide aspect.

So, here we go…

Feeling suicidal is torture and the product of torture unique to the individual

There are different ways to think about suicidal ideation. I think the prevailing school of thought is wholly incorrect and I have enough life experience to propose an alternative.

Feeling suicidal is the worst state for any conscious being. (NB, this is different from duty-based suicide). It means they no longer want to exist.

People get to that stage through a series of events and/or a massive trigger. This is the cause of extensive harm to the psyche, a harm which is torture. (I’m trying to make this brief so I’m skipping lots of detail, discourse and examples to convey my point). This emotional torture breaks people and throws them into a pit of hopelessness and despair which they feel can only be resolved by death.

This is an awful state of mind which another of the Angel of the Abyss strategic objectives seeks to prevent from happening.

It gets worse. Having reached this ‘no other way out’ state of mind the individual becomes isolated because cultural taboos and the way psychiatry typically deals with suicide means a person keeps suicidal ideation to themselves. There are other factors involved in this isolation.

Additionally, an actively suicidal person has made a decision, one which comes with lots of negative feelings like guilt or shame which add to the turmoil. It is all weighed against the hope of relief from a terrible state of mind (and, of course, the life circumstances which are usually the cause of suicidal thoughts).

They make a very difficult decision and they make it with free will. The outcome – their death – is the only escape from the torture they go through. It can’t be survived.

Then they have to do it. They have to kill themselves but it isn’t easy. Suicide prevention cunts in the primitive mental health system have done the typical shite they do: they block the availability of effective, preferred methods rather than focus on the causes. This doesn’t change the torture which leads to suicidal ideation nor the torture of suicidal ideation itself. It doesn’t deal with causes.

Suicide virgins and veterans

The suicide prevention strategy of the primitive mental health system does protect reactive ‘virgin’ or first-timers from succeeding in their suicide attempt, something they might regret later. This is important though it is a form of tyranny which robs liberty from a free consciousness.

It also means suicide veterans (people who have consistently wanted to die over a period of time) like me are left to live through torture.

We want to die but – for whatever reason – have been unable to succeed. Failure upon failure. Ugh. There is little the current suicide system developed by the primitive mental health system can do to resolve the situation and suicide veterans are left to suffer.

Some lucky ones manage it. The blessed from my perspective.  Around 6000 people a year kill themselves though many, many more try. They risk serious consequences if they fail but their death is their primary goal. They go to their deaths alone too. There is no reprieve from the evil they’ve faced and caused them to want to cease existence.

I’ve described the tip of the iceberg in terms of the multitude of horrors of the current system. There’s a prevailing attitude from certain mental health professionals that the terrible thing is the morality of an individual who chooses death as their exit. If I could I would make them feel like I do if they dare think that way.

The Angel of the Abyss solution: legalise it

Anyway, the things I’ve described here are what drive me to demand suicide be legalised. It was decriminalised in the last century and this advancement needs to continue.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe in an anarchic suicide system as a true libertarian would. My solution is a suicide pathway. It’s something I’ll write about in another post.

I do, however, believe suicide must be legalised and I am unequivocal. I would kill anyone who wanted to die (within my personal suicide framework) because I can’t abide torture.

This is the crux of my reframing of living while wanting to die. It is torture and torture is unacceptable. This unique torture by man and god is the height of suffering for a conscious being.

The compassion offered to animals in untreatable pain is greater than the compassion I’ve been offered, another indication of the subhuman status assigned to me using psychiatric labelling.

I do not have an angel of mercy. No one has the decency to kill me either. I live day after day of a life I’ve not wanted to live for a very long time.

Mercy. Please. I beg. Mercy.

Disability discrimination, the value of psychiatric research and getting it right

Prescript

Things are hard. My hatred of the human race was once again touched upon yesterday.

I went to a Speak Out Against Psychiatry, Winvisible and independent activist’s protest. The poor, the mentally ill and other disadvantaged groups are victims of unfairness and inequality across a wide number of domains including the UK’s so-called justice system.

Perhaps the worst injustice is the medico-legal framework which allows doctors to commit crimes on their patients. I was reminded what a high value the criminal justice system places on innocence, so much so it allows the guilty to go free because their system is biased towards protecting the innocent. This bias nor the rigour of jurisprudence is afforded to the mentally ill because the cultural prejudice is firmly rooted in considering us subhuman and considering doctors as akin to god.

Anyway, on with whatever the title says.

Syndromes and phenotypes

Current mental health diagnosis relies on a syndrome approach which seeks to identify homogeneous types. It’s been a failure especially with respect to homogenous outcomes and treatment response.

As time has past these typings have evolved with the constant change in social norms since psychiatry was invented – a clear warning sign of the lack of science. It doesn’t mean it’s all been a waste.

understanding cognitive differences and discrimination

I looked into some information for a legal test case and through this work I learned a lot about reasonable adjustments for mental illness guaranteed by law.

They were inadequate. I don’t know if I can talk about the details of the case but I can talk about existing psychiatric research into what is termed ‘cognitive deficits’ though I prefer to call them differences.

Psychiatric research into cognitive differences underpins the syndrome approach and there’s an internal psychiatric movement to make cognitive tests part of clinical diagnosis.

I’m writing this off the top of my head so bear with me please. One area in schizophrenia is deficits in working memory. This is temporary memory. It can be used to store the cost of groceries as items are tallied up to estimate the total.

I’ve been lucky to have exceptional keyboard skills so I can whip through work given the right workstation. Ctrl-C and Alt-Tab are two of my most valued Windows keyboard shortcuts. The copy command is well known but the switch Windows one isn’t. They’re what I use to overcome my limited working memory.

If I didn’t have this little bit of computing knowledge I’d perform much worse when working memory was required. Let’s say I had to enter a written document onto a computer. My limited working memory means I’d be entering small bits of the text a few words at a time whereas someone else could hold whole sentences in their working memory and not have to keep glancing back at the original document.

This mental difference is associated with poorer performance in a job which requires working memory and it’s part of the syndrome described in psychiatric research.

Another facet is called ‘Theory of the Mind’ (TM) and relates to understanding other people’s emotions. The obvious aspect of this is paranoia. Small, unintentioned slights become construed as deliberate harm or insult to a person experiencing this sort of paranoia. I think it cuts both ways and people with this TM aspect perceive deliberate insults as minor or unintended slights. They turn the other cheek. This may all be related to the sort of autistic quality of the schizo-spectrum type. The cause is related to lack of understanding of facial and physical communications which requires the mind to guess whereas other mind types can easily differentiate between sarcasm and truth.

There’s obviously an impact on employment. Poor TM can lead to inappropriate behaviour, the worst of which will end up with someone having to face disciplinary procedures. These in themselves are traumatic and, in my opinion, are rooted in old social practices which reinforce mental health discrimination.

Reasonable and unreasonable adjustments

These are two examples of what psychiatrists call cognitive deficits and I’ve demonstrated how they can affect employment.

At the time of this legal case there were lists of reasonable adjustments published in a variety of documents relating to employing people with mental health problems. Unfortunately it was the most recent publication which had a far fuller list of reasonable adjustments than those which existed at the time the incident happened so there was no way an organisation (specifically the human resources department) could have known what to do.

However none of the established reasonable adjustments would cover the two cognitive deficits I’ve mentioned in this piece which are part of the cause of the severe disability associated with schizo-spectrum disorders.

I’m not sure things could easily be done to adjust for these disabilities. Let’s take the problem of aberrant behaviour caused by paranoia. This is a practical barrier to any role which requires someone to interact with people on behalf of an organisation. It is also a barrier in modern organisations where all employees are expected to adhere to a high behavioural standard all the time.

Excusing the mentally ill from these expectations is necessary to allow their entry to and continued employment. The issue many people would contend is this is unfair on those who do have to adhere to codes of conduct. The risk to an organisation’s brand image is a real business need too.

This is where things get hazy in terms of the spirit and the letter of the equality laws. How far must an adjustment go before it is considered an unreasonable adjustment? There are significant barriers beyond attitudinal ones which create the severe negative prognosis of severe mental illness.

The psychiatric construct of mental illness explains disability as prognosis. In fact the paradigm could be widened to include a wide range of human differences which suffer disadvantage because of an unequal society rife with prejudice and discrimination.

This is all a product of historical inequity. Culture is as much to blame as any individual because it’s permeated with discrimination. It seems every generation sees some small advances and the occasional giant leap advancing towards equality but there are still more advances necessary, especially for the mentally ill.

unreasonable adjustments

At least one culture has accepted the terrible cultural guilt which should exist after historical formal oppression is recognised and ended.

South Africa was a pariah in the modern world till apartheid ended. In recognition of the terrible crime their culture committed and the resulting barriers faced by those they’d once oppressed they instituted Affirmative Action, an unreasonable adjustment, rather than any lesser protocol.

Reasonable adjustments are a realistic, practical tool and are ineffective for all but a few of those disadvantaged by psychosocial disability and other differences. Most of the best paid or most powerful jobs are still dominated by white males under the age of 65 who have no recognised disability and certainly no where near the severity of disability associated with psychotic disorders.

The mentally ill have suffered at the hands of Western culture for hundreds of years. Their value has been cast aside for generations and even today they’re still considered subhuman, for example by the so-called justice system. The Disability Discrimination Act did little to alter the significant employment discrimination faced by people with severe mental illness.

There wasn’t the sense of guilt to force radical change as was instituted in post-apartheid South Africa. Even the new unified legislation, the Equalities Act, was not an implement of suitable strength to ramrod the necessary level of change. It still relies on reasonable adjustments to move a mountain.

equality first: moving mountains

Some of you may have already read about a project I call Equality First. It was conceived with the purpose of dramatically improving employment equality because the current system was an abject failure.

The new Equalities Act had no teeth but I think there’s a legal equality duty which goes beyond the letter of the law. This piece of legislation was pathetic because it still retained the old, ineffective paradigm and values of the legislations it replaced and the supporting case law.

It was no revolution nor paradigm shift and reasonable adjustments were it’s main protocol.

Things weren’t, for example, measured. At the core of the original Equality First idea, way before it even took on a working title, was the development of a measurement tool.

I have a scientific background and there’s no better summary of one of the core principles than ‘we can not hope to change what we cannot or do not measure’ (this isn’t the exact quote).

This is based on the underlying assumption that the spirit of the equality laws is to create an equal society rather than simply a piece of paper to show the government is trying. It was given no teeth which makes me suspect the latter but perhaps this is just a case where Hanlon’s Razor applies.

The equation and the associated application of basic performance management theory was a way to make the Equalities Act a genuine tool of equality. It is more powerful than reasonable adjustments though delivering a minimum standard of adjustments and processes is essential to Equality First’s objectives.

It is obviously the ‘velvetted glove’ of Affirmative Action but though the oppression is similar the same cultural guilt conditions don’t exist and I suspect there will be resistance to the paradigm shift.

The paradigm shift is to stop nipping at the problem but rather to eliminate the prejudice and discrimination with extreme prejudice. Sorry. That was a crap sentence where I’m trying to be smarmy and too clever. Let me try it again.

Civilisations has inched and occasionally leapt a little closer to equality and employment equality. Black people are no longer slaves but still don’t make it to many senior roles. Women are no longer second rate citizens but are still underrepresented in echelons of power. The mad have not yet had their liberation in the same way these two groups have experience giant leaps towards equality. The era of community care still suppressed madness and caged victims in prisons created by psychiatric drugs.

Equality First is one of my solutions to ending this terrible, undiscovered injustice. What’s yours?

postscript

I’ve spent the morning writing this up and I’m glad of the small break away from the genetics problem I’ve been wrestling with. It’s hard going facing my intellectual inadequacy. I gently sob about it occasionally.

Onwards. Wearily onwards. Till the eternal sleep finally gives me rest.