A useful analogy is to think about social media in terms of steroid use in cycling.
An athlete on the Tour de France knows most winners cheat and the instance of cheaters in the standings clusters densely toward the top.
To even qualify for the game with cheaters, you need to either be a standard deviation better than they are without their cheat, or compromise and also cheat, which in turn legitimizes their tactics.
Social media exacerbates nascent mental illness by creating this same double bind for young people, where to "succeed," in life by getting access to cliques and networks, school placements, job opportunities, and investment opportunities, you need to "play the game," which today means to fabricate an image of performative conventional success and the perception you are a viable centre of attention.
They know it's wrong, everyone else knows it's probably wrong, but the whole exercise is a temporary suspension of disbelief in exchange for lottery style rewards, provided by sponsors.
Good news on both fronts is you can enjoy riding bicycles or any other sport, and indeed life, without the often horrific and spiritually hollow compromises of elite competition, which social media seems to approximate.
The greatest irony is that it is in more humble and private pursuits where most of the real stories of courage, dignity, and personal triumph that people only fake in performances on social media can truly be found.
Daily frustrations are universal to humans despite money, which can suggest that happiness often requires not complaining and doing things that are uncomfortable.
It can be difficult to know where negative thinking and intrusive thoughts begin and end. So the idea I want to represent my best thoughts in a reasonable way to the world isn't analogous to cheating or faking something.
It seems more pragmatic. Limited use of social media, expression of identity, online interaction and real-life social cohesion all have tremendous benefits.
A better message seems to be resilience over the human condition, normalizing the universal feeling of hopelessness and recognizing that these thoughts don't make you a victim, a diagnosis, ill or abnormal. They make you human.
This is just circumstantial evidence, but from my personal experience of just not participating in "playing the game" it would always result in losing friends and relationships. This was before the time of Facebook and other modern social media, but there are all kinds of social games you are expected to participate in if you want to be part of things. Perhaps I won the game by not participating and never being stressed about these things, but who knows what things would have been like if I didn't close so many doors by not playing along.
I imagine today you would be more isolated than ever before if you decide to not participate. This might not matter much in work life, but for kids in school it is huge.
It's certainly a trade-off: by not partaking in social media and/or popular culture, you are bound to come up empty and alone in modern day. I usually like to say, do whatever you like to do, but remember to wear the world like a loose fitting shirt and don't let it bind you.
3 links. One is pure opinion saying social media is important, another saying it's not, and one is a survey saying that having social media can help or hurt your application, which explicitly contradicts it's own reporting. That adds up to nothing.
"Facebook does not help you in getting any success at all."
Young people often define 'success' basically in terms of popularity and social acceptance.
And FB/Instagram is the basis for that now, in many ways.
I think there's always been considerable pressure upon young people to 'get along' & 'have friends' i.e. in a time before they 'know who they are' - this is a serious issue for kids I think.
And even into one's 20's these days, it seems everyone is 'building their personal brand' and some may find it hard to simply opt out.
I'm glad I hit 30 by the time this inanity started, I think it's an age wherein we start to take control of our identities.
> Facebook does not help you in getting any sucess at all.
I guess it depends on how you use it and what's your success condition. In a world where all your friends use it to communicate and tighten bonds, you staying out of it means losing that experience and being left out.
Right now I have a FB account that I haven't actively used in 5 years probably and I can live just fine. But I imagine for the younger audience it's going to be a bit harder when they realize they are left out of stuff. So sometimes this is no longer about using it to get ahead, it's using it to not be left behind.
I agree with your point, but in my experience it's people 50+ that are actively using FB to maintain social networks. People under 30 seem to only maintain a ghost account and use other apps for their social networking. Your point stands regardless of the platform most popular in your social circle, however.
Yeah, i am like a social media hermit but doing fine in life. I kind of lucked out finding a wife whom I love. I care about her more than anyone in the world. I have 10 or so really close friends that i dont keep in touch with much. However when we see each other face to face (every month or so) it feels as good as ever. I dont feel left out because i'm not looking at their social media posts...
I got my own shit goin own. Thankfully i've been able to separate myself from everything. I dont think that is as 'easy' for younger folks. However, there are always going to be punkers and alt kids right? I'm sure there are some youths who dont live their lives on social media.
There have always been fads that the cool kids do. That is never going to change. You dont have to have a cool presence online.
The perception of cycling is that pretty much everyone is doping. Just like the perception of football, and baseball, rightly or wrongly, is that everyone is doping.
Whereas with soccer and basketball the perception is that, while some of them may try doping, the elite skilled players cannot possibly have gotten that way by doping. So people see Steph Curry, or Neymar, or Kyrie, or Messi, and, again rightly or wrongly, they assume these guys have elite skills that the other players just don't have. The perception is that the other players won't ever get those skills either, no matter how much dope they take. The elite skill guys in basketball and soccer are perceived almost as artists. It's almost like those skills are more like art.
It's just the perception. Most people think basketball and soccer take more skill than football or cycling. May not be a fair perception, but that's just how a lot of people see things.
I'm curious how you're determining how most people perceive things. (Also, baseball probably has the most strict testing of the major sports. Most of the people I know that follow the game casually seem to think there were steroid problems, but they're out of the game now)
>The greatest irony is that it is in more humble and private pursuits where most of the real stories of courage, dignity, and personal triumph that people only fake in performances on social media can truly be found.
I wouldn't go quite that far. Some people are very social and show courage, dignity, and triumph.
However those people aren't making endless posts about their workout routine.
Wow you articulated the phenomenon I've been mulling over for years nicely, trying to put my finger on what exactly went wrong with society after the advent of social media.
Do you have a blog? Would enjoy reading more of your thoughts/writing...
It's scary how many people are seething tempests of confused emotion under the hood yet can put on a convincing facade that they are perfectly normal. Just last week one of my co-workers who I've known for years and seemed completely normal on the outside disappeared one day to attempt a Nice-style terrorist attack with a U-haul truck (the FBI nabbed him before anyone was killed).
I think a lot of people, me included, have quite a high barrier to things they're willing to discuss or reveal to co-workers regarding their personal life.
This is probably the main issue. People have a "public face" and a "private face". Facebook is primarily a public face medium. Coworker relationships are (for the most part) public face interactions.
The only people capable of seeing the private face (and thus potential red flags) are close family members and trusted friends.
I think a lot of people, (probably) me included, have quite a high barrier to things they're willing to discuss or reveal to people they've paid to discuss and reveal these things to.
Definitely true of me. Even after years of therapy with a practitioner I liked and largely trusted, I still didn't fully open up about my issues unless there was an immediate crisis that I couldn't cope with emotionally.
co-workers are in many ways competition, revealing certain things to them can be bad for your career. And I'd bet that most people hiding things aren't murderous, just struggling.
I don't know where you work, but I have never held a job in ~25 years where I considered any of my coworkers as any sort of competition, and actually quite the contrary, either camaraderie or at the worst, a lack of interest due to e.g. no common interests. I have the feeling that my coworkers always felt the same... perhaps I should ask around.
I've rarely met people that let it hurt the camaraderie of the team (I have met them, rather cut throat people, but not often), but when there's three of us in a role and one spot we all want opens up - we're absolutely competing for it.
Can't reply to webwielder's comment anymore, but your anecdote is not isolated. How cliche is the response to a mass killing, "we had no idea he / she was capable of something like this."
Well, if they had, they would have put those persons under close surveillance or put them away earlier.
So, obviously it's the one's that people "have no idea" that do the acts.
That's probably some kind of logical bias with a name and all ("survivorship bias" perhaps: you have to "survive" the scrutiny people get when they appear capable of a horrendous act, to be able to carry such an act out).
Quite a few of them had history of trouble if you ask those who knew them closely. Legal troubles, conflicts in school, aggression toward acquitances or/and undiagnized but visible mental health problems. Not all, but way more then obe would expect based on cliché. People who say that iften base it basically on killers ability to respond to "hello" with smile and "hello", but did not spent time with them to know their opinions or troubles.
Generous reading of the comment is sarcastic scepticism of claims and basically calling the parent a liar, but even in this case it adds little substance to the discussion.
I assume it is a comment on the turn of phrase "It's scary how many", suggesting that perhaps this is a phenomenon that the poster has had repeated experience with.
(I'm not sure this is a valid criticism, as the comment comes first and the anecdote second, suggesting that the anecode is there mainly for backup.)
Social media is a slow acting poison. It's extensive damaging effects will only be felt in 10-20 years. For the most part, it amplifies all the negative traits of humanity, twitter encourages ad hominem style debates and substanceless statements from all strata of soceity. Instagram/FB takes the need for human validation and the need to keep pretenses among our peers to a global scale. The next generation will be much more comfortable behind a screen where they can maintain an illusory persona than in real life. This is not taking into accounts the addictive nature of social media in general and how they employ research scientists to work on making their products more addictive.
To be honest, it is really hard to know if social media did in fact improved your life.
One could argue that opiates improve their life, in the short term at least. Therefore, in my opinion parent comment claimed that we will not know the effect of FB for another 10-20 years, and I agree. There is a lot more to us, than what we feel right now, our minds are very complicated. What if in 20 years you starting feeling depressed for no obvious reasons?
FB and social media will definitely have a major impact on the human mind. I am not sure if I find value in being friends with people from high school as my mindset has shifted so much I cannot stand people that used to be my friends. Seeing their children and vacation pictures adds no value to my life, it serves as a distraction and makes me want to "keep up with the Joneses"
I can understand that feeling of "keeping up with the Joneses" but for me it's easy to ignore. For awhile I'd look at Instagram and see all the cool stuff my friends were doing and be disappointed that I wasn't doing cool stuff too.
Then I realized that my mindset was all wrong. I should be stoked for those people! I do cool stuff too, even if I'm not always doing it.
The problem starts when your friends doing 'cool' things as defined by them, then start subtly judging people who are not part of that gang. People hangout only with people who do the exact same thing otherwise there is just no point of hanging out. Instead, the truth is that our brains are quite capable of making friends with different people who do different activities and have a round robin going on. This is how we grow as a person. Human pettiness is universal and it is easy for the brain to keep noticing who is different than them, and completely missing the point.
Even then, some of my friends are rich buttholes who somehow manage to take many huge trips each year. International, snowboarding multiple times (denver, canada etc).
It doesnt bother me much, but I sometimes feel bad for my wife. She seems everyone doing fun shit on instagram and she is stuck at home. We cant afford to drop 10k+ a year on trips. We get one or two a year which is enough for me.
The thing is when we go on these trips, we just enjoy each other. We take pictures, but we arent fucking posing for instagram 20 times a day. We take pictures to remember the moment together, and to share them with our family in the future.
My argument would combine both of these sentiments, both parents and GPs, and say that social media has an amplifying effect.
It'll amplify good intentioned and sincere efforts (reconnecting, sharing good news, etc.) as well as toxic ones (hatred, lies, and so on) just as all forms of media have done in the past as well.
The same happened with the printing press as well as the emergence of the Internet itself.
The degree with which people compare social media to drugs (with all the baggage that entails) fucking astounds me sometimes. I would fully expect a serious reply to a comment like yours to be "that's just because you're addicted".
It's a fad in some circles to hate on social media. And a particularly tiresome one, since it's doing nothing more than highlighting the pathological ways humans have always behaved, even in its absence. Availability heuristic.
Humans have always fought in wars and killed one another but why are modern weapons so much more dangerous? Technology has the potential to enable the dark aspects of humanity to be more destructive than ever. Make no mistake, the HN crowd is not your average person, how social media applies to you does not reflect how it will apply to the majority in the world.
Sure. Maybe from your perspective, things are improved. But you can’t see how the world would be different without social media. Maybe you’d enjoy living in an alternate world instead. Honestly, connectedness might be overrated. Presence and locality could produce completely different and potentially better results.
I have a strong feeling that you were well past the age where social media could have had a strong influence on your psychological development when you had encountered social media for the first time. I am not saying there are no good things to social media, but knowing people, the dark patterns emerge much stronger than the positive ones.
It's possible. I was 17 when I got Facebook, so older than most kids now, but not exactly a fully formed adult.
Interestingly, in middle school, my friends and I sort of built our own social network. We all made websites on "Expage" and would link them to each other. It seemed like everyone in the school was doing it and I remember being pretty happy when a girl I liked gave me a shoutout on her website. I feel like we all learned a lot from that experience because inevitably, there was plenty of drama and hurt feelings.
That's a big part of what got me into software development in the first place.
"Everyone now agrees that Madison was depressed, though she had never previously exhibited symptoms. (Depression exists on Jim's side of the family.) Something had changed with her brain chemistry. She was not seeing the world in the same way she had before. She had lost weight too, had become so thin as to appear sick.
The day before Madison returned to Penn for spring semester, she had a session with her therapist that Jim (note her father) also attended. She admitted to having suicidal thoughts. "If you have suicidal thoughts, don't act them out," her doctor said. "Either call me or call someone in your family.""
I don't see how social media can mask anything once this happens. The article mentions Jim din't like to discuss suicide as to encourage it, but he also mentioned transferring, and Madison herself went to her coach with a letter to quit track.
There's no "masking" at this point. The issue is, to be blunt people don't take these kind of things seriously. They want to believe the person will power through it and any signs that they do they seize on. I think maybe the sense of public failure-that she would have to drop out due to the pressure- guides this, as well as the realization of a mental illness.
I know HN has their own memes now, but it's kind of odd to blame social media when the young woman had plenty of real contact with family, friends, and coaches. But people here are invested into "social media= bad" that articles like this really fuel their prejudices.
To be honest, there's no reason to portray an authentic lifestyle on Facebook. Because the more accurate or authentic you share on Facebook, the more likely they cut/data mine/analyze it to the point where they (and also everyone else on Facebook) might know about your life than you do - with predictive AI, that's worth a lot of thousands dollars of ad dollars.
I don't have any mental illness but I do a deliberate effort to portray something else on Facebook and Twitter. You can't share anything private. Who knows, border agents, customs or criminals might use it against you in the future.
> The big thing I've heard is vacation photos in real time means unoccupied dwelling, which means ripe for breaking and entering.
This is mostly FUD though. Dutch police did an experiment where cops using traditional methods were 3 times (iirc) more effective at spotting vacationers than ones using the internet. It's much more important to secure your home than it is to not post to social media.
Anyone who can find my address can also probably find out I have a job and can simply break into my home while I'm there. They don't need to wait for me to go on vacation.
Cart your (sensitive) recylcing to a recycling center yourself, rather than relying on exposed curbside pickup.
> Spread the disposal over many months? The signal is still there.
That probably works too, if you have a bin and the signal is stuff extending beyond the bin signalling to drive-by opportunists; by spreading it out over time, you can keep the stuff you don't want to expose in (and at the bottom of) the bin, which exposes you to people who dig through the bin for intel, but that's a whole lot more active search.
Thanks everyone. But I live in Western continental Europe and every week I load my small car with sorted heaps of garbage (colored bottles, transparent bottles, paper, folded cardboards boxes, cans, plastic bottles each in a different bag, plastic caps, metal caps, etc.).
My question was more about what can be done by an American citizen (as I assumed it was the case here) since the cliché is that the US doesn't do recycling.
I also deliberately do not share much on Facebook and other social networks because I feel the same way. It was not long ago that it was relatively common for potential employers to request your Facebook password as part of their hiring decision. It seems obvious that the ways in which you use social media can and will be used against you if necessary, whether by employers or law enforcement agencies, and fail to see why anyone wouldn’t be defensive in how they use these services.
I vaguely recall reading about this but it's since been made illegal, in Washington at least. Not sure about the rest of US states though. Pretty sure it's illegal here in the UK.
I see this argument a lot. For myself anyhow, it's because all of my friends and family use it to share photos and memories, and I am able to stay connected to people who I no longer have the same amount of time to stay connected to as I used to. There are certainly fantastic parts about Facebook and other social networks, but that doesn't mean care should not be applied to how they are used.
It's because everyone uses it, so it's highly suspicious if you don't use it.
Also if you don't use it, it leaves open the door for others to define your digital identity. Someone could open a profile with my first name and last name and share pictures that are meant to debase, defame or something else. At least if I share something, I can push something that I want and define myself what is my digital identity.
Plus the other which is being able to be contacted by remote family or other high school contacts etc.
The article mentions social stigma to showing that you're unhappy, as if the stigma is wrong. To me, the stigma is natural behavior. Most people don't want to be around people who are deeply depressed. It takes a lot of energy to counteract that. In my opinion, it can be contagious like happiness can be contagious. This is not to say that I don't think depressed people need help and support though.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't understand what it would look like if outwardly showing your depression wasn't stigmatized. The only alternative I can come up with is that people would have to be totally apathetic to your happiness or your sadness.
I think also there are people who will take advantage if you show any form of weakness. Thus people have a good reason to not come clean about their feelings.
Having been depressed, I think the main fear people have is of pushing people away. If you're not "fun", people won't want to spend time with you. Your friends will support you for a bit, but they have limited patience too. Comforting someone who's feeling down takes energy, and you know very well that there's a limit to how much of that you can ask other people to do for you.
There's some kind of balance to be had. I find that I can express my sadness, but I have to be mindful that when I hang out with friends, even when I'm feeling down, I don't make it all about me. I have to still try to be a good friend and listen, etc. Avoid being someone who's emotionally draining to be around. Friendship is an exchange.
The problem is that what you describe as "natural" stigma reenforces the problem, as people feel stigmatized and rejected and go deeper in their isolation and problems. I think part of the solution is actually for people who express your opinion to get over themselves, and realize for example how you just said happiness can be contagious in a similar way, so why not decide to be a contagion for good rather than dismiss someone as a contagion for bad. That won't fix your friends' problems totally but it goes further than people realize.
This article feels misguided because it seems to start from the assumption that your social media presence is supposed to be a whole representation of your life. It's like saying James Bond movies fail because they don't show him going to the bathroom.
They're not failing, it just isn't their intent. If you're contemplating suicide, perhaps your distant aunts and people you last saw in high school are not the appropriate lifeline.
Well, don't all just sit there: tell your children that social media is poison, and act aggressively to root it out. The current generation of young adults is likely beyond salvation, but the one after - the current <17 cohort, perhaps - may still be helped.
I'm around children a lot, especially the 10-12 age group which happens to be my daughter's social circle. I'm amazed to see how many kids are glued to Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and other such apps that I don't even know about. Either we act now, or it'll be too late for that generation, as well.
It's very easy for an adult to lock down which apps can be used on a child's device, which websites can be accessed, etc. Social media can be stopped, but this must happen one tedious step at a time.
I knew before I clicked this would be Madison. I didn't know her but I went to Penn and was a student there when she died. It shook the whole school, and then a wave of other student suicides followed. I'm sure all of these other students had happy pictures on their Facebook too, but for whatever reason Madison's story was the one that went national and still seems to echo back. Nothing to say that hasn't been said ... it's beyond tragic and nobody will ever be able to explain it.
I do think the focus on social media here is misguided or at least not productive. Penn and other colleges need more readily available mental health services and programs to reduce the stigma around accessing them. From what I hear, not much has changed on that front.
Penn and other colleges need more readily available mental health services
Unfortunately, that's actually kind of a bandaid approach. It's a little like saying "We don't really need to make the factory safer so fewer people get hurt. We just need another doctor in our on-site clinic and it should be a free visit if the injury occurred on the job."
You go to a mental health professional because something is wrong. Often, that something wrong is social/environmental.
This trope that depressed people just need better access to mental health professionals is a left-handed way of blaming those individuals and suggesting they are simply randomly defective and washing our hands of trying to make a better world. In most cases, they are more rightly viewed as "the presenting problem" -- the signifier of something systemic gone wrong.
Family counselors are routinely presented with a situation where, for example, a teenager is acting out and being labeled as The Problem. They never accept that as the actual truth. They know that they need to deal with the family dynamic. Simply blaming the teen as the easy out will not go good places.
Same here, when I saw the `(2015)` in the title. I didn't remember the exact year of Holleran's story, just that when ESPN published it, it was very notable and alarming. People were cynical about social media back then, but they weren't as outright hostile, in the way that it's common to be so today.
Just as you said for yourself, her story spoke more to me as a story about how severe depression can hide in plain sight, in any era, but also in an age where constant checkins and engagement is almost mandated by social media. I didn't get the impression at all that the tragedy was exacerbated by social media, other than possibly misleading her loved ones to think she was happier than she was.
I think her story is out a lot because for a lot of people it seems easy to understand. She was at a new school who was hard, and due to the pressure she killed herself. I think the story is way more dense than that, plus the fact that you never know what is really going on inside people head. But the simplification of the story, the rather attractive girl, the perfect life that she was posting on social network, the big and famous university are some of the factors that might explains why she is more publicized than other. But every fight need a face, and today she is the face.
This FB example of the social 'stage set' individuals can set up for themselves at no cost to project on the world is arguably a micro example of what the pr machine behind politicians and showbiz personalities push out to us.
It's getting harder and harder to find what's authentic unless you actually manage to physically meet these people in unmanaged and scripted situations...
It’s sad how often social media has to take the blame for social iinteractions in general. Yes alcoholics, drugadicts, manically depressiv and terrorists all Seem normal to passive observere and sometimes even to passive friends. That has nothing to do with facebook, Instagram, snapchat or any other social media platform.
When people don't have a perfect "Facebook life" they are castigated for oversharing and washing dirty linen in public. On a public medium like Facebook, you keep things perfect because everyone from your boss to your juniors and your grandmother is reading.
That's true. I started a new job where all my coworkers (including my boss) added me on Facebook. I recently realized that I'm now censoring myself more than I was before. It's a question of status: I don't want to broadcast to my coworkers that I sometimes go to electronic music events. I know they would judge me negatively. My girlfriend recently broke up with me. I didn't say anything on Facebook either, because I don't want to seem like a whiner. Maybe it's not such a bad thing, the net result is that I participate less in public discussions on Facebook, and instead discuss these things privately with close friends instead.
What if it was not the fault of social media? What if the platforms were only there for people to express themselves in which ever way they felt comfortable doing publicly? It seems that this woman was not speaking to her father about her mental illness nor to her friends. Social media might have shocked the observer but the mask is only created in the minds of her followers ("I thought she was a one-dimensional happy person. I'm shocked to discover there is more to this person than her public profile!")
Perhaps the real story here is about the audience of this woman's profile. They were naive in thinking that a collection of photos and posts represents a person in its entirety.
What if the platforms were only there for people to express themselves in which ever way they felt comfortable doing publicly?
If the social media companies limited themselves to just that, we wouldn't be having this discussion. The fact is, they specifically zero in on stuff that "engages", so if you happened to innocently like a friend's vacation photo, your feed will be modified to show you more of that stuff, because the machine thinks that's what you want to see all the time.
If you're involved in animal rights advocacy, don't be surprised if your feed is full of horrible pictures of overcrowding and abusive conditions on farms. If you're interested in fitness, IG will show you a flood of semi-pornographic "workout routines" of fitness models, but very little about proper form.
These are platforms where the search functionality is intentionally gimped to search for usernames and hashtags as opposed to actual text content, which a lot of IG posts have; it's not all just pics and videos.
> which ever way they felt comfortable doing publicly
They are.
Your argument seems to confound the author and the audience. Sure, the audience is shown only what they like. As you correctly point out, that is the engagement social media seeks to maximize. The author, on the other hand, is free to publish what they choose.
How does avoiding the term help at all? Will restricting our vocabulary somehow counteract the phenomenon of people portraying different lives on their Facebook profiles?
Blaming "social media" is as dumb as blaming the young adult book "Reconstructing Amelia". Heck, if I was to presume anything, I'd blame her parents before blaming anything else (read: i'm not).
Who has it harder? The jock with the flawless physique, the hottest girlfriend, and the perfectly thrown spiral; or the nerd who get's pushed around and laughed at by all the girls? The answers are not so easy.
We live in the society of the spectacle as predicted by Guy Debord, in which he argues that authentic social life has been replaced with its representation.
Relevant quotes:
"All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."
“The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.”
“... just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having [things], post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
Why would facebook be the place where you choose to publicly portray your mental illness? Most people are going to choose to share some positive aspects of their live. Should they be posting emotional outbursts or breakdowns?
I take plenty of issues with social media but this is just facebook bashing for sport.
To me it seems to be caused by the technological imbalance caused by DRM. If people have social media clients that are wholly in their control (to e.g. integrate a bunch of different personas, platforms, and to have total control over the privacy aspects) the double-bind will dissipate, as mastery over your social media is no longer against the law.
IMO law should forbid social media platforms from employing DRM altogether. Their monetization scheme will eventually adapt and Facebook and Google's financial situation is none of my conern.
I feel sorry for her and condolence for her family.
BUt, at least in my circle, there are some people who do the total opposite. That is, they keeeeep complaining about their life/boss/politics/etc but actually they're a nice person and totally normal in real life.
For liability reasons, newspapers are notoriously wary of naming specific organizations or linking to third-party sites , especially in the case of sensitive topics like MH treatment, in case it's mistaken as an endorsement.
I can understand the hurt and bitterness you feel, however it may not simply be that they do not care about the world or the people in it anymore - it could also be that they're no longer able to care. It's a subtle difference, however I can only imagine that most people do try to stay alive, they fight to survive - ending your life being perhaps the most extreme measure. I imagine it is the last resort in someone's mind if they do end their life. Whether they knew of help they could get or were able to access it, or if the rest of society cared enough to help adequately, is another question. I don't think blaming those who commit suicide is useful for anyone though, albeit it may on a shallow level temporarily help deal with the emotions for those who are alive and suffering from the act - there are ways to process the hurt and remember those we love in peace.
Just because someone close to you committed suicide doesn't mean your views on it are correct or logical.
Have you considered that there are tons of people out there who grew up being abused and neglected, or have otherwise experienced horrific trauma? How do you think you would fare if, for example, your caretakers sexually molested you for years?
I've interviewed people who tried to kill themselves but lived, and not one of them said that suicide was a "fuck you" gesture. Every single one of them spoke about their firmly held belief that their family would be better off without them.
Suicide as a fuck you gesture is very rare, and tends to be accompanied with murder.
I wouldn’t be so sure and I respectfully disagree. It’s a coping mechanism. If I tried to kill my self and failed, and then was asked why I did it, of course I would take the position of a martyr. It’s the mark of true evil.
An athlete on the Tour de France knows most winners cheat and the instance of cheaters in the standings clusters densely toward the top.
To even qualify for the game with cheaters, you need to either be a standard deviation better than they are without their cheat, or compromise and also cheat, which in turn legitimizes their tactics.
Social media exacerbates nascent mental illness by creating this same double bind for young people, where to "succeed," in life by getting access to cliques and networks, school placements, job opportunities, and investment opportunities, you need to "play the game," which today means to fabricate an image of performative conventional success and the perception you are a viable centre of attention.
They know it's wrong, everyone else knows it's probably wrong, but the whole exercise is a temporary suspension of disbelief in exchange for lottery style rewards, provided by sponsors.
Good news on both fronts is you can enjoy riding bicycles or any other sport, and indeed life, without the often horrific and spiritually hollow compromises of elite competition, which social media seems to approximate.
The greatest irony is that it is in more humble and private pursuits where most of the real stories of courage, dignity, and personal triumph that people only fake in performances on social media can truly be found.