On the challenges of studying suicide | Mind Hacks

http://mindhacks.com/2012/03/30/on-the-challenges-of-studying-suicide/

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In a strange sense my going on medication is a failure

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Action for Happiness - 10 tips for more happiness

http://www.actionforhappiness.org/10-keys

This is pretty good. It's all stuff people have said before but in a nice short form.

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Suicide isn't a right

It is a priviledge to get an assisted suicide. The law is being tested in the UK and other countries have more progressive laws but there's still a long way to go before assisted suicide is consider a legal right in the UK and a legal right for those who have experienced mental illness too.

Assisted death isn't a great option for any human being. It is the end of their life but it is a choice some of us have to make rather than be forced to live with so many days wanting death. There are few solutions I've coming across to living with the desire to die. Those I found didn't seem to work.

Perhaps the shift needs to come with a shift in research into psychosocial options. By this I mean changing society as well as changing people through chemicals and talking.

There is a lot of internal suffering which drives a person to want to die. It is usually a long process when it comes to a suicide with capacity to understand what death means.

I want to kill myself but I haven't always felt this way when things got bad or when things were good. It wasn't an overnight change where I found myself facing more days with suicidal thoughts than without. There were cycles of time and there are still periods where I feel less like wanting to die and simply want to stop living or even don't think about my death at all. Every once in a while I get close to making an attempt and occassionally I try something but I'm still, sadly, alive and not in the frame of mind to make an attempt.

I'm so keen on an assisted dying scheme to help me out. About 150 people with mental illnesses have been given a peaceful death by Dignitas according to their Wikipedia page. I would like to be one of them.

It will take a long time before I have this right. :-(

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Google's new search technology and unwanted search finds

Google is updating its search algorithm - the software which determines what search results come up and in what order - to be more effective. By more effective I mean getting the right web page - the right answer to the question - straight away at the top of the page and even as the first link.

This is a next generation technology which will make finding information ever more easy. But what of things which society doesn't want people to find? For example the ingredients list of a suicide cocktail and where to buy them would be a brilliant search result for those who actively want to die. Current searches don't easily reveal this sort of information. In fact the Wikipedia page has been altered to remove the ingredients list of at least one suicide cocktail.

Will Google continue this subtle censorship of suicide literature or will they automatically serve up the best information which directly answers the query? I suspect Google will adopt the former approach and have less relevant web pages ranking above the information which helps a person end their life. This is in line with current suicide prevention techniques which use suppression of information and access to self-termination materials.

This sort of censorship has never been challenged. It is a shame but it is done to save lives. The problem is some of those people don't want to be saved. They're looking for a solution which they've consciously decided upon: the time and place of their death.

There may be other keywords which also have similar sorts of search censorship from paedophile porn to hacking sites. Standard algorithms did not censor well made and well ranked sites without manual intervention but this manual intervention is easier and perhaps more commonplace when developing a semantic search system, I.e. to get good search results the programmers must have had to spend more time ensuring good results come higher up the rankings. They may have spent time making sure good information about dangerous, illegal or subjectively described as mentally ill or immoral keywords was suppressed and some of this could have been done through manual intervention.

With so much effort put in to suppression suicide by suppressing and monitoring online communication and information it is likely this trend will continue irrespective of privacy and freedom of information. The right to die will change all this I hope.

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Psychiatry's oppression of human types

First incarceration was used to make the mentallly ill disappear. Then drugs were used to free the mentally ill but suppress their symptoms and type. Depressive types were prescribed narcotics to make them cheer up and not be so glum. Manic depressive and schizophrenics had other drugs foisted upon them but these central nervous system drugs were not real treatments.

They were using the power of medical science to change behaviour and being. CNS medications are used to solve psychosocial problems, not real illnesses, but the science is applied as if they were real illnesses and so is the language of change.

Change is what treatment involves but a different type of change to what most physical medications achieve. Drugs for mental disorder arrest the disorder. They can incapacitate individuals to resolve the problem of emotional and behavioural disorders - the stuff which is often a problem for society and can be healed by changes in society or society's norms.

For example, homosexuality is one diagnosis which was healed by forces other than the usual treatment of an illness. It was demedicalised. There still exist other paraphilias which are treated the same way as homosexuality was but today a social change changed the pathologisation of homosexuality. This happened when psychiatrists said it was okay to be gay.

Other 'illnesses' may be healed in similar ways. There is a growing movement who seeks to shift the power-base away from psychiatry's biomedical dogma and domination over humanity. This is the movement which seeks to look at schizophrenia as not an illness. Many just call the idea the social model of mental disorder without fullying comprehending what significance the social model has.

It demands demedicalisation in my opinion because medicalisation - no matter what it purports to achieve - is only one half of the solution. The illness model says the individual must be changed to remove abherrant symptoms. Psychiatry and psychology both work on these aims. They percieve people as ill and healing means changing the person to be more normal.

The social model asks people to consider the impact upon the individual from different cultures and countries, from social factors which can significantly impinge on the disability.

After all, the science of psychiatry exists because of a social problem where the mad were outcast from family and society. Their exclusion was created by dispassionate norms common in the industrial revolution societies. Those who fitted in prospersed. Those who didn't fell into disability and inequality. It was only afterwards when psychiatry and the biomedical model really developed to take custodianship over the asylums and their inmates. This is the beginning of the mental health system and the paradigm of illness as a commonly understood social knowledge about humans who were different in some way.

Unwittingly, psychiatry became a tool of social order instead of something which treats any real illness. Homosexuality was never an illness and neither are any of the paraphilias. They're a social problem for society and a problem for individuals when there aren't suitable structures available in society. This may be hard to accept when considering something like paedophilia but it is easier when considering depression.

Depression may simply be a natural pain which some people suffer. This is the pain of life and a shit life for certain individual types, types who may suffer to much or not feel enough joie de vie. This doesn't have to be an illness but it can be treated by drugs which make the person feel better. The drugs aren't curing any illness because unhappiness isn't an illness however it is also true that some really unhappy people are made happier by SSRIs just as many people are made happy by other things, not all of which are drugs.

Bah...buggered this piece up.

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Portraits of Bob Whitaker speaking (those I didn't like as much.

Different crops and effects and tones in these versions. Some
photographers might prefer some of these to the ones I like. It was a
tough choice to leave some of these out from the final 5.