> The point about suicidal thoughts is that the urge to have the thoughts is a symptom of a disease,
This is wrong. Thinking of it as a "disease" is a misunderstanding, it makes it impossible to truly understand it.
Alcoholism might be a disease... excessive alcohol consumption probably doesn't have any benefits. Suicide though? It sort of does.
You see, biological organisms aren't programmed to survive... we're programmed to reproduce. And that means not just laying the eggs, but making sure that at least some of the offspring survive. So it became advantageous if a parent (or even uncle/aunt) was psychologically capable of killing themselves or letting themselves be killed.
And we're not necessarily talking about throwing yourself in front of a rabid grizzly either. There are all sorts of circumstances (killing yourself so there will be enough food for the other to survive a famine).
The psychological machinery is all there for killing yourself. Hard-wired into your brain through countless thousands of generations of people who only lived because a close relative voluntarily died.
But evolution isn't intelligent, and it goes with a "what works most of the time" method of keeping a trait or not. And this is probably cross-wired in with quite a few mental illnesses and other questionably-useful traits.
It's a malfunction of a (once in a great while) useful tool.
On HN, it's anything other than the strict mental health party line on suicide. On other threads, I've seen people looking down on David Foster Wallace, as if they had a prayer of doing in their lives what he did.
I upvoted, because interesting comments on this topic are rare.
"This is wrong. Thinking of it as a "disease" is a misunderstanding, it makes it impossible to truly understand it."
I would classify it as a medical condition since that is how the modern society can provide attention to it. If one is clinically depressed and borderline on suicide the way to get help is to seek immediate medical attention.
I'm not sure what the philosophical difference is between a "malfunction" and "disease".
This is wrong. Thinking of it as a "disease" is a misunderstanding, it makes it impossible to truly understand it.
Alcoholism might be a disease... excessive alcohol consumption probably doesn't have any benefits. Suicide though? It sort of does.
You see, biological organisms aren't programmed to survive... we're programmed to reproduce. And that means not just laying the eggs, but making sure that at least some of the offspring survive. So it became advantageous if a parent (or even uncle/aunt) was psychologically capable of killing themselves or letting themselves be killed.
And we're not necessarily talking about throwing yourself in front of a rabid grizzly either. There are all sorts of circumstances (killing yourself so there will be enough food for the other to survive a famine).
The psychological machinery is all there for killing yourself. Hard-wired into your brain through countless thousands of generations of people who only lived because a close relative voluntarily died.
But evolution isn't intelligent, and it goes with a "what works most of the time" method of keeping a trait or not. And this is probably cross-wired in with quite a few mental illnesses and other questionably-useful traits.
It's a malfunction of a (once in a great while) useful tool.