Lived Experience Forum

[Former-Member]

There was a sudden death in Sydney yesterday.

The incident was covered by the major television news networks, as well as major online news sources too. None of them showed enough respect to the person who died, in my opinion. Instead, they talked about the inconvenience the incident caused, and the "lack of social distancing." SERIOUSLY. Social distancing was their big concern. None of them were even kind of enough to mention the three major resources: 000, Lifeline and the Suicide Call Back Service.

So, [...] it, I'll do it myself.

If this article has raised any issues for you, please reach out for help: Ambulance (000), Lifeline (13 11 14) or the Suicide Call Back Service (1300 659 467). I promise, your death would not just be a disruption to social distancing. The world needs what you have.

I'll be honest with you, that's kind of unusual. Usually the reporting is a lot more respectful. They kind of vaguely imply what happened, and then they mention those resources, and I love it when they do. I honestly don't know why that changed today.

Disclaimer: I have to point out that the lack of compassion may indicate that the incident wasn't a suicide, and that maybe if it was, they would have been more careful. However, the comments in one of the websites I saw certainly suggested it was a suicide, and I think it has the same effect anyway, to anyone who's watching it and struggling at the time.

If this post looks familiar, it's because I put it up yesterday, but I had to make some minor adjustments to it. I'm glad you guys appreciated it x.

[chibam]

@Former-MemberYeah, I had my post nixxed, too, because I referred to the death too specifically; or to be more precise, to it's immediate societal consequences too specifically.

That, too, I believe is majorly problematic - the fact that we aren't aloud to discuss methods of suicide - directly or indirectly, even in the vague terms that we were using in that thread. And it's interesting because nothing about what we were saying actually stated how the suicide was performed. We dropped clues that would allow most savvy people to draw a likely conclusion about what happened, but we didn't actually say or specualte on what happened.

It's interesting because I once had my daily comings-and-goings disrupted by a suicide that caused the exact same disruption to societal inferstructure that we were discussing in the other thread. Without going into specifics, I was actually in close proximity to the suicide itself, though I didn't personally witness it. But the method of suicide was not what you would immediately assume if you simply heard that "a suicide disrupted [a certain element of societal inferstructure] today". So talking about the consequential societal disruptions really doesn't tell you anything about the actual method of suicide.

I just have some very serious concerns about the free speech implications of these sorts of limitations, especially when it comes to suicide. Because it is an issue that we need to be talking about and that we need to be frank and forthright about. So many of the problems that drive and surround suicide are "those things we mustn't speak of" and that's why the problems persist.

If we are to have productive discussions that produce real, accessable, non-fatal solutions to the fates that are worse then death, then we can't keep talking in vague, non-specific, uninformative fashion as we've been forced to do in these posts. We need to be free to talk about what's really going on and what needs to be done. And we need to break with our pitiful traditions in this field and say "nothing is off limits", because the second you impose limitations on what you are and aren't aloud to discuss, you hobble any chances you have of producing adequate conclusions that address the realities of the problem.

[destructive]

It's so sad. I actually have had friends share their opinion that it is selfish. They don't know I've tried, or clearly what it's like to be there because selfish is far from it. In many ways you think the world will better for it.