Any suicide in general, and this one in particular, definitely has multiple causes. I’m really sorry if I gave the opposite impression.
But I think it’s reasonable and potentially important to respond to a suicide by looking into those causes and trying to reduce them.
To be more object-level:
Kathy was obviously mentally ill, and her particular brand of mental illness seems to have been well-known. I don’t know what efforts were made to help her with that (I do get the impression some were made), but I’ve seen people claim her case was an example of the ways our community habitually fails to help people with mental illness and it certainly seems worth looking into that.
Kathy publicly attributed her suicide to the fact that she had been sexually assaulted. Whatever else was in play, it’s certainly true that sexual assault is a risk factor for suicide and she really does seem to have been assaulted. It behooves us to check for flaws in our protections against this sort of thing when they fail this dramatically.
In particular, it seems she felt she didn’t know how to avoid inevitably getting assaulted again. I get the impression this was part of a paranoid/depressive spiral on her part. But it’s true that this is a real phenomenon and I’ve talked to other rationalists who have been concerned with this as well.
To return to the meta level, I’m also very concerned by the fact that this has been taken up by the anti-rationalist crowd and this may be making some people defensive. I don’t recall anyone saying that we should be so concerned about suicide contagion as to ignore the object-level issues raised completely when Aaron Swartz committed suicide, for example. Maybe we should have been! But the fact that we as a community potentially failed or simply could have done better here means that we should be more careful about dismissing this, not less.
I think we do disagree on if it’s a good idea to widely spread as a message “HEY SUICIDAL PEOPLE HAVE YOU REALIZED THAT IF YOU KILL YOURSELF EVERYONE WILL SAY NICE THINGS ABOUT YOU AND WORK ON SOLVING PROBLEMS YOU CARE ABOUT LET’S MAKE SURE TO HIGHLIGHT THIS EXTENSIVELY”.
This is a simplistic monocausal model of suicide that is not only incorrect but dangerous and goes against the CDC suicide prevention guidelines.
Any suicide in general, and this one in particular, definitely has multiple causes. I’m really sorry if I gave the opposite impression.
But I think it’s reasonable and potentially important to respond to a suicide by looking into those causes and trying to reduce them.
To be more object-level:
Kathy was obviously mentally ill, and her particular brand of mental illness seems to have been well-known. I don’t know what efforts were made to help her with that (I do get the impression some were made), but I’ve seen people claim her case was an example of the ways our community habitually fails to help people with mental illness and it certainly seems worth looking into that.
Kathy publicly attributed her suicide to the fact that she had been sexually assaulted. Whatever else was in play, it’s certainly true that sexual assault is a risk factor for suicide and she really does seem to have been assaulted. It behooves us to check for flaws in our protections against this sort of thing when they fail this dramatically.
In particular, it seems she felt she didn’t know how to avoid inevitably getting assaulted again. I get the impression this was part of a paranoid/depressive spiral on her part. But it’s true that this is a real phenomenon and I’ve talked to other rationalists who have been concerned with this as well.
To return to the meta level, I’m also very concerned by the fact that this has been taken up by the anti-rationalist crowd and this may be making some people defensive. I don’t recall anyone saying that we should be so concerned about suicide contagion as to ignore the object-level issues raised completely when Aaron Swartz committed suicide, for example. Maybe we should have been! But the fact that we as a community potentially failed or simply could have done better here means that we should be more careful about dismissing this, not less.
I think we do disagree on if it’s a good idea to widely spread as a message “HEY SUICIDAL PEOPLE HAVE YOU REALIZED THAT IF YOU KILL YOURSELF EVERYONE WILL SAY NICE THINGS ABOUT YOU AND WORK ON SOLVING PROBLEMS YOU CARE ABOUT LET’S MAKE SURE TO HIGHLIGHT THIS EXTENSIVELY”.
I think we agree on this and we only miscommunicated with each other. Aumann points for both of us, I guess.