Suic!de and Ment@l He@lth | Philosophy Tube ★

[Music] to sleep perchance to dream either for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause there's the respect that makes calamity of so long life or who would bear the whips and scorns of time the oppressors wrong the proud man's constantly the pangs of despised love the laws delay the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes when he himself might his Quietus make with a bare bodkin who would fardels bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life but that the dread of something after death the undiscovered country from whose Bourn no traveler returns puzzles the so Prince Hamlet when the ghost of your father instructed you to take revenge on your uncle who murdered him and married your mother and seized the throne of Denmark how much did that event impair your normal functioning on a scale of one to four if somebody is thought to be definitely not in their right mind whatever that means then a lot of people think that makes it okay to take away some of their rights like by locking them up in a psych ward for instance so morally legally and medically a heck of a lot is riding on this question of how we decide what a mental illness is and when if that kind of response is okay and it's kind of alarmingly unclear where that line is or if it even exists and one of the best ways of illustrating this is to learn about something that used to be considered a mental illness and is no longer the American Psychiatric Association officially thought that homosexuality was a mental illness until 1973 which might seem like the distant past but really isn't that long ago and when they did declassify it a counter-narrative sprang up saying that they'd been pressured into it by activist gays who denied scientific evidence in favor of political ideology that story might sound familiar to some of you so why do people used to think that homosexuality was a mental illness what were their rationalizations well Sigmund Freud thought wrongly that homosexuality could be traced to some kind of abnormal experience in childhood and although he later changed his mind about it being a mental illness the idea that there must be something screwy going on in the heads of people who aren't straight and that it was all linked to childhood stuck the hallmark of an illness that's often used for defining them is that it inhibits normal function and in the 50s and 60s people like sand or Rado and having Bieber started to say that in their findings and they did a scientific test that they really believed in gay and lesbian and bisexual people seemed pretty dysfunctional and they thought they could cure them and make them happier and turn them into straight people through therapy and it was all a matter of bad parenting there's the Freudian legacy the problem or one of the many problems was that Freud and a lot of the thinkers who came after him only ever spoke to gay and lesbian or bisexual people who were in therapy already and ignored all the ones who weren't who were functioning fine but these ideas gained a lot of power to make people feel ashamed of themselves and make those around them especially parents feel like they've done something wrong in 1956 dr. Evelyn Hooker conducted an actual scientific study with a control group and she found that the gay men she investigated weren't really any more dysfunctional than straight men but her work was covered up the Nixon administration later got wind of it and tried to bury it on political grants ironically politics really was holding back the science but just the other way and tempting as it is to lay the blame for society-wide homophobia and solely at the feet of religious authorities like Reverend Jerry Falwell who definitely played their part academics and doctors were in on it too from the very beginning and that's how it happened entire sexualities became medicalised and then that diagnosis was used to justify taking away people's rights and talking over them because their mentally ill so therefore they don't know what's best for them the problems start to creep in because inhibiting normal function requires you to define normal and I definitely don't to piss on anyone's chips especially if psychiatry has been a help to you but the philosophical concern is that psychiatrists own conceptions of what counts as a normal good life can creep into their judgment of who is deviant and therefore ill especially if psychiatrists themselves aren't a very diverse bunch health can't really be defined without reference to some theory of a good human life and one definition doesn't always fit everybody okay I'm gonna ask you some standard questions now that will help us determine what sort of a service we think you might be right for over the last two weeks how often have you been bothered by any of the following to the extent that they've impaired your normal function on a scale of one to four one being not at all and four being every day little interest or pleasure in doing things you would normally enjoy feeling down depressed or hopeless trouble sleeping eating sleeping or eating too much or too little feeling that you are a failure and have let your family down just on a scale of one to four the problem of defining the boundaries of health and disease isn't just an issue for psychiatry but all medicine for instance you may have heard of the Jehovah's Witnesses they're a denomination of Christians and a very small part of their belief system is they don't think Christians should get blood transfusions as you can imagine it doesn't come up very often for them because most people never get a blood transfusion and most people think that you don't have to get a medical treatment if you don't want one most of the time there's a big exception to that which we're coming to shortly but most people at least agree that you don't have to get a blood transfusion if you don't want one so Jehovah's Witnesses you do you but what do you do if a child of Jehovah's Witnesses not yet old enough to make an informed religious and medical decision needs a transfusion or they're gonna die in that case you can't get around the fact that somebody be their doctor or a judge is gonna have to make a moral call between valuing the religious rights of the parents or valuing the life of the child in my country this has actually happened and the High Court said that doctors are allowed to give blood transfusions against parents wishes if it is medically necessary trouble is though that medical decision contains within it a moral and even a religious one about what is good for the child and who gets to decide that the opinion of the High Court is oh we put morality and religion to one side and we just focus on the medicine but by pretending to do that impossible thing you actually make a moral and religious decision there are no morally neutral medical calls and every medical treatment presupposes that there is in fact a problem of a particular nature although we think a lot of the time that medical treatments should be voluntary practically speaking the big exception people make often comes with mental illness interestingly although suicide is technically legal in my country if you get caught attempting it you can be arrested as in handcuffs threatened by the cops strip searched and thrown in the back of an ambulance you can be imprisoned in a psych ward if you are a danger to yourself even though being a danger to yourself is a legal thing to be and many of those who have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act in my country describe appalling conditions that are much more like punishment than they are like care an independent review published in 2018 reports that 2/3 of people sectioned in my countries say they were not treated with dignity and respect it's also worth noting that black Britons are four times as likely to be sectioned as whites so race might be creeping into people's assessments of what counts as normal and healthy too in his book fatal freedom libertarian philosopher Thomas oz gives a history of how suicide became medicalised in my country it was illegal to kill yourself until 1961 long before that it used to be that if you killed yourself all your property would be confiscated and go to the state and around about the nineteenth century people started to think that that was pretty cruel especially on families who were left behind who were basically being punished for somebody else's crime so lawyers started to use the insanity defense and say that if you killed yourself you must be insane and therefore weren't criminally responsible it was a legal dodge to allow families to keep their dead relatives property and then religious authorities got in on it as well previously a lot of them had said that suicides couldn't receive certain rights or burials because it was a sin and then they also started using the ipso facto insane defense and that's why we today view suicide predominantly through the lens of insanity and therefore medicine whereas a lot of other cultures and peoples at different times just haven't seen it like that we show you a la le Luana sure logic mesh plan yet limb press transfer now we talked before about how homosexuality and bisexuality became medicalised into mental illnesses and then after a turbulent political struggle things changed and the reason that might sound familiar is that right now we are doing that whole dance again but with trans people in particular some transphobes point to the highest suicide rate amongst trans people as proof that it must be some kind of dysfunction just like they did in the 50s and 60s for homosexuality and bisexuality because the suicide rate for LGBT people is higher than for others so if we can establish that suicidality isn't always a sign of insanity mental illness or dysfunction then we'll be doing LGBT folks a massive solid by taking that mo away from their persecutors will presumably also be doing a lot of people are solid because they might then be more open to talking about how they feel thoughts about ending your own life or feeling that you would be better off dead but that's no easy task partly because we've been medicalizing suicide for hundreds of years and partly because if not all suicides are the result of mental dysfunction then that means that people who are perfectly in their right minds can rationally decide to kill themselves and that's a pretty bleak thing to have to face for two big reasons I can think of firstly even if 99 out of 100 suicides are the result of uncontrollable mental illness like just a bolt from the blue if it's your mother or it's your brother or it's your lover and you're the one who's left behind your of course can I ask yourself what if that was the one what if it wasn't an uncontrollable mental storm but what if it was a decision that they made in the moment based on certain factors in their life and therefore what if I could have done something about it what if I called them what if I texted them what was the last thing I said could I have saved and that line of thinking is truly the [ __ ] depths of human experience I've been close to people who've fallen into that and you can spend your whole life asking what if questions again and again but you can never find the answers to the idea that suicide is in its own bubble it's like cancer it just boom happens and no one can do anything about it it's an enormous comfort to a lot of people it's gonna be really difficult to let go of that secondly if suicide is something that for want of a better word rational people can decide to do then yeah there isn't a nice way of putting this actually that means that it's an option if it's not something that we can just sweep under the rug and say oh only mad people think about that then this discussion is going to force us to confront the question do I want to go on living that's not really a question but a lot of people find it enjoyable to contemplate I mean like do I do it want to go on living I don't even know why I'm having for my dinner tonight no I don't really want to think about that I know this is a philosophy Channel but sometimes it really is it's just not think about stuff some philosophers have argued that because suicide is the choice between life and death where one of those options is a complete unknown it must be irrational because you can't make an informed decision and this is the same argument that Hamlet makes could I have my stationery holder back no but the response to that is that we're not really choosing between life and death yes death is an unknown but life is a known quantity and to the suicidal person in the moment it's judged to be negative so really it's just a choice between different amounts of a life and at least some suicidal people don't really want to die per se they're just in a lot of emotional pain and don't have any other way of stopping it I know that mental health and even just suicidality is an enormous ly varied field but I don't think we can say that every suicidal impulse whether it results in death or not is necessarily a sign of insanity during the siege of Masada in 74 AD a Roman legion surrounded the mountain fortress of Masada trapping the Jewish rebels inside when they got in there they found the rebels had all killed each other rather than be taken captive the Jews of masiva basically died by suicide and I don't think it's reasonable to say that in circumstances like that everybody suddenly came down with the same mental illness no the Jews of mass that had died because of their beliefs and they weren't delusional either they really were surrounded facing a shitty life of slavery and they decided that they'd rather be dead why are we talking about the Jews of Masada because dr. Rosencrantz I want to talk about myself again definitely not trying to minimize the ability of psychiatry and medicine to save people's lives but the philosophical question here is can we talk about mental illness in exclusively medical terms because doctors in my country have started talking about people with s LS [ __ ] life syndrome and it's obviously not a medical condition but people who work crap precarious jobs who are being paid enough you can't make Ren who live in filthy depressing cities or they get discriminate against all the you know you live in a country where everything's getting worse all the time and nobody in charge knows what they're doing watch is blinding our souls or you love someone and they die or you love someone and they hurt you really bad like those things can impair your normal function a bit like a disease can in his book capitalist realism Mark Fisher writes it goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated but this says nothing about their causation if it is true for instance that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin by privatizing these problems treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individuals neurology and/or by their family background any question of social systemic causation he's ruled out mark killed himself in 2017 the philosopher Franz fanon was a psychiatrist treating algerian torture survivors during the French occupation and he realized that there was no point making them better when the main problem in their lives the fact that the French were occupying their country and torturing them was still there there's no point making them better if you're just going to send them out at the world and it's gonna mess them up again so he resigned his post and he joined the revolutionaries what about tech Wong Duke the Buddhist monk in 1963 who set himself on fire to protest the South Vietnamese government's treatment of Buddhists he left a note to be read after he died saying I respectfully plead to President no Dinh Diem to take a mind of compassion towards the people of a nation and implement religious equality and that that doesn't sound like a guy's out his mind mate you can't you can't do a video about how suicidality isn't necessarily a sign of insanity and only provide historical examples of people who actually kill themselves it undermines your point you have to tell them about somebody who tried to kill themselves and who isn't insane and who is still alive you have to tell them what that's like my first suicide attempt or suicidal gesture you want to call it was when I was 17 I was upset obviously a lot of things that would over simplify it yeah I just didn't see a way out my second attempt was in February of 2018 and again I was obviously very upset I wasn't in a good place I didn't feel safe I felt very trapped in the end I am I called the Samaritans they're a crisis line here in the UK and they just listen to you they don't give you an advice tell you what's do and they don't have the power to lock you up or report you or anything sir I spoke to Andrea was the volunteers name for about 45 minutes and I told her everything I've been through and she was out yeah that sounds really [ __ ] as far as I know there is no history of mental illness in my family I do have a history of self-harm I've been good for a few years now when I started out I always used to always used to use the same knife this one I I realized that it's probably quite disturbing for you to actually see it and and believe me it's pretty disturbing for me to hold it again but the reason I brought it is do you want to see something funny it has a fork and a spoon attachment on it like you can even like what what better illustration of the the auto cannibalistic nature of self-harm there the nourishing of the self through the destruction of herself like what what that I Ellis tration of that could he possibly ask for than the fact that the knife that I literally used to use to cut my own skin actually has color ii on it you you have my permission to laugh with me on that okay that is actually kind of free the thing is i'm high-functioning i function like no machine in four years of uni I never miss class in six years of YouTube I've missed my upload date once I I just function I'm there I get it done like I'm lucky by that you know I'm a man English so you know emotional repressions part of the deal and I was an army cadet for most of my teenage years so I've been socialized and trained to function under fire like both metaphorical fire a literal fire I function even if I'm just absolutely drowning inside under functioning actually helps a lots been said recently about youtubers facing burnout and the pressure of having to pretend to be happy when really things aren't so happy so I should probably say that what I was going through in February had nothing to do with that in fact at the time YouTube was it was a pretty welcome escape and I enjoyed it I still enjoy it anyway the point is my suicidal tendencies don't fit the normal pattern of what is thought to be an illness because they don't really impair my normal functioning my desire to murder and mutilate myself is it's kind of always there I think about it not all the time but usually every day so it doesn't impair my normal functioning because my normal functioning is itself an active impairment from on that right I went to the doctor and I told her what happened the whole shebang she got me on the waiting list to see a therapist a six-month waiting list two suicide attempts six months before you can talk to anyone about it that is what austerity and custom mental health have done in my country that's the social and systemic causation that Fisher's talking about and now I I get two half hour sessions of therapy a month over the phone it's early days yeah I've only had two sessions at time of recording but there's things in my life of kind of improved son I'm starting to feel a little bit better whenever I feel like hurting myself now or killing myself now I imagine that I'm a cosmonaut it's why I'm dressed I imagine that I'm one of those old Soviet nearest base men like Yuri Gagarin or like see laying off because that's what it feels like it feels like being stuck in a tiny spacecraft and I don't want to go because it's scary up there but don't have a choice because put in it and it shakes and it shakes and then blast-off up you go I'm just spinning into the atmosphere skipping across it like a stone just everything's shaking and banging my head off the sides of the spacecraft is coming apart because I'm ain't fit to fly toxic masculinity z hell of a ship to pilot when you're suffering but I'm just trying to repair it like mid-flight as it goes with gaffer tape and string there's no ray okay just go just thousands of pounds of thrust behind any it's still stupid it can happen like when I should be happy when I could Liesl we're just filled with love and joy and then suddenly one little thing happens and back nine G's zero gravity off you go just hurtling through space with just like tinfoil nothing between me I'm just void and I've got to keep my spacesuit on and keep it sealed up tight because the vacuum is just pulling but I know I know that if I could just be brave high on that I could get through it and ask to blad the thing and I could come back down to earth I can see the earth again because I wanted what I live I am the cosmonaut how do you tell when someone's in their right mind and how do you tell what is a disease and what is just someone responding to the world which can often impair our normal function Thomas as he takes the libertarian position he says that suicide should never be interfered with he says that just as we have a right to birth control because of bodily autonomy so too must we have a right to death control he says that suicide can sometimes be rational and therefore it's not okay to de-facto treat it like it's not and he says this because he cares about what happens to suicidal people and he wants their rights to be respected and that's a noble goal and it's one that I share but I still think he's coming at this from the wrong direction because I know that there are times when I when I just want to die and I also know that right now isn't one of them so I'm in a bit of a conundrum I've got conflicting desires which desire should I act on mr. zas if I want to maximize my autonomy what's the rational thing to do here live or keep myself to be or not to be that is the question but I don't think how much question can be answered I don't think it's about whether suicide is rational I think it's about whether it's understandable can we empathize with someone who just wants to die and surely that is the beginning of designing policies and institutions and behaviors that give suicidal people that help they think they need on their terms the help we think we need on our terms and now if you're out there if you're out there in space and you've made it to the end of this video and you're thinking about killing yourself then there's only one thing I want to say to you and by all means listen to doctors and psychiatrist and professional help if you think you need it you can get it listened to loved ones listen to the people who tell you what happens to your loved ones if you leave them behind listening to the people who'll tell you what can happen to you if you try it and don't die I've seen debate online about whether it's actually helpful to just post numbers to suicide hotlines I see both sides of it the Samaritans help me so I'll put a whole bunch of numbers down there just in case but if you're out there and you're drifting in space the one thing that I want to tell you the one just little transmission from my spacecraft to yours it's just the thing that I wish someone had been there to tell me those two nights when I tried it it's the simplest and it's the most powerful phrase in the English language I think I understand how you feel I've been up there I've flown that mission I fly a hell of a lot and you're not necessarily bad or broken inside just because they're sending you up so you fly safe cosmonauts I don't want to end the video by saying the end because the mission goes on so instead I'll just say [Music] and I think it's gonna be time to touch down many think of young [Music] Mama's ain't the kind of place to raise your kids in fact it's cold [Music] and all the science I don't understand it's just my job five days a week you [Music] Rocketman [Music] Rocketman out here [Music] - touchdown brings me to [Music] because out here [Music] yes [Music] [Music]

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 914,759

Rating: 4.9728417 out of 5

Keywords: hamlet, philosophy, shakespeare, health, blackstar, medicine

Id: eQNw2FBdpyE

Length: 33min 30sec (2010 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 28 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Dservice]

Even though I feel the framing of this post is a little weird and morbid, I know Olly occasionally browses this subreddit. If you see this Olly just wanted to say we understand how you feel. Fly safe buddy.

[u/picklev33]

I love his content, watching through his under watched earlier stuff make me love him more .

[u/Hakawatha]

Hey folks, it may not be worth reminding him at all besides some minor concern. You may want to leave it alone as a public matter, besides small forums like these where things won't turn nasty. Olly might be a little raw and out of public decency it might not be so wise to push this particular theme too hard.

That being said watch and comment on his videos, keep him and his work alive. Woo capitalism, it's our job to engage with good content, Olly is wonderful.

[u/ViolatingBadgers]

This video introduced me to a profoundly darker, but in some way much more beautiful interpretation of the lyrics to "Rocket Man".

[u/George_G_Geef]

As someone who was there this past fall (October 13th is my semicolon day), how is watching this for someone who is only just slightly in a better place? Should I skip this one?

[u/[deleted]]

We need you Olly

[u/DrTerminater]

Jesus Christ, I didn’t know this video existed till right now. I had to try really hard not to cry, I really, really needed this today, thank you Olly.

[u/pilas2000]

I like his videos. I hope he continues doing them.

[u/yeahnahteambalance]

I am listening to Wil Wagner’s Laika right now, “the sheer crushing empty.”

The rumbling sensation when you feel the world is slipping away from you, even after a good period and having a great support network. Therapy never helped me, I had a great childhood and my partner, parents, and sister loved me.

So why do I want to die?

I think Death Cab summed it up the best when they said sorrow creeps into your heart through a pinhole and, like a leaking faucet, you get used to that feeling/sound. But, if you leave it too long, it drowns you.

It took me so long to realise the way I feel wasn’t normal. I didn’t realise how bad it got.

Suicide is like dropping a massive boulder into a placid lake. The ripples will continue for a long time after you have drowned.

Love you all.