The MP Suicide Self-Evaluation Scale

Suicide is an extremely contentious topic, principally because it's the ultimate locus of emotional thought.

The two principal approaches are the psychiatric, which consists of equating suicide with mental diseaseⁱ and which is currently fashionableⁱⁱ on one hand ; and the philosophical, which consists of equating suicide with freedomⁱⁱⁱ and which is both unfashionable and difficult to correctly understand on the other hand.

To try and remedy that difficulty, let us start from equally contentious, but more directly comprehensible stuff. Suppose you are a woman, finding yourself in one of the following four situations : a) you are guaranteed to find a mate on your own terms ; b) you are at liberty to either find a mate on your own terms or not find a mate at all ; c) you are required to find a mate, whether on your own terms or not ; d) you will mate with whosoever feels like mating with you.

Going through that list, it should be obvious that whether utopian or not (possible or not, desirable or not), the first option does not in fact describe a situation of freedom, because one can never be free to the inconsequential^iv, whereas the second describes a situation of absolute and perfect freedom. Whether you agree that the third contains sufficient matter of the appearance of freedom to be called anything such is entirely open to fashion. Currently you seem to think that McDonalds contains sufficient matter of the appearance of food so as to be called food-something, whereas the traditional^v freedom of womanhood does not contain sufficient matter of the appearance of freedom as to be called freedom anything. This is fine, fashions are there for a reason. Nevertheless, that there's a difference between third and fourth should be apparent, without that much of a mental stretch.

Totalitarianism (which includes all species of socialism, pointedly and specifically the one under which you currently live, its "Occupy Wallstreet" nonsense y compris^vi) is the rough equivalent of case d) above. It should be readily apparent why most people do not wish to live in that situation - it's exactly the same reason women don't. But exactly, no exaggeration involved. The situation where "suicide is always and everywhere a mental disease" neatly maps onto c) : you are free to pick something, just as long as you pick something. You somehow find it uncontroversial that a woman may make for herself the choice to not mate, which is, as an incontrovertible point of fact, biological suicide. You however manage to also find it uncontroversial that the woman in question may not cut her own throat, because... essentially because "you don't like blood". Which is fine, but it also isn't about her. And for that matter, I don't like pus yet somehow that doesn't mean everyone with an infected eczema has to move out of town.

This introduction - which proudly manages to not even mention Seneca^vii, fancy that! - should be sufficient to establish the general point - that suicide is in fact the appropriate behaviour at least some of the time. As far as the theory goes that's fine and dandy, but then again in theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is, and what shall we practically do ? Sure, it may be the case that sometimes suicide is the appropriate behaviour, yet how are we to know this time is that time ?

This is not a trivial problem, because, as Tommy Reagan aptly points out, "a man will say just about anything when his time is up". You are stuck trying to determine if the brain making the determination is functioning properly or not, this is not a very reliable process no matter how you design it. To compound the problem, the fact that (at least in the less civilized parts of the world) random people are going to assault you in a bid to prevent your exercise of this fundamental human^viii freedom^ix makes seeking a second opinion dubious at best.^x

All is not lost, however, which is why we have this MP-SSES thing. So, answer you the following questionnaire and set your mind at ease.

I. Is your suicide impulse driven, or is it something that you've had on the back of your mind pretty much continuously for a long time ?

Impulse-driven suicide is almost certainly not going to be of the philosophical kind. What you are seeking is relief from specific stressors, not (likely) relief from existence outright. The two measures most likely to help sorted by likeliness of their helping are a) give up some belief/situation/position/job/etc and b) learn some new skills.

To be specific :

• if your suicidal ideation mostly revolves around how the Cali libtards are "ruining the country", and it flares up whenever some blondy chick in an expensive car drives badly, you are almost certainly sexually frustrated, rather than in a position to "no means no" in the direction of generally. Fortunately this problem is a lot easier to approach.
• if every single Valentine's day, Christmas and Thanksgiving makes you want to off yourself, you might be better served by giving up on "men are pigs", or getting a new mother, or other practical, simple measures like that rather than slashing your wrists the wrong way with a broken Tylenol bottle.

On the other hand, compulsive suicidal ideation is just a compulsion like any other. Like the obsession with checking if you've locked the door or with washing your hands, it probably has some sort of subconscious correlate, and it can perhaps be improved with medical care, but it's not terribly likely to ever fully resolve. There are some pills for this stuff too, but they don't work all that well and have a bunch of side effects. If at all possible, your best bet is to just learn to self-manage it.

As you can tell, this was a trick question. What you need to pass here is a good reason. Neither impulse nor compulsion are going to get you to pass.

II. Is your suicide mode specific and fixed, or you don't particularly care ?

This is well known to clinicians across cultures and centuries : a guy that tried to hang himself and failed is not probably going to try jumping next. A gal that tries pills and fails will try pills and fail fifty eight times, until her liver has enough of her and gives her brainwater. She's not going to trod a shotgun. People who drown don't simply drown because the river was closer to their house than the cliff, but because the drowning specifically has some sort of subconscious meaning or importance.

This is where therapy can actually help you : if you've answered "impulse" to the Ist question you don't really need a therapist, you just need a change in your life. Substantial, perhaps, a new job, a new entourage, stuff like that, the sort that happens multiple times in a lifetime anyway. If however you've answered "compulsion", and especially if your answer here is specific, then you almost certainly can benefit from seeing a therapist, and you have a perfectly good approach to make the sessions productive. What exactly is it that's so important about making sidewalk pizza that has you almost willing to give up your life to reenact it ? To understand this properly, think in terms of theatre, which is what it is : at some point in your life you've seen some show which was in your opinion so damned good, you're willing to kill yourself to see it again. Wouldn't you want to find out what the fuck that was ? I know I would, I've never seen a show that good in my life - and I've read Shakespeare even!^xi

But if you've been thinking about this for a while and you don't actually care, you're essentially this guy.^xii Nice knowing you / sorry for not knowing you, but yeah, you're the better sort of humanity. Pity it didn't work out, it's definitely our loss.

This whole scale is obviously only going to be useful to you if you're intelligent and honest. If you aren't, it's probably going to hurt you^xiii. But then again, that's pretty much what Trilema is all about anyway, so I guess you should know better by now.

1. A proposition that is formally correct, seeing how disease is, fundamentally, an inability of the living thing to safeguard its own life. [↩]
2. For purely socio-economic reasons - suicide is always the more expensive avenue from the group point of view. See "the most valuable resource" for more on this topic. [↩]
3. Also a correct proposition, and more substantial than the alternative, in that it considers more than merely the amoebic "will to life", a distinction which is fundamental to human identity and has been fundamental to human identity throughout recorded history. [↩]
4. To go back from sex to death, everyone is guaranteed a death, and it will be exactly their own and adequate to them. Nevertheless, nobody readily understands the finite nature of their life as any sort of freedom. An argument can readily be constructed as to this point, ofcourse, and it may be constructed to be logically sound and perhaps even persuasive - expecially for Phil majors and other wankers inclined to this particular sort of wankery. Nevertheless, the banal observation that it will only be constructed after the matter is brought to attention - that it is, in other words, reactive and so properly said wankery - settles the question for our interest here. [↩]
5. And by traditional we mean something stretching over degrees of magnitude more time than the entire history of our colonies in the New World. [↩]
6. On this point, some very prime Ballas rib :

   "Marching gets our message out." No it doesn't, it gets CNN's message out. "We don't watch CNN, we use the internet." Yet given the infinity of the internet you still surf the same 5 websites, looking for and finding exactly what you want, like a baby playing peekaboo in a mirror over and over and over and over and over and over and...

   You are the 98%, you are totally without any access to the machinery of power and worse, much worse, you plug yourselves into the machinery of media and become a slave.

   [↩]

7. No, he was not "forced" to commit suicide, that's a little bit of pious fraud clearly indicative of why exactly it's a bad idea to trust "scientists" to drive social policy - they lie just as much as anyone else, are just as self-righteous as anyone else, but are in the unique position of being very well equipped to hide both these facts, at least from the casual observer (which is the 98%).

   Seneca killed himself either because he determined to deny fate its due ("I die when I say, not when you say" - historically a major driver of the behaviour among actual men) or because he was really disgusted with the result of his educative efforts. Speaking of which, if you review the dialogues, it will be a hard argument to bring that Socrates was forced to commit suicide. It will at any rate be a lot easier for me to prevail arguing that he was so disgusted with the kids - Plato included - that he just didn't feel like seeing more of the mess. [↩]

8. It's not so certain this is human. Plenty of animals will either not reproduce or actually destroy their litters in captivity. Somehow humans fail to make the inference that "this fox thinks our stinking offerings suck so bad it's willing to kill its own babies over it" and instead deduce something or the other about the feral nature of the poor animal in question. Because we're never ever going to possibly be in the wrong, we're just bringing democracy to all these creatures, n'est pas. [↩]
9. It's not a right, because it's not given by anyone. It's a freedom. It exists there not to embiggen the self-importance of various entities (the "rights givers") but to diminish. To diminish everything generally, but any "rights givers" especially. Which is why it's "sinful", if you were curious.

   And which also explains a part of the emotional thinking involved. If Joe quits playing Halo because "Halo sucks" what does that say about you, still there playing it ? Maybe it means nothing about you, and Joe's just being stupid. Then again... [↩]

10. They do have suicide hotlines, of course, but generally those people tend to waste your time by refusing to help you do it. [↩]
11. Another great indicator, especially for the suicidal ideation driven by wounded narcissism, is how prominently "what will happen after" figures in your thoughts. If your suicide is mostly the stage setting for lengthy funeral processions and ellaborate regrets of everyone, you've basically just skipped a normal stage in the development of the adolescent. Re-read Tom Sawyer, live it vicariously, move on. Sane people don't give a shit what happens after, which is precisely why they're doing it. [↩]
12. Note that while he killed himself, he did it for the stupidest of all reasons - statistics.

    People today seem particularly vulnerable to this sort of nonsense, and I lay most of the blame at the feet of plainly irresponsible "authorities" (once more - it's a bad idea to give scientists a say in social policy). The insane campaigns against tobacco in the past decades were based on a fundamental fallacy, the equivocation between what may happen and what does happen. Yes, it's true that tobacco has some deleterious health effects. Yes, it's true that if there's a million smokers less there's going to be fewer hospitals that need to be built and staffed. However, it's not true that if you personally smoke, you personally will die of it. You might, sure. That's not the same thing. It's also not true that if you personally don't smoke, you won't die of it, either. People have. Lung cancer happens with or without smoking.

    The courts understand this much, which is why you can't sue for potential damages, you have to sue for actual damages. But people generally do not have the intellectual wherewithal to reproduce in their own heads the wisdom accumulated over sixteen to thirty centuries of legal practice, and so they end up sorely confused. In particular in the food blogger's case (wtf is food blogger srsly, get a job already), it makes exactly diddly squat a difference what the "statistics" of dating are. So out of every 100 mixed couples with one Oriental the woman is Oriental in 95 cases ? Big fucking whoop. Of every hundred women interviewed 99 do not see themselves as happy harem slaves in the future. Then the one that does fails and half a dozen of the ones that didn't discover they actually were wrong. Of every 100 Romanians interviewed by police in Europe, 106 or so are thieves and the remaining four rapists. What's that do, exactly ? Should I go hang myself over it now ?

    It is after all a statistic, so it must be science (if only) so I must organize my life according to it, right ? That's the message of all the idiotic "campaigns" : you must organise your life according to statistics. And then people do, resulting in silliness of this sort, and then nobody is going to put the idiots who came up with the entire thing on trial for it, because hey, they only told you to quit smoking, they didn't also say "jump". Right ? Well... this is what's meant by irresponsibility, and, again, this is why you don't want scientists to have a voice in setting social policy. [↩]

13. But that's okay, if you aren't you probably think intelligent, honest people are sociopaths or something. [↩]