Ireland and suicide

We don't know the real reasons a person takes their own life. We can only speculate. I think being emotionally and mentally resilient is important for our well-being and therefore should go quite a way to preventing a suicide attempt.

That's what Tax is saying I think.

I do not think I have a "Long list" of posts of any sort saying kids are too soft. It is entirely possible you are mistaking me with someone else. However if the list is so "long" I am sure you can quote a few examples of what you mean.

If I had said "softness leads down the road to suicide" you could certainly pull me up on that. It would be a dumb ass thing to say and as such I never said it. You are simply making it up.

What I did say is that I wonder - and there is nothing wrong with wondering - if there is any merit in taking an approach to suffering where we can make robust people and whether our moves (and I gave a single example of that) to reduce even the mildest of suffering might be counter productive. After all what is the reasoning behind giving everyone a medal rather than the winners?

And I said that as part of a complete and holistic approach the subject - but you ignored all of that analogy I made between this and our immune system of disease in order to manufacture your little straw man for me.

I think I am in a better place to tell people what I said - and what I meant by what I said - than anyone else. Especially you. Your representations of what I have said are so far the opposite of what I actually said and meant - that I somewhat suspect malice rather than error. But everyone has a choice on a forum like this to have a conversation where you either A) Ask people to explain their position and ask them to clarify if clarification is required or B) Presume to tell them what they mean even when they tell you you are wrong. One of these options is honest, open, and polite. The other is not.

However no nothing I said was about bringing suffering into the lives of children. Rather "controlled adversity". Which is not actually my phrase - but the phrase of someone who deals with his emotional and mental health issues through martial arts and pushing himself physically.

But things like working towards a competition and coming away from it empty handed rather than a medal for merely showing up would be an example of "adversity". What is the benefit to "protecting" children from something like that by simply giving everyone the same medal? What are we actually trying to do with something like that? What's the goal? Allowing our children to try and fail is not to my mind a bad thing. Letting them see the winners get medals when they get nothing is also not a bad thing.

I have done no such thing. Your need to make things up is unparalleled :) I did make my profile private when the new site went online however - which was recommended at one point because the new website was exposing things like users email address to google searches. But searching posts that I have written using the standard search should be working the same for me as anyone else.

In fact - is there even a button/option to block people seeing old posts? Let me know where that is would you? I do not see one. But happy to turn it off if there is as I very much want my post history visible to all.

Once again your need to tell me what I think and believe rather than listen to me telling me you have got it wrong is telling. And it is not just me telling you that you are getting it wrong. Two other people have too at least. Making stuff up that I never said - and digging down on it when everyone else can see it's not what I said only makes you look bad not me.

I do not think we are not producing robust people. What I said was that I wonder if we are going in the right direction to keep doing so. OR are some of the moves we are making (and I gave one example of this) likely to undermine that and reduce the robustness in the same way (analogy) that over protecting our children from dust and dirt and germs actually undermines their immune systems and leaves them more prone to suffering through disease than not.

Keeping our children squeaky clean and away from dirt probably seems intuitively like a great thing to do. We learn later that doing so actually had unforseen side effects and problems. And I wonder out loud - much to your distress it seems - whether we are in danger of making any analogous errors here. So rather than suggesting a simplistic solution to a complex problem - as you pretend - I am actually doing the opposite. Because I acknowledged in my post (another bit you simply ignored) the many other approaches we can take to the situation of suicide in our society. But wondered if on top of all that there is yet another approach to consider too.

You know me choosing to discuss one aspect of a whole complex subject - does not magically mean that I think that one aspect is the only thing happening or worth discussing? I hope. But if you do not - maybe get hip to that or if you need any more help with it I can 'splain it to ya more.

As for who loves straw men - you're the only one creating them here.

Perhaps? It's an analogy. An analogy is meant to help describe a point being made. Like a picture beside some text. The analogy still functions even if it has been debunked. If an analogy bothers you - simply consider the point without the analogy. The point being that if learning to deal with any kinds of distress or adversity or so on is something we develop over our lives - then we can consider as a valid question whether any attempts to reduce such things during childhood is going to have a good - bad - or neutral effect in the long term.

It's a valid question - regardless of what the answer turns out to me. If the question itself bothers you so much that you have to make up things about me over and over - maybe thats worth asking yourself why.

Children need support to help them with life's struggles. That's different to suffocating and mollycoddling them. The area of child development and how it leads to emotionally stable adults is massive but here are two small examples of building resilience:

Encourage them to take safe risks such as talking to the new child in school or joining a club. If your child and their friend have a falling out let them find ways to figure it out themselves rather than jumping in to protect and 'fix'. Give them space while at the same time provide a secure base for them so they know you are always there.

It is not about making them suffer monkey.

The crux with certain mental health issues is that subjects don’t always want to fully engage with treatment. For a start, addictions like alcoholism cause the person involved to be in total denial that pretty much all their problems stem from that addiction, and to address it means the all-encompassing & traumatic process of disentangling from the addiction. That would be pretty daunting, and it takes a complete implosion of one’s life to even begin to address it. As for the major psychoses, it’s not that subjects convince themselves not to engage with treatment, it’s that they often lack the insight to recognise that they are sick, especially in a chronic rather than periodically relapsing course of disease.

By necessity an addiction requires first and foremost that the unwell person actively seeks out recovery with help of professional/experienced input (and can really only subsequently be supported by family etc when they demonstrate they have gone the 9 yards) but a psychosis requires medical intervention as the person themselves is helpless to do anything about it.

Stuff like anxiety and depression require appropriate input and encouragement from therapists, relatives & friends & of course self work. The area of treating personality disorders seems to be an evolving one, and from what I read requires people affected to gain insight to be able to co-operate in developing self-therapy through cbt.

We humans can often re-program our brains with a bit of help, and where an ongoing untreated organic disease process isn’t counteracting therapeutic gains.

I went all abstract there, didn’t I.

Do you mean he took an overdose and then....let the guillotine..ehm...... 😟

I don't understand that at all and I don't have the right words. His family would have found him like that.