Read this and rage.
This is unacceptable. This is abomination. There is simply no excuse – containment of costs, fiscal responsibility, whatever bullshit lie you may think justifies this – this is unacceptable.
It must end.
“My Suicide Attempt and My Struggles to Get Help”
God damn them. God damn the wombs that bore them. God damn their floating corpses.
God damn them.
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So much wrongness in that story, I’m going to focus on one bit; “For more than three hours I sat on a hard plastic chair…..wearing a drafty hospital gown”.
Those fucking hospital gowns. People HATE! those hospital gowns. They find them humiliating and dehumanising. It’s well known that people avoid help and put off medical treatment because of how unpleasent hospitals are, and those goddamed gowns are one of the first things they’ll mention.
Myself; I haven’t got an ounce of propriety, I couldn’t care less about wearing one of them. But other people do, and the humiliation they inflict adds up to deaths. Making someone sit around and wait for three hours wearingone is a fucking abuse.
Yeah, that part struck me too, for some reason. It showed a particular callousness to this guy, who had just attempted suicide. to have him sit for three hours in one of tose things in a drafty hallway.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard a story like this for psychiatric care of suicidal people. It seems designed to have the exact effect that the author described: make them never trouble the healthcare system again. They seem to feel that the violent and delusional are enough work medicating (a false term unless being fully conscious is a medical condition in need of treatment) and warehousing. Everyone else just needs to be “scared straight”.
Suicidal people are told they have two options: suicide–which they are told is wrong even to contemplate–or “get help”. They are told to choose the “help” option. Since that option is mostly non-existent they are in effect being told to kill themselves but to remember to feel bad about it on the way out.
No arguments against committing suicide are based on reason–only emotion. But emotion is more disrupted than reason in conditions like depression. I don’t know what the solution is but it probably isn’t treating people like crap. We’ve been trying that solution for several millennia and it still doesn’t seem to be working.
Thanks for sharing this. I think the “I had no identity” line defines male disposability the most.
Dani, it does in this context. My personal feeling though is that whatever identity we have is based on our social group – family in the form of our surname, ethnic identity, professional identity – so it’s not inherently so horrible that he would define himself by belonging in the Marines.
But where it’s gendered, where it becomes *male* disposability, is that our society does grant women and inherent value just because they exist, where men have to earn theirs by performance, by making the grade by belonging to this or that group.