Yes, Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes that this sentence is triply redundant (unpredictable, predict, in advance), but it comes from a reasonably thoughtful consideration of suicide. I like the way the guy – a psychiatry professor – says he does understand suicide, even though the meme, the thing, the trope, the conceit, is that suicide’s all enigmatic.
Because it is at its essence a perceptual disorder, [depression] causes one to see the entire world as pain. It feels painful inside, but it also feels painful outside.
When a person is depressed, the entire world is disturbed and distressed, so there is nowhere to escape. And it is this fact that makes suicide so seductive, because it seems to offer the one available escape option.
(Go here for an elaboration on this from David Foster Wallace.)
This writer goes on to say that “the means for committing suicide should be removed from the environment.” He’s talking about the home. We can’t do much about a world brimming with suicide locations.
And yet even as we speak Cornell and NYU, who’ve had suicide clusters, are both futzing with their environment in just this way. Cornell is netting its bridges, and NYU is digitally shielding its high-atrium library.
August 22nd, 2012 at 3:26PM
all well-intentioned acts but maybe more about shielding the general public from their anxieties of the uncanny limits and vulnerabilities of being a body than anything else.
August 22nd, 2012 at 3:41PM
It’s always easier to deal with a problem (or more precisely, give the impression of dealing with a problem) by doing something tangible rather than something intangible.
If there are “suicide clusters” at Cornell and NYU, maybe there is a pattern of anomie on these campuses that needs to be addressed.
August 23rd, 2012 at 7:05AM
Cornell is a brutally competitive environment with many young people far away from their support systems, and the upstate weather can’t help much.