Cav's Place

There was an article yesterday in a newspaper from here praising a special team of doctors that has been created in Iasi to deal with the very large number of suicide attempts. The title was “They Are the Guardian Angels of Suicidal People” and there was a lot of talking about how they “save” their patients at the last moment.
Excuse me? Guardian angels? Saving? Those people want to die! They even admit that most of their patients will simply try again sooner or later, and usually sooner, so what exactly is the purpose of this? Those people think, for whatever reason, that they can no longer live and have the strength to do something about it. Then you come along and show them that they can’t die either, you add one more thing that went wrong in their life! That is forcing a person to suffer and therefore causing harm, how can they be praised for it?
They say that they’re also trying to offer counseling to their patients, because “suicide is never the answer”, though they admit that terrible stories lie behind each and every attempt. Who exactly gives them the right to decide for others what is right and what is wrong? And if that’s not the answer then what is? Can they solve the problems that drove those people to attempting suicide? And I do mean solve, not look for ways for the person to cope with the situation, that’s not solving the problem. Solving the problem means changing the situation so the person will no longer have cause for unhappiness. Can they do that? No? Then they should stop telling people that they made the wrong choice (yet again), they should stop assuming that they know what’s right and what’s wrong for everyone!
Besides, all that time and effort, not to mention the money used to fund such operations, could be far better used to eliminate the problems that make people unhappy in the first place. No, that’s not easy. Yes, it will require some very unpopular measures. But things can be done and they need to be done! After all, if having so many suicide attempts as to require creating a special team of doctors to handle them isn’t a very clear indicator that something’s deeply wrong, I don’t know what is!