Episode 107: Suicide is NOT the Answer [Discussion]

[jackierulesall]

The It Gets Better campaign has one flaw: implying that suicide is a rational response to bullying.

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[wolfmane]

There's one difference that utterly invalidates your analogy: in Somalia and in Auschwitz, they were not singled out as individuals and ostracized completely by everyone they knew, including their own family. When teenagers commit suicide, it's because they have not only lost all hope of things getting better, they have no one else to turn to who personally identifies with the exact same issues. No one who really understands. No one who can validate both their feelings and their existence. No one who tells them it's okay to be who they are. It's the isolation that gets them, not the bullying itself. But the bullying is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
And what may not seem rational to you may seem rational to someone else and vice versa. You may think that there are cases where euthanasia is a rational and acceptable course of action. Others would disagree. As an example you mention terminal illness: however, the reason that euthanasia (or suicide) may rational to you in that situation turns out to be exactly the same thing that results in the teen suicide: utter lack of hope that the situation can improve.
As a gay adult who has been ostracized by his own family, I can say with utter confidence that yes, there are times and places where simply being gay is in fact equivalent to a terminal illness in that there are people who will never change their minds about it and continue to exert extreme negative pressure, even when it's their own family member who is suffering, and at their own hands. It's not something you can "choose" not to be, and you will be that way until you die, so the term "terminal" is in fact eerily appropriate.