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Monday Is the 50th Anniversary of Sylvia Plath's Death
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The suicide rates really haven't dropped that much. And with the recession, they might be at record high levels right now. The idea that psycho-pharmaceuticals are miracle drugs is misplaced. If you measure the efficacy of mental health treatment by the suicide rate, then there have been no major advances over the last 50 years. Instead I think we need to acknowledge that suicide has not been researched properly and there have been no treatments developed, other than DBT, that are effective. This video of a lecture by Marsha Linehan explains why suicide research sucks and why nobody knows how to treat it (because ethics prevents testing on suicidal patients, thus, the efficacy of treatment of suicidal people can only be inferred from the results of treatment on moderately depressed people).
TL;DR: There is no reason whatsoever to think that modern psychiatry would have saved Sylvia Plath's life.
TL;DR: There is no reason whatsoever to think that modern psychiatry would have saved Sylvia Plath's life.
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For some reason the other night I found myself going down a google research rabbit hole and started reading up on Nicholas Hughes, son of Ted & Sylvia. He was an accomplished fisheries biologist, researcher, and professor. He was a very private guy and many of his colleagues did not even know that he was the son of famous parents. He had told his girlfriend that should he ever decide to take his own life that he would do it by hanging himself in the shop on his property in Fairbanks. That's just what he did on March 16th, 2009.
I don't know what the stats are about the likelihood of children of parents who kill themselves going on to do the act themselves. But in the book "Night Falls Fast" by Kay Redfield Jamison, she mentions a psychology researcher who did her dissertation on children of parents who take their own lives. Her findings were that the vast majority of them never quite get over it.
From my own experience, being a recent survivor of suicide has turned out to be the biggest mindfuck of my life. My boyfriend (I'm gay) did it last spring the same way Nicholas did it. He was a handsome firefighter and one of the sweetest gay men I've ever met.
The wake of destruction that this shit leaves behind is goddamn profound. I'm going to my first support group meeting next week. Never been to one of those before but I'm def. open to it. And given that friends have turned out to be a dud in the support department, (we never talk about it and it seems like they're all acting like nothing ever happened) I'm hoping that I'll meet some like minded folks who will truly understand the scope of this mindfuck.
I don't know what the stats are about the likelihood of children of parents who kill themselves going on to do the act themselves. But in the book "Night Falls Fast" by Kay Redfield Jamison, she mentions a psychology researcher who did her dissertation on children of parents who take their own lives. Her findings were that the vast majority of them never quite get over it.
From my own experience, being a recent survivor of suicide has turned out to be the biggest mindfuck of my life. My boyfriend (I'm gay) did it last spring the same way Nicholas did it. He was a handsome firefighter and one of the sweetest gay men I've ever met.
The wake of destruction that this shit leaves behind is goddamn profound. I'm going to my first support group meeting next week. Never been to one of those before but I'm def. open to it. And given that friends have turned out to be a dud in the support department, (we never talk about it and it seems like they're all acting like nothing ever happened) I'm hoping that I'll meet some like minded folks who will truly understand the scope of this mindfuck.
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