On Suicidality

On Dying Well: Ben Sasse and the Vocation of Suffering

Ben Sasse’s recent announcement reveals to us both goods and virtues that show in his dying a glimmer of light, a stirring of hope, and the possibility of spring even in one’s final winter.

I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain—until I met him.

CW: suicide, suicidal ideation, addiction

Amusing Ourselves to Death comics reflections - Stuart McMillen blog

Why was the Amusing Ourselves to Death comic by Neil Postman removed from the internet by cartoonist Stuart McMillen? Reflective essay on this comic.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed | Penguin Random House Secondary Education

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most underappreciated forces: shame.

'Suicide rightism' and the penguin

Is it based or soy to kill yourself?

Alexis King’s Blog

This is a blog post I have been considering writing for a long time.

Contra Pritchard On Liberal Happiness

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How to be perfectly unhappy

This comic was inspired by essay from Augusten Burroughs: How to live unhappily ever after. In addition to the essay, I highly recommend reading his books. It's also been described in psychology as flow.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by sociologist and mass media scholar Neil Postman. It has been translated into 16 languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide. In 2005, Postman's son Andrew reissued the book in a 20th anniversary edition.

I wanted ChatGPT to help me. So why did it advise me how to kill myself?

ChatGPT wrote a woman a suicide note and another AI chatbot role-played sexual acts with children, BBC finds.

The Global Decline in the Mental Health of the Young

One of the major findings in wellbeing research until recently was that happiness was U-shaped by age and unhappiness hump-shaped by age. There was a midlife crisis — a finding reported in well over 600 published papers using data on 145 countries. It was present in both developing and developed countries. And it was persistent over time. The finding of a peak in ill-being in midlife was consistent with Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s work on mortality and the so-called “deaths of despair.”1 In the US in particular and to a lesser extent in other countries, White prime-aged individuals without a college degree had high death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, and cirrhosis of the liver. Drug overdose deaths in the US, for example, peaked at midlife ages. In 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that overdose death rates per 100,000 by age rose from 13.5 for 15-to-24-year-olds to 45.6 for 25-to-34-year-olds and 60.8 for 35-to-44-year-olds, and then declined to 53.3 for 45-to-54-year-olds, 49.2 for 55-to-64-year-olds, and 14.7 for those over the age of 65.2 The morbidity data matched the mortality data.

It Breaks a Village: Bevy's 6th Birthday

This post, like all my posts, was written by me. It came out of a lot of conversation and reflection with many people. It is long. I promise you there's valu...

A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy (Published 2018)

A livery driver facing financial ruin killed himself in front of City Hall to protest the financial devastation wrought by ride hailing services like Uber.

#769: Nothing you see online is true

Clipping as emergent online literacy, the women self-injecting bootleg Botox and the woes of Facebook nanny groups

The Ambition Project

A guest post by Jason Brennan