From Jane Grieg
I was astonished by Robert Pool’s account of Thomas Joiner’s theory that anorexics find suicide easy because they are used to pain (28 February, p 37). It’s actually much simpler than that. When I was anorexic, the constant mental agony was so intense that the only relief from it was physical pain. I was almost constantly suicidal.
The low recovery rates for anorexia are due to the way it is treated. Current hospitalisation treatments are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the condition. Anorexia is nothing to do with not eating; it is about having self-esteem so low that you feel like you are taking up too much space in the world. What people with anorexia need is reassurance that their lives are worth living and to find other things that they are good at, apart from not eating.
From Phil Thompson
Suicide prevention research might also be served by turning the question “why do people kill themselves?” on its head: why don’t more people kill themselves?
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Death is unavoidable, but to bring it about early is a nearly universal taboo. The need for a strong survival instinct is obvious, but what are the neurological mechanisms that actually enforce it? Do those mechanisms vary much from person to person? Is it that the survival instinct is fairly consistent, and the only significant difference in suicidal tendencies comes from what it takes to overcome it?
Understanding better how the survival instinct works when it does work properly might help in figuring out what’s happening when it doesn’t.
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