So I decided to address something that has bothered me ever since the genesis of some of my own mental health problems, and this is the deliberately concise result:

Mental illnesses, while qualitatively different from physical diseases, are just as deserving of a proportional amount of attention - “proportional” referring to an ideal calculation performed in the knowledge of just how bad any diseases being compared are. I don’t suggest we actually start comparing everything in lurid detail, but rather we should keep some facts about the details of what constitutes different or similar types of suffering in mind when making some basic evaluations - something I believe the US government already does with veterans when determining their compensation for suffering a disability while serving. .

So, if you believe that physical diseases are any more urgent than mental illnesses, or deserve disproportional priority, consider the following: the lifetime rate of suicide in in individuals with schizophrenia is between 4% and 13%. That is hundreds of thousands of deaths. I don’t know how to figure out exactly how many that would be per year, but it would be a lot. It seems there is a reason that 75% to 90% of schizophrenics smoke cigarettes.

And that reveals less than you might think about the (often really shitty) experiences of people with psychosis - whose lives are certainly more than just a statistic to be thrown around for the sake of argument. The same goes for people with anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, etc.

Furthermore, I posit that dying unintentionally and committing suicide are not really all that different in some ways; that is, if you grant that one’s agency can be severely - if not entirely - deteriorated during, say, a psychotic episode; then you must grant that someone experiencing a psychotic episode is not responsible for their actions, and, also, in all likelihood, what happens to them as a result of these actions.

In light of this, I see not much of a difference between slipping on ice and hitting one’s head and dying and intentionally shooting oneself in the head because of a deep depression. In fact, I would say that the events and experiences leading up to suicide makes the plight of the suicidal worse than the plight of someone affected by a freak accident - or, even less congruously, someone who is in their right mind that gets themselves killed because they took a risk or made a mistake, especially due to negligence. No one chooses their genetics, or their upbringing, or whether or not they have a chemical imbalance in their brain. But you can choose not to weave through traffic on your motorcycle at high speeds.

Some of the factors that increase a schizophrenic’s risk of committing suicide is being young, intelligent, well-educated, and having high personal expectations and hopes - and also believing that those expectations and hopes will not be met. When was the last time anyone you know or have heard of ran a successful fundraiser for these valuable people? When has a public figure vowed to combat this obvious, persistent desperation? If they have, I certainly haven’t seen it.

If you agree with me, then you also ought to agree that mentally-ill people deserve more love than we typically show them, even if being around them is difficult sometimes. If it were your aunt, or uncle, or daughter, or son, you would want people to treat them with dignity and respect - even if they have some limitations, which is something we already do reflexively for those with physical disabilities. So, please consider what it would be like to be this guy.