The underside of suicide

A magazine aimed at wannabe arch youth has published a fashion spread featuring dolled up death scenes of women writers. They all but one committed suicide.

Bad taste at least, for some outright dangerous. The latter due in some part to the often barely sublimated allure of suicide. Always a distinct tang hanging around thinsproana.

Thing is, being a fat person, other attitudes to suicide are regularly on show.

In a sense one can view the 'obesity' cult as fixated on death. Leaving aside its hysterical promises of sickness and doom, its trojan horsing of a screwy worship of anorexia, there's its attack on mental health. Seeking to invoke a state where self harm is no longer a change of mindset. This is its primary lever of persuasion.

Its back up enforcer, stigma has inadvertently liberated a lot of our underlying attitudes to things that have otherwise been tidied up. Superficially at least. In the case of suicide, this may be confusing, given there's still said to be a great stigma left about it.

Fat people are regularly told that they are suicidal. Indeed, if you're one of those people who accepts the usual 'obese' definition of willful self abuse, it's hard for you to see being fat as anything but a reckless disinterest in your own well being.

For being seen as in this way, "suicidal" we're told therefore that we deserve to die or perhaps don't deserve to live. Oddly, the same question does not seem to have been asked recently of those who actually attempt or manage to commit suicide. Indeed the idea of the question made me giggle a bit. I know, my bad. It's just such an obviously inappropriate thing to say, that my mind doesn't travel to anything connected to the act.

That must be in some part a tribute to dissemination of the cry-for-help motive.

Yet, this is not usually applied to fat people, presumably folks know full well, they're speaking for effect. So why would they use suicide in this way? It most surely framed as some kind of insult. The suggestion is someone's misplaced their will to live and that's ridiculous of them and punish worthy. It's hard not to see that as some of the stigma mentioned.

It sometimes catches my mind out when that is juxtaposed with a more generalized concern about invoking suicide. I find myself distant and perplexed about the worry of the inducing suicide by "glamourizing" (weasel alert) it.

I know impulses are induced in perhaps in varyingly susceptible people when they connect deeply with someone else. Certain musicians who are no longer with us spring to mind.

Yet those who have a less than discernable desire to end themselves are felt to be fit to have their will to live undermined for the sake of 'health'. Context is all, but that still doesn't make much sense in my mind. Except to say that it is a statement on those who are seen fit to preserve at all costs.

Exposing those who are seen as less so.