March 30, 2015
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Still, if the narrative that the investigators are currently peddling is true, he made plenty of choices, no matter how severely the pills may have doped him into inertia. That’s the problem when you blame the depression rather than the depressed person. The very idea that depression is a “disability” has the effect of disabling people from taking responsibility for their own choices. Convincing people that they have an “illness” rather than an emotional dilemma lessens their sense of control over the problem.
If a person wants to kill themselves, I suppose that’s their choice. Erasing oneself is probably the most self-indulgent thing someone can do. But when you drag other people into your suicide, it ceases to be so…libertarian? The children you financially strand and the loved ones you emotionally destroy have no choice in the matter. And on top of all that, deciding to drag 149 other people down with you into your sick miserable hole of self-loathing while you permanently scar thousands of other lives as a result? That’s a leap of selfishness as high as the French Alps.
It would be foolish to blame this incomprehensibly ghastly event on the inanimate phantom illness of “depression.” I think it makes more sense to blame it on the obvious culprit”one selfish depressed asshole who chose not only to act on his sadness, but to make it everyone else’s problem, too.
