It is unfortunate that so many people are looking to blame anything - big companies, government, whatever - anytime their worldview has to reconcile a hint of the imperfections of humanity.
Amazon big profits, cheating taxes in every country and keeping people in zero hours working.. how can company owners be happy of them selfs ? oh my, sad times for working class really.
I know that in the San Francisco Bay Area, everytime a student from a highly pressured high school (think Gunn, Palo Alto, Monta Vista) commits suicide by walking across the train tracks, the more publicity it gets, the more copycat suicides happen.
IMO this response by Amazon is the best. Let things slowly sink into obscurity and that way people don't get stupid ideas about getting attention.
Talk about it like "Someone stood on the tracks and killed themselves", and now every suicidal person who sees the track think about that. Many suicides are impulsive acts (helped by a state of mind, but few have the willpower to plan their suicide), so these tiny facts that can influence people in need can kill them. Avoiding specifics of the death can be enough to avoid copycat behavior, because it remains a bit abstract.
Instead, covering it as "we want everyone to know that there are these programs that we have in place for those suffering" (and of course having a real feedback loop). Then if only a couple people go in after reading this, you have done some good!
Our mental state is the combination of many tiny positives and negatives. Contributing even just a small amount might be enough to get someone into proper treatment.
(Amazon should also be doing its own work to figure out if changes are needed. We spend a good chunk of our lives in the workplace)
> Instead, covering it as "we want everyone to know that there are these programs that we have in place for those suffering" (and of course having a real feedback loop).
That should be done regardless of whether or not there are suicides/attempts. That's orthogonal to the original point, which is that attention paid to a suicide tends to encourage copycat suicides.
Just ignore the fact that they existed and you can do a much better job ameliorating these things. Why even give them any news coverage at all or acknowledgement?
I've had classmates pass away. The school would then run counseling sessions for those who wanted it. It wasn't to talk about how the classmate passed away, but to talk about how to accept this and manage it.
When a person close to you dies, you likely want some of these services.
Now, I don't think we should be talking about how these cases happen (because of what you bring up). But people close to the situation do get affected. They hear about it outside the news, and might personally know the person. They deserve help.
American media needs to adopt this strategy on its own. For all such attention seeking suicides, massacres, gun violence, media must not report the name of attacker or scale of violence for at least 72 hours. "His neighbours said he was an introvert" type of headline must be avoided.
This cracks me up. An anonymous chat app that immediately authenticates its users. They are probably selling your chat messages back to employers behind closed doors.
I fucking hate flippant comments like that. A human being was pushed to killing themselves, and this asshole is sitting there pretending as if the reason was because someone looked at them funny.
Er, how does that 'clarification' change anything? They tried to end their life, and this armchair psychologist is only too keen to assume that they're overreacting to minor workplace hardships. Shamefully disrespectful, attempting suicide is not a joke.
Sending out a company wide email for a suicide attempt at a company with hundreds of thousands of workers? It seems like you'd end up sending something like one of those emails a month. It'd get depressing pretty fast...
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 67.8 ms ] threadIMO this response by Amazon is the best. Let things slowly sink into obscurity and that way people don't get stupid ideas about getting attention.
Talk about it like "Someone stood on the tracks and killed themselves", and now every suicidal person who sees the track think about that. Many suicides are impulsive acts (helped by a state of mind, but few have the willpower to plan their suicide), so these tiny facts that can influence people in need can kill them. Avoiding specifics of the death can be enough to avoid copycat behavior, because it remains a bit abstract.
Instead, covering it as "we want everyone to know that there are these programs that we have in place for those suffering" (and of course having a real feedback loop). Then if only a couple people go in after reading this, you have done some good!
Our mental state is the combination of many tiny positives and negatives. Contributing even just a small amount might be enough to get someone into proper treatment.
(Amazon should also be doing its own work to figure out if changes are needed. We spend a good chunk of our lives in the workplace)
That should be done regardless of whether or not there are suicides/attempts. That's orthogonal to the original point, which is that attention paid to a suicide tends to encourage copycat suicides.
Just ignore the fact that they existed and you can do a much better job ameliorating these things. Why even give them any news coverage at all or acknowledgement?
When a person close to you dies, you likely want some of these services.
Now, I don't think we should be talking about how these cases happen (because of what you bring up). But people close to the situation do get affected. They hear about it outside the news, and might personally know the person. They deserve help.
You're missing the point. By doing anything out of the ordinary when something like this happens, you're giving it attention and calling it out.
It'd be like making safe driving classes available everytime somebody dies in a drunk driving accident.
These classes and service should exist regardless.
/s
Where in the article did it say that? Rather, a human being decided to try (and fail) at killing themselves for reasons unknown.