So, which part was wrong?
Loneliness is the hole. Got it. You ever been lonely? Clearly not, because you’re still alive.
Loneliness is NOT a mental illness or a death sentence, it’s an integral, surmountable, usually temporary fact of life. It is the British disease to soak pain in alcohol and hope for the best. THAT is the identifiable disease that spiraled for him and was totally self inflicted and avoidable. He CHOSE IT!
I’m done.
You know, I actually feel sorry for people like you, who seem to think that shunning empathy at every opportunity makes them more enlightened than everybody else around them. I get it, we're the stupid, naive ones being taken for a ride by the sob stories of the meek. The Reaper's scythe is remorseless and we can either get on board with it or suffer the consequences. You can do it (whatever it is), so why can't everyone else? Yada yada.
You say you've spent time around the mentally ill but clearly you've learnt very little from your experiences.
There's space for nuance here, bud. Mental illness isn't a blanket death sentence and neither is loneliness, no, but you know as well as I do that they significantly decrease a person's chances of survival. Some people are capable of helping themselves, but other people (for whatever reason) really aren't. The mentally unwell either recognise that there's a piece missing and seek to find that piece, or they call off the search before it's begun.
It really is a coin toss.
Alcohol was this poor bloke's vice and it played a part in his death, yes. But like I said, if it wasn't alcohol then it would have been something else. And yet you say he "chose" alcohol as though he'd already seen the end of his own story and still "chose" to go down the same path. Nobody who turns to alcohol to fill the void thinks it's going to kill them - it acts as a temporary reprieve until it's a permanent state.
Have you ever actually studied addiction? Do you know it's an auto-neurological disorder? The brain takes over from our conscience and works against the interests of the rest of the body. It says that long-term damage to the rest of the body is a necessary sacrifice for the brain to seek out constant short-term joy. Some people are capable of realising this and reversing the effects on their own, some people need help, and some people never realise.
If overcoming addiction and loneliness was as simple as you make it sound then it wouldn't happen so often, but it does. And it's not because all of those people are weaklings with "self-inflicted" illnesses. It's because of a range of factors that are circumstantial and neurological in nature, and everybody's factors are completely different from the next person. A person can change their own factors, but others aren't so fortunate.
The best way to think about it is to compare everything to school. 30 kids - they all go to the same school, they all have the same lessons, they all have the same teacher, they all sit in the same classroom, and they all get taught the same syllabus. And yet, they all perform differently, they all go to different colleges and get different jobs, and as they grow up they all become very different people with very different lives.
I expect you'll now come back with some more right-wing libertarian bollocks about how it's every man for himself in this dog-eat-dog world and that the animalistic "survival of the fittest" rule is something we need to apply to every day human beings. But think on.
