Today is Bell Let's Talk Day where the phone giant donates money to mental health initiatives. Sounds nice, right?
Yeah, not so much: in reality it ends up just being a sort of inverse purity spiral where different (mostly far-left) groups wallow in their own failures under the guise of victimhood, insisting that they need (free, mind you) treatment for their own "safety" and "security" and all those typical woke buzzwords.
But as I wrote about it here four years ago, the only ones committing suicide because of their internal characteristics are the faggots and trannies..who admittedly have broken brains, but thanks to activists in the psychological academia two decades ago cannot be cured by today's over-credentialed but under-wisdom'd reams of "mental health professionals". After all, they refuse to accept that their brains are broken too, which really impedes treatment.
Not that I have a lot of faith in general in the successes of the psychology profession. Let's look at a little book I've had on my shelf since Junior High School: Collings Gem Body Language written by David Lambert. It was one of my earliest educations into how the psychology profession, along with all the social sciences, just didn't have the intellectual rigour we expected from hard science. We can't tell you much about the subatomic interactions in an aluminum molecule but that's mostly a result of computers not being powerful enough: we can pretty much nail down hydrogen (and we could long before computers in fact). But the human brain is just beyond a full understanding, and that book is a great example. In it, a variety of examples of body language are demonstrated. When you're sitting on a subway seat and the girl next to you crosses her leg furthest from you onto the one closest too you, it's a sign that she's sexually attracted to you: she's mimicking the folds of her vagina and inviting your gaze to travel between her legs. Well, it's either that or she just prefers crossing her legs that way. Or she's signaling lack of interest in the guy on the other side of her. Probably one of those three. So hey, if you wanted to use that body language to determine if she was willing to go for coffee sometime we actually have no information for you. It's all over the "tome" (that's awfully lofty a phrase though, it's literally a little book).
Oh but that's only the Faculty of Arts side of psychology, right? The courses taught under the Faculty of Science are much better than that, correct? The definitive undergraduate textbook remains "Biopsychology" by John P.J. Pinel (from UBC, as it happens). It at the very least has more useful information than pop (or Faculty of Arts academic) psychology books, but you'll certainly want to grab a version from before he threw a pointless tranny preamble into Chapter 13. It does, by the way, include the example of David Reimer, who medical science tried to make into a girl (and early results were encouraging) before he ended up...committing suicide. Go figure. Chapter 15, about drugs and their effects, is the biochemical example to this though: the opposite of drug tolerance (body builds up resistance to the effect of a drug) is drug sensitization, where after exposure the body develops sensitivity to the drug. This can happen with the same chemical to different people, or to the same person with the same chemical at different times. Can you predict what will happen beforehand? Nope. In fact, Pinel only casually mentions sensitivity twice in the entire book, despite being the subject of numerous official health and safety warnings from the Alberta Government.
Mental health and suicides are on a lot of people's minds lately, of course, because that same Alberta government and thousands of others from around the world have irrationally decided to sacrifice people's mental/physical/economic health in order to protect us from an ineffective ChiCom bioweapon. Currently within my own circle of friends and extended family and folks I can picture if you tell me their name, we have lost exactly zero people to the Wuhan Flu but lost one and almost lost another to suicide as a result of the rapidly-diminishing job and prosperity prospects in Western Canada. In Japan there were more October suicides than Wuhan Flu deaths to date. These lockdowns are seriously increasing the suicide rate, and this year's theme of Bell Let's Talk is "needed now more than ever".
Of course, the problem is that there's an intrinsic difference between economic rationales for suicide and the mentally ill rationales for suicide. Curing people of their mental health issues will save suicides for youth with irrational levels of despair (cutters, poofters, etc). It's less clear that extra counsellors making six figures are going to reduce suicides for oilfield workers facing huge debts and numerous political leaders explicitly telling them they will never get a good job ever again and actively trying to discourage employers from hiring you†.
So this year for Bell Let's Talk let's stop pretending that pissing around pretending the cure for economically-inspired suicides will cure men like Benjamin "Gwen" Benaway.
