She was never really my thing but I do remember reading her, but a lot of people really loved her and her suicide is just awful. I hope she is at peace.
Also, fuck CNN. I watched none of it because I am trying to be in a better place and work on myself and his voice alone is enough to set me off into a rage.
Amir Khalid
Even CNN’s own coverage of the “town hall” said TFG was full of shit. They must have known this was going to happen; being full of shit is a fundamental attribute of TFG. Why did CNN do this to themselves?
trollhattan
My heartfelt condolences to her family and especially, her daughters. Suicide is a foundational shock and I cannot intuit how somebody simply cannot live another day/hour/second.
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: My guess?
Someone at the top thought this would be a good idea and didn’t give a crap about what any of the “lesser” people thought.
Perhaps CNN people who are admitting that Trump is full of shit are trying to preserve their reputations as they are going to be looking for work in short order, before CNN goes further down the toilet?
John S.
Sounds like it went as expected. From The Guardian just now:
Great job, CNN!
Jackie
@Amir Khalid: Ask Licht. This is all on him.
Baud
@John S.:
In fairness, that particular lie isn’t unique to Trump. It’s a pretty standard right wing trope.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team
Looks like she was grappling with drinking and sobriety too. Such a shame, ugh.
https://dooce.com/
John S.
@Baud:
To be fair, most of Trump’s material is just warmed-over retread of what was already popular before he came along.
He just added his own dash of narcissistic, delusional rage to make it more appealing to his base of degenerates.
ETA: And irresistible as clickbait for most corporate news outlets.
TS
@Baud:
I offer trump as much fairness as he gives to anyone else – and as far as abortion is concerned – he cares not one iota, other than using it to attack women & get the “right to life” RWNJ vote. Regardless of where he gets his lies from, he needs to 100% be called on them all the time.
Ruckus
I am still wondering why some humans need to be so shitty to each other. Or just plain shitty.
Like SFB. Other than being a douchebag, what does he get out of acting like a 6 yr old spoiled brat? Ok I know, he’s not acting…
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
The only possible rational explanation is that they know he’s craptastic and decided to let everyone see it for themselves so that his chances of running for anything and getting it, is hopefully approaching absolute zero.
Now that’s likely being way, way too nice to Crappy National Network.
Wyatt Salamanca
Mark Lukasiewicz @DeanLuk
The predictably disastrous @cnn town hall was indeed disastrous. Proving again: Live lying works. A friendly MAGA crowd consistently laughs, claps at Trump’s punch lines – including re sex assault and Jan 6 – and the moderator cannot begin to keep up with the AR-15 pace of lies.
https://twitter.com/DeanLuk/status/1656469608306470916
Dan Froomkin/PressWatchers.org @froomkin
The CNN audience cheering Trump when he calls Collins a nasty person when she’s correcting the record. That’s on Chris Licht. No self-respecting journalist should be willing to work for him.
https://twitter.com/froomkin/status/1656465659063050243
The Moar You Know
I have known two people whose parents killed themselves: one in front of the whole family, one arranged so the daughter would find her.
They were not ok when I knew them and they will never be ok.
I cannot help but feel you gotta hate your family something fierce to do that to them.
debit
@The Moar You Know: That’s not fair. I think they probably hated themselves more.
Juju
I used to check the daily Chuck pictures.
jonas
@Amir Khalid: Because their CEO is a massive, narcissistic asshole, who, not unlike a certain other BigTech/social media platform jackass CEO we know all too well, thinks that because TFG is still a popular political figure (if you can call 30% “popular”), thinks he deserves a platform to spew his unhinged, nazi-gargling garbage. I hope CNN is crucified for this for all time and is never considered a reputable news outlet ever again. Sorry to all the actual journalists that work there, but fuck. Your bosses suck. Look for other work.
gene108
@trollhattan:
The motivation and reasoning is probably different for each suicide or suicide attempt.
A person can get so depressed they become psychotic and delusional, maybe even having visual or auditory hallucinations. This means actions are based on things not grounded in reality, but rather whatever fear or anxiety the person is experiencing.
Getting to the point of psychosis and delusions, with auditory hallucinations is what pushed me to attempt suicide. Thought people I worked with were out to get and were spying on me by tapping my home and cell phone, hacking my computer, and possibly robbing my bank account and may be a co-worker, who I know doesn’t own a gun, brings a gun to the office and threatens or shoots me
Edit: I hope her children have a strong support network. I can’t imagine what losing a parent to suicide does to a child’s sense of being loved and wanted.
jonas
Alison Rose
@The Moar You Know:
That’s a revolting thing to say.
Eolirin
@gene108: Things do not need to get nearly that bad for suicidality to rear it’s head either.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Moar You Know: @debit: I would be careful about tossing around the hatred in this context. I know there are people around the blog who have had suicides in their families. I think that someone must reach a level of hopelessness and despair that I hope no one reading this ever experiences to consider taking that action.
gene108
@Eolirin:
As I said, the reasons are going to be different in each case. This was just my case.
Mai Naem mobile
@The Moar You Know: my cousin committed suicide and left his wife and 3 young kids(IIRC ages 7,10+12) behind and it was just pure luck the older kid wasn’t the one who found his body. For the longest time I thought he was a selfish POS for doing this. A couple of years ago I was talking to a friend about it and she talked about what kind of state he must have been in mentally to even consider it and its true. It’s not normal for one to kill himself over whatever difficulties he’s having.
debit
@Omnes Omnibus: Agreed. I was trying to be sensitive and put my foot in it.
Jackie
@jonas: I think you’re right. Rick Wilson is 💯 right. Chris Licht screwed the pooch bigly.
Frankensteinbeck
@gene108:
UGH. Schizophrenia? How awful. I am so glad you got help and got through it. What a gruesome, gruesome disease.
gene108
@Frankensteinbeck:
Nope. Just a major depressive episode. An untreated major depressive episode can lead to psychosis and depression.
I’d already been chronically depressed for sometime, and my depression started going off the rails a bit at a time until it really picked up speed into psychosis for a few weeks before the suicide attempt.
Those weeks were utterly exhausting.
Sister Golden Bear
@gene108: Also, chronic break-through physical pain.
I had excruciating level 20 pinched nerve pain for some six months. While thankfully I never got to the point of actively considering suicide, I did get to the point of understanding why some suffers of chronic pain would. Then I got to the point where it looked like the extraordinary pain would go on 24/7/365 for the rest of my entire life, and if that did happened I would reach a pain where death would be a blessed relief.
Eolirin
@Omnes Omnibus: It is unfortunately much easier to end up in a place like this than most people realize. Things will go along great until suddenly they don’t. Sometimes it’s a surgery, a medication interaction, a sudden loss, or even just slow accumulated stress. Something tips over inside and what you’re left with is really intense and unbearable, and if you have the means there’s an easy way to escape it, and it’s really hard to say no to that. For most people that’s a momentary passing impulse, unlikely to last even six months. If they can get through it, it goes away and they’re more or less able to get back on with living.
Not all of us are that lucky. There is a reason I get so pissy about mental health and disability related related issues. I have been dealing with chronic suicidal ideation for 2/3rds of my life.
It took a couple of decades, but I figured out how to develop enough of a relationship with it that I can experience it without feeling like there’s even a small risk of acting on it, to the point where I’m not concerned about actually killing myself anymore.
But it’s still there, and probably will be for the rest of my life. It’s oddly possible to find ways to be okay with intense levels of hopelessness and despair, to feel them and still even be able to be hopeful, and patient, and kind to yourself, as much of a paradox as that sounds like it should be.
But it’s also true that the only reason I’m not dead is because of a lack of guns in my immediate environment. This is why I’m also super touchy about guns.
Suicides don’t get talked about enough in that context, despite being the bulk of gun deaths, but they’re very much the ovens of London prior to them fixing them with good natural gas hookups. Made up a huge percentage of suicides, and when they were effectively removed as a method the overall rate was durablely lowered by 30%; study after study shows that if you make easy methods just a little bit harder quite a lot of people don’t even try.
As long as people have easy access to guns, we will always have a suicide epidemic in this country, no matter how many resources we pour into mental health services. Most suicides aren’t people with a history of mental health conditions. They’re that first group that has something go really wrong, just for a moment. Even though substance abuse and mental health suffering populations are at greater risk proportionally, there’s far fewer of us relative to the rest of the population.
And there’s no way to stop people with chronic conditions who have made a decision in a clearer more rational place about the cost benefit of continuing to live with the quality of life that’s in front of us. When it’s not impulse driven, when they’re part of a very rare group that, when unsuccessful, will actually try again, we need to learn to respect that decision. It is not being made lightly, and the pain involved in getting there is unimaginable to someone who hasn’t experienced it.
Eolirin
@Frankensteinbeck: Those symptoms are not necessarily indicative of schizophrenia. Hallucinations and psychosis can be features of a fairly large number of disorders.
Eolirin
@gene108: Yeah, I just don’t want the neurotypicals to get the wrong idea. Your circumstances were pretty extreme. I’m glad you got through them okay.
Quinerly
Good Rolling Stone piece about tonight: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-cnn-town-hall-network-insiders-disgrace-1234733328/
(That 12ft ladder site will get you around the paywall)
Doc Sardonic
@The Moar You Know: Ya know, I try not to say much and I ain’t going into my life and backstory…..But I got one thing for ya ….
FUCK You
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Quinerly:
I don’t get how Trumpworld thinks this was a great night for him. By all accounts, he looked like a deranged asshole, mocking the woman he was found liable for sexually assaulting and calling for the US to default on it’s debt; saying he’d be open to signing a national abortion ban into law. Y’know, that issue that’s been causing Republicans to lose by a lot recently? Where has he or they been for the past year or so?
I doubt this will play well with suburban women, independents, etx
Gemina13
@gene108:
I’ve been there. Twice. The first time, in my 20s, I was so desperate to kill myself quietly that I went to the bathroom, got a safety razor, and tried to break it apart so I could slit my wrists. I cut my finger instead, which hurt so bad that I started crying and found I couldn’t stop. The next day I started therapy. The second time, in my 40s, I had plans made to kill myself – one by drowning, one by suffocation (helium), and one by train. Thankfully, I got to a therapist again, and she asked about my plans. When it came to drowning, I told her of a nearby lake with a sign up year-round warning of the risk of hypothermia (it gets runoff from Mt. Rainier). I planned to go out away from shore and then jump in. “Good idea,” she mused. “Where are you going to get the boat?” It was, if you’ll pardon the phrase, like cold water thrown on my plans.
It doesn’t need to be psychosis-level depression to make you want to kill yourself. Months or years of feeling like nothing will ever be better, or even good, in your life, that you’re not just unloved but actively unwanted and a burden to everyone around, will get that urge going. I had friends, a sibling, a partner who all loved me, and were horrified when I confessed I had one plan and two backups to commit suicide. In the end, I went to therapy not because I realized I needed help, but because I realized how much I’d hurt my partner if I ever went through with it.
“Now how could anyone do that to their child?” I hear some ask. Simple. When you believe you’re an utter fuckup, a waste of skin and air, and you love your child, you tell yourself that they will be infinitely better off without you. Depression is a liar, and its worst lie is that your loved ones will rejoice when you’re gone.
James E Powell
There is no one thing or one way of looking at suicide. This description from David Foster Wallace – who took his own life – describes me from about age 14 through my early 40s. It was not constant every day thing, but it always came back and it never really went away for very long.
Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)
@The Moar You Know:
Or depression is a brutal illness that causes your brain to override its own primal survival instinct. In fact, often a suicidal person will feel like loved ones would be better off if the suicidal person were gone — because not only is depression a brutal illness, it’s also a vicious liar. I know this from experience. From what you wrote, it appears it’s experience you don’t have. If that’s the case, I’m happy for you.
If that’s not the case, then… well, never mind what I would want to say.
Eolirin
@Frankensteinbeck: Also, I’m fairly confident the schizophrenics I know wouldn’t characterize their experiences as gruesome. Scary at times sure, but not that.
And there are plenty of schizophrenics that have developed coping tools and relationships with their conditions that leave them completely functional even without medication. Severity and symptom expression vary with individual, of course, but it’s a complex disorder and individuals dealing with it have a wide range of experiences. Try not to paint it with too broad a brush.
Lyrebird
@Gemina13: Thanking you and Gene and Eol and everyone.
Little candle gifs are corny, but I wish I could send you one.
Eolirin
@Lyrebird: I appreciate it. ❤️
Quinerly
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
If you have the stomach for it, here’s how it played in TrumpWorld.
https://www.revolver.news/2023/05/trump-crushes-town-hall-video-roundup-jake-tapper-on-the-verge-of-tears/
(I know many don’t like to give the RW sites “hits”….so don’t click if you feel that way. I wanted to know how scum viewed tonight, so I poked around. Sickening. Personally, I think we should prepare ourselves for what’s coming)
Brachiator
Fuck Trump.
Fuck CNN.
Fuck suicide.
James E Powell
@Eolirin:
What you describe so well is me exactly. And yes it is still there. Likely? Not nearly as much as it once was. But I can never completely rule it out.
Eolirin
@James E Powell: Yeah, for me, I just recognize that we all die eventually. My heart is pretty likely to give out at some point too, and there’s only so much I can do to protect against it. Having good support networks and plans for how to deal with a real crisis is like not eating fast food every day and getting adequate cardio in. It still may not be enough, but that’s the cost of living.
If there was one thing that I wish I had the ability to do, though, it would be to make it so that people who don’t have to deal with this stuff had some way of actually getting what that’s like. It’s so hard to even talk about without reflexively trying to reassure people that everything’s fine, really.
Because even though it more or less is, or at least, it isn’t what they’re going to get scared of it being, that’s not the same as it not being there either.
It makes it so hard to talk to people who haven’t experienced chronic conditions in an honest way. Things are often not “okay”, but also it’s often okay that they aren’t. It doesn’t have to be a crisis to be in pain, physically or emotionally.
I think our society is so reflexively scared of discomfort that it’s just really hard to get that across. I have a whole bunch of extra shit I need to navigate and that can be exhausting, but it’s not any different than all the other difficult stuff almost everyone has in their lives, it’s just more.
Brachiator
I had a dear friend who struggled with depression. I tried to simply help her and be there for her, and even that was not enough. You just feel helpless.
But what I observed is that sometimes the things most of us easily do, like just get out of bed and put on clothes, is a struggle for a person with depression. And medication can add to the frustration. My friend would say that sometimes it felt as though she was separated from the rest of the world by a huge viscous bubble that surrounded her as she tried to move through the world.
People who are suicidal are not selfish or full of hatred or even unconcern for family members. They feel like they are drowning in helplessness or that there is a huge weight pressing down on their soul, trying to suffocate the life out of them.
When the NY Times archive was free, I did a search for suicides. There was often a sad similarity for many.
I had been struck by the death of a noted NY cabaret singer in 2001.
Later, friends provided more detail.
Depression is a pit, a terrible trap that chokes the soul of those affected by it. We should always try to be compassionate.
Eolirin
@Brachiator: Yes, this.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Amir Khalid: They did that town hall because CNN is Infotament and not news.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
two things strike me about Trump; Trump is simply the American Salesman taken to it’s logical extreme; Trump has no personal fixed views except he needs to make the sale. The whole thing were he just talked over the CNN personality and personally attacked her when she pushed back is just a more exaggerated version of what salesmen are taught.
As for the MAGA hats it’s like they get their morality from cheesy 80s actions movies were whatever the hero does is morally right, no matter how viscous and self defeating it really is.
It’s like Trump stumbled into fascism because his entire life is an experiment to find the biggest fools in the room and found out 27% of the population thinks with a VHS tape.
LiminalOwl
As a therapist, I have tried to help clients thinking about suicide; at least once, we lost the battle. I agree with so many of the comments here: it is rarely if ever about “hating” anyone, but is about the weight of unbearable hopelessness. (@Brachiator: thank you for the way you put it.
As a human being, I have struggled with suicidal ideation—and stopped because I have seen what a suicide does to loved ones. My maternal grandmother died by suicide; the impact on my mother was profound, and never healed.
I often point to this blog post by a therapist friend: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1775300.html
Princess
@gene108: I don’t know how old her kids are but if they’re not adults, their support network is primarily their parents and people their parents have brought in, whether family, friends, or professionals. Given their mother has committed suicide, her support network was not strong enough and now she’s gone it’s pretty much a given that the kids in fact do not have a strong support network.
gene108
@Gemina13:
I’ve had suicidal ideations prior to the attempt, and some since. The first time was after graduating college. I had a very narrow view of what I could do right then and there and how my future would unfold. I also had a fear of rejection, which made a job search hard. Feelings of worthlessness built up. I had thoughts of drinking household cleaners, but worried if it didn’t kill me, I’d scar my innards for life.
My cousin in NJ has a small business and had been offering me a job. I agreed in December, because I felt like I’d just lock my self in my bedroom and never come out except eat, bathe, and relieve myself.
The change of scene helped. He’d some other recent college graduates. The suicidal thoughts receded. I was doing things 20 somethings were “supposed” to do. I felt okay, but wrapped too much of my self worth in my job, as I rebuilt my self esteem.
The 2001 recession was terrible for us, and we nearly folded. Things at work felt toxic to me, and I started getting depressed again. I was able to keep the worst of it from overwhelming me, but since I wasn’t getting treatment, the depression got out of control. When the psychosis happened, whatever reasoning I’d managed to use to not kill myself eroded. I stopped basing decisions on reality.
👆👆👆👆👆👆👆
This right here is an excellent concise description of depression and suicide. I did genuinely believe the world would’ve been better off without me.
E.
Just wanting to thank you all for these very personal comments. I am not ready to contribute but thank you for writing.
Barry
@Ruckus: “The only possible rational explanation is that they know he’s craptastic and decided to let everyone see it for themselves so that his chances of running for anything and getting it, is hopefully approaching absolute zero.“
Where ‘rational’ means ‘deliberately ignoring the past several years’.
cmorenc
When I saw the thread title, I initially wondered if the just-deceased was Peter Doocey, the Fox White House correspondent. Wasn’t previously familiar with the Dooce the article actually memorialized.
BellyCat
What “E” said.
Barry
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): “I don’t get how Trumpworld thinks this was a great night for him. By all accounts, he looked like a deranged asshole,..”
The Base *wants* this. The other GOP voters will seen a dominant male discussing the lies against him. So will independents.
CNN will see ratings and a beautiful horse race, as will the rest of the oh-so-liberal media.
Mousebumples
Thank you to those who are sharing personal thoughts. I’m glad you’re here with us today. I am better for knowing you and “listening” to you all.
JML
Depression is so harsh. We still struggle to not just treat it effectively for so many people, but even to talk about it in ways that are productive. There are still huge swaths of the country that act like it’s not a real disease and that people should just be able to somehow tough it out. There’s also a lot of people battling depression that really struggle with treatment (rough side effects, struggles to stay on a program, problems finding an effective course, and so much more). It’s brutal. (throw in struggles with addiction, anxiety disorders, and other medical problems than often arise secondary to depression only makes it worse)
It also lays waste to the people around them. Their loved ones can destroy themselves trying to support them. The suicidal ideations and actual attempts can break the people around them even the actual person struggling with depression doesn’t complete the act, and when someone does complete a suicide it can leave behind a legacy of pain, anger, and loss that too many people never get the proper support and therapy to deal with.
I have deep sympathy for those dealing with this illness. But I do understand and have sympathy for those who continue to deal with the legacy of this illness long after the person may have passed on from their life and struggle to talk about it without expressing a lot of anger and pain. It’s neither kind nor helpful to characterize suicide as a selfish act, but I understand the feeling behind that statement and sympathize with the pain that generally drives it.
(I’ve had 3 people in my life complete a suicide, and had to have the police break into someone’s garage when they got into their car with the door closed and the engine running. Getting goodbye messages can haunt people for a lifetime)
Sherparick
@Amir Khalid: Because it is their nature.
Paul in KY
@Alison Rose: Will say that killing yourself (especially in a messy way) in a place where you should know a close family member will be the one to find your corpse is not cool.
Chris Johnson
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Trump is literally Russia’s guy through and through. He didn’t stumble into fascism. It’s literally the only reason he’s there, and his big crushing secret is that he’s not the boss. He’s Russia’s slave. He’s made to dance for them, specifically for the purpose of doing this to the USA, their great enemy.
In that light I wonder why CNN is flirting with them.
Feathers
@Paul in KY: Anyone who does such a thing is so far beyond considering whether something is “cool” or not, that your judgement of them is nothing short of horrific.
Worked for a university research group that did some work on suicide. One of the things that struck me was that the average time between the decision and the act of suicide was under 15 minutes. The path to suicide is a bad stretch of life, leading to a bad couple of weeks, and then a very, very bad day. The timing effect is why getting rid of guns is so important. It’s why the UK requiring that Tylenol be only available in blister packs where you have to pop out each pill individually lead to a measurable drop in suicides.
The dangerous moment in suicidal ideation is when someone starts believing they are a burden to their friends and family. As someone who has had suicidal ideation, hateful statements like yours after a family member took his own life, seriously cut down the number of people I would feel safe reaching out to should I again be at an unsafe point. It’s sad that they’ve made this choice, probably without realizing it.
If you want to keep friends and family alive, do some learning on the subject. But that might risk your not being “cool,” eh?
Caravelle
That’s awful. She was one of the blogs I followed at one time, heck I remember attributing my caps lock usage to her example once. I find it… interesting ? A bit of a pity but interesting in the sense that I wonder what it says about the internet, that the profile describes her purely as a mommy blogger when actually she became the OG mommy blogger *after* being one of the OG workplace bloggers and getting fired over it. Like, IIRC I discovered her blog after reading about how it spawned the word “dooced” to mean “getting fired over random stuff you posted online”. Obviously that’s just a tiny part of her life and legacy in retrospect given how big her blog got after the birth of her children but it still feels worth mentioning. Like, before blogging got segregated into fields there was just blogging and I feel a profile that does not frame her as originating in that era is missing something. And I wonder if it’s just because the profile writer had never heard of it or if they thought it wasn’t important.
Knowing her history with depression this kind of feels like the bad ending. Knowing it happened it does seem to track with what we know of her personal life but I still never expected this to happen. She fought so hard for so long, I wish she could have found peace in life. She probably wasn’t in a very good line of work for that but no judgement for sticking with it, I don’t know the details of her personal life and given her success at what she did it would never be a casual thing to step away from that. And it’s heart-rending to see how young her children still are, Marlo only 14.
Caravelle
@Princess: It depends a bit on their relationship to their father doesn’t it ? Which I don’t know anything about, I’d feel bad bringing it up if it’s terrible. But given their parents’ divorce there is at least a possibility that they have access to familial support that their mother did not have access to, or not as comfortable an access at least.
Caravelle
@AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team: Oh wow, that website changed A LOT since the last time I stopped by, which I want to say was within the last couple of years or so ? Back then it was all flashy pictures and product placement. I absolutely love this sober look, it’s a very back-to-basics OG blog look (checking some other oldies… Yep Digby’s Hullabaloo and Niewert’s Orsinus still exist and look very similar to that) but still has an appropriate dose of the photography she clearly loved. I don’t know if her family changed it in light of her passing or if she changed it up at some point, but if it’s the second I now feel bad I never got to see the change when it happened.
Skepticat
I cracked and displaced three cervical vertebrae in a fall, and I frequently said I understood why people in chronic pain might take their own lives. Intensive, long-term traction alleviated my pain and let me avoid a spinal fusion, but too many people aren’t as lucky. Suicide hurts so many more people than the person who dies.
PaulB
Deleted.
dearmaizie
@Juju: Her blog wasn’t my thing either but, like you, I enjoyed the daily Chucks, to see what she would balance on his head.
PBK
@Feathers: Paul’s comment as well as the one they were replying to are glaring examples of just how poorly mental illness is understood. Thank you for saying this.