Cops probe FIVE deaths linked to 'suicide kits' after student searched web before taking life

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/cops-probe-five-deaths-linked-37022802

Bin gestern über dieses Projekt gestolpert: „Reasons to stay“. Briefe, die Menschen mit Suizidgedanken helfen sollen. Irgendwie mag ich die Idee, also dachte ich, ich teile sie hier mal.

I stumbled across this project yesterday: “Reasons To Stay.” It’s a collection of letters meant to help people who are having suicidal thoughts. I kind of like this idea, so I thought I’d share it here.

https://reasonstostay.org/

#Suizid #Briefe #suicide #letters

Blake turned his grief into growth after losing 'hero' dad to suicide
By Rose Kerr, Sana Qadar, and James Bullen

It's normal to feel distress when you go through trauma. But some people also experience personal growth to make positive changes in their lives.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2026-04-26/surf-coach-blake-johnston-turns-grief-into-post-traumatic-growth/106421100

#MentalHealth #Health #PostTraumaticStressDisorder #DiseasesandDisorders #Stress #Psychology #Suicide #Grief #Depression #RoseKerr #SanaQadar # #JamesBullen

#QueerAF reports on the consequences of #StateNeglect & #FascistPolicies regarding #TransPeople & the shocking #suicide rates in our community.

#GifsArtidote: when #UKgov are deliberately creating material conditions in which (trans) ppl cannot live a healthy life, they're driving us to suicide which is eventually amassing #genocide.

https://www.wearequeeraf.com/trans-people-are-dying-of-suicide-more-than-the-general-uk-population-new-investigation-reveals/?

#press #IndependentMedia #news

#QueerAF reports on the consequences of #StateNeglect & #FascistPolicies regarding #TransPeople & the shocking #suicide rates in our community.

#GifsArtidote: when #UKgov are deliberately creating material conditions in which (trans) ppl cannot live a healthy life, they're driving us to suicide which is eventually amassing #genocide.

https://www.wearequeeraf.com/trans-people-are-dying-of-suicide-more-than-the-general-uk-population-new-investigation-reveals/?

#press #IndependentMedia #news

Mum 'had no idea' healthy daughter was planning assisted suicide at Swiss clinic

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/mum-had-no-idea-healthy-37067689

The Silence Camus Refused to Domesticate: Hazel Barnes, The Myth of Sisyphus, and the Cost of a Sympathetic Misreading

Hazel Barnes was one of the most careful American readers of French existentialism in the twentieth century. She translated Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1956, a labor that shaped how generations of American students encountered Continental thought. When she turns to Camus, though, something interesting happens on the page. Her summary of The Myth of Sisyphus is partly accurate and partly an act of quiet translation in the other direction, pulling Camus toward a Sartrean humanism that Camus himself spent the last decade of his life resisting.

Here is the passage in question:

Albert Camus, in his book, The Myth of Sisyphus, puts the question in humanistic terms. I do not know, he says, whether or not this world has a meaning which transcends it. But this I am fully aware of, that if there is a higher meaning, it is not one which it is possible for me to know. And if the meaning is not a human meaning, then how can it be a meaning at all for me? In this case, the leap in question is no longer the leap toward God in faith. It is the literal leap over the precipice toward death. What one encounters, if one assumes that there is no higher meaning, is what existentialist writers have called the absurd. Absurdity is a discrepancy, a gap between man’s aspirations, and that which he is capable, even at best, of achieving. It is the fact that when man appeals to the universe for meaning, for form, for unity, there is no answer.

This passage comes from Self-Encounter: A Study in Existentialism, a ten-part television series Barnes wrote and hosted for National Educational Television, the predecessor to PBS, broadcast in 1961 and 1962. KRMA in Denver produced it, and the lines above are from the third episode, “To Leap Or Not To Leap,” which takes Camus as its focus. The shadowy figures seated behind Barnes on the set are theater and dance students from the University of Colorado, staged as atmospheric performers by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who shot three of the ten episodes. The original broadcast tapes were long thought destroyed, but one set had been preserved at the Library of Congress, which is how the episodes survive today.

The context matters, and it cuts against Barnes more than it excuses her. A ten-part series for a general public audience could reasonably be expected to simplify, and one might defend the Sartrean inflection as a teacher’s compression for lay viewers. That defense fails on a single fact. Barnes is the philosopher who coined the term “humanistic existentialism” as a shared label for Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, and she used it in the title of her 1959 book The Literature of Possibility: A Study in Humanistic Existentialism, three years before the broadcast. Her opening sentence in the passage above, that Camus “puts the question in humanistic terms,” is her signature classification in action. She is arguing, across her career, that these three thinkers belong inside a single humanist project. The television audience gave her the opportunity to broadcast that argument to the country. What sounds like compression for a general viewer is the position itself, delivered in its most public form.

Notice the rhetorical method before the content. On camera, Barnes speaks the middle portion of this passage in Camus’ voice. “I do not know, he says” establishes the ventriloquism, and then the attribution drops away, so that “if the meaning is not a human meaning, then how can it be a meaning at all for me?” appears to come from Camus’ own mouth. The technique is sophisticated. When Barnes is accurate, the ventriloquism functions as faithful translation. When she slides, the slide is harder to catch because the viewer hears it as Camus speaking rather than as Barnes interpreting. The frame sentence sets the agenda before the impersonation begins. Camus, Barnes tells us, “puts the question in humanistic terms.” Before a single quotation has been offered, the audience has been told what kind of thinker Camus is. The rest of the passage will make good on the promise of the label.

Start with what Barnes gets right. She captures Camus’ epistemic posture with admirable precision when she has him say that he does not know whether the world has a meaning that transcends it, and that if such meaning exists, it lies outside any human capacity to verify. This is accurate to Camus. He is agnostic about the transcendent, and his agnosticism is strategic. The absurd requires two parties, the human needing meaning and the universe withholding it. A flat declaration that the universe is empty would leave nothing to confront, only a report to file. Barnes grasps that Camus preserves the tension, and she names that tension well.

She is also accurate on the closing point, that “when man appeals to the universe for meaning, for form, for unity, there is no answer.” This is the silence at the heart of The Myth of Sisyphus. The universe does not respond in the language we bring to it. It gives back nothing that matches our need. Barnes hears the silence and records it faithfully.

Between these two accurate observations, her summary performs three operations that move Camus in a direction he did not move himself. The first operation lives in a single clause: “And if the meaning is not a human meaning, then how can it be a meaning at all for me?” That clause belongs to Barnes rather than to Camus. Camus’ actual position is narrower. He writes that we cannot know the transcendent, and what we cannot know cannot guide us. Barnes’ clause converts epistemic humility into metaphysical dismissal. The Camus position preserves the unknown as unknown, and the absurd lives in that suspension. Barnes renders the unknown as functionally nonexistent, which collapses the gap she will need in her next sentence. The slide is small enough that a viewer may not catch it, especially when it arrives in what appears to be Camus’ own voice.

The second operation is the framing of the alternatives: “the leap in question is no longer the leap toward God in faith. It is the literal leap over the precipice toward death.” Camus does open his book by naming suicide as the one serious philosophical question, so Barnes’ framing matches the opening of the text. Her account falters at the book’s destination. The entire argument of The Myth of Sisyphus is that suicide and religious faith fall into the same category of error. Both escape the absurd. Both resolve the tension by removing one of its two terms. Religious faith abolishes the silence of the universe by filling it with God. Suicide abolishes the human need by ending the one who needs. Camus calls them both forms of philosophical suicide, and he refuses each one. His third path, which Barnes’ summary does not name, is revolt. Live with the absurd, awake and unreconciled, refusing the consolation of transcendence and refusing the erasure of the self. That third path is the point of the book. A viewer who finishes Barnes’ summary without knowing the third path exists has been given the setup and denied the argument.

The third operation is the most philosophically consequential. Barnes defines absurdity as “a discrepancy, a gap between man’s aspirations, and that which he is capable, even at best, of achieving.” This is where the Sartrean translation becomes audible. For Camus, the absurd lies in the distance between what we need and what the universe will confirm. The distance between aspiration and capacity is a different problem, a practical and psychological one the book does not address. Barnes has moved the absurd from cosmology to psychology. In her frame, absurdity concerns human striving and human limitation, a problem that could in principle be addressed through effort, solidarity, political action, the building of meaning among ourselves. That is a coherent philosophical position and a recognizably Sartrean one. Camus wrote something else. For Camus, the absurd is a permanent condition that arises the moment a conscious creature asks the universe to account for itself and hears nothing back. No achievement closes that gap. The gap sits between us and the silence itself, a position no striving can reach.

Notice also the qualifier “if one assumes that there is no higher meaning.” Barnes inserts this phrase almost in passing, but it reverses Camus’ posture. Camus makes no such assumption. He refuses to assume in either direction. The absurd is not the consequence of an atheist verdict, it is the condition that holds when a person cannot reach a verdict and still needs meaning. Barnes’ phrasing gives the viewer permission to think of absurdity as the mood of a person who has already decided the universe is empty. Camus’ absurd belongs to someone still standing at the edge of the question with no verdict available.

Why does this reading matter beyond its scholarly accuracy? The Camus who emerges from Barnes’ summary is a humanist in waiting, a thinker who has arrived at the absurd and needs only to turn the corner into a Sartrean ethics of engagement to be complete. Barnes would have welcomed such a Camus. Sartre would have welcomed such a Camus. Her term of art, “humanistic existentialism,” assumes exactly that Camus. The historical Camus broke with Sartre publicly in 1952 over The Rebel, and the break turned on exactly this kind of absorption. Sartre wanted to fold the absurd into a program of historical action, into a humanism that used absurdity as a starting gun for political commitment. Camus resisted the folding. He thought the absurd was harder than Sartre’s humanism allowed. He thought it stayed alien even after one had decided to live inside it. The revolt he described in Sisyphus and extended in The Rebel was never a political program dressed in metaphysical language. It was a permanent posture of the self against a universe that will never confirm the self’s demands.

Barnes’ softening is sympathetic, and she was a serious thinker, which makes the softening instructive rather than dismissible. A careless reader would miss Camus entirely. A careful reader trained in Sartre hears Camus and translates him unconsciously into the closest available dialect. The cost of that translation is the loss of what was specifically Camusian about Camus. His refusal of consolation included the consolation of humanism. He would not let the audience off the hook by promising that solidarity or achievement could close the gap that opened when the universe refused to answer. The gap stays open. One lives in it. That is the whole ethic of the book.

A fair critic could press back here and argue that Camus’ own position is less stable than the argument above allows. The revolt Camus describes does start to look humanist when examined hard. Sisyphus pushing the rock, imagined happy at his labor, resembles the Sartrean project of meaning-making through commitment. Barnes might answer that she has simply read Camus as he was becoming, not as he managed to freeze himself in 1942. The defense against this critique has to rest on what Camus explicitly resisted. The Rebel, published nine years after Sisyphus, draws a sharp line between rebellion and the humanist absorption Sartre was constructing. Camus had every opportunity to collapse his position into Sartre’s and he refused. The refusal is the evidence. Whatever instabilities the revolt contains, Camus himself insisted that revolt was not the same project Sartre was running. Barnes’ reading, sophisticated as it is, reads Camus as the Camus he might have been had he taken one more step, rather than the Camus whose whole authorship was a refusal of that step.

The broader stakes are worth naming. Contemporary humanism, in its secular and religious shapes, wants to close the gap with meaning built from below, communities and causes and identities that furnish the significance the universe refused to provide. Those projects can be valuable on their own terms. Those projects describe something other than Camus’ position. Camus described a life lived awake inside the silence, with meaning made locally and honestly and without any pretense that the silence had been filled. The first approach is effective because it motivates action, builds solidarity, makes the world workable. It is not effective because it tends toward bad faith the moment it claims the absurd has been resolved. The second approach is effective because it refuses bad faith and keeps the confrontation visible. It is not effective in the sense of making anyone comfortable, and it was never meant to.

Barnes taught American readers how to hear Sartre, and she taught American television viewers how to hear existentialism itself. She did not hear Camus the same way, and reading her carefully shows where the frame she carried pulled the text toward her. The Camus she describes remains worth reading. The Camus she does not quite describe, the one who refused the third consolation after refusing the first two, is the one still worth arguing with. The silence he insisted on is still there, and the question of how to live inside it without domesticating it is the same question he left us. Anyone who tells you the gap has been closed is selling something. Camus’ honesty lay in refusing to sell it.

David Wilcock's Death: Sheriff's Office Releases Detailed Timeline Of UFO Researcher's Tragic Suicide

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://in.mashable.com/culture/108913/david-wilcocks-death-sheriffs-office-releases-detailed-timeline-of-ufo-researchers-tragic-suicide