[Merry Mockmas]

Originally Posted by Redway

The thing is a lot of suicide ‘attempts’ are in reality just cries for help (as we all know) and while at least a certain degree of sympathy just comes naturally to most people with a decent emotional compass there is kind of the issue of those attention cries (I don’t mean that nearly as bluntly as it comes across on paper) draining already-overstretched hospital resources (including beds) and in a clinical sense that could give rise to the question of (knowing the patient’s intent) prioritising more definitive, actual attempts over minuscule paracetamol overdoses that the person obviously knows won’t even remotely come close to unearthing them when it comes to something purely-practical like allocating hospital beds in a typical NHS hospital. That’s one of the situations where equal doses of sympathy all-round might become kind of messy.

In response to Mock’s point about not giving certified child molesters the time of day in this sort of context I do hear it (of course) but there’s often so much going on in the mental lives of people who indulge in those perverse acts (for which per se there obviously isn’t much justification) that even then it’s hard to definitively-assume. There are just too many shades of grey (in my opinion) when it comes to deciding who to allocate any kind of sympathy at all (or not) to but then I guess that depends on how much you inherently value the concept of life itself and the fundamental right everyone has (or, again, not) to go when they go out of natural causes alone and not murder or a desperate way out. It’s a tricky one.

Oh my viewpoint is definitely more of a black and white one when it comes to convicted child molesters.

Ironically I can feel some form of sympathy for murderers, as normally they have been dealt a bad hand that can take them down the path that they go down.

Of course it doesn't justify their crimes, but I do hold the belief that anyone can kill if pushed hard enough, so I could still maybe see some humanity left in a murderer that might make me feel a slight sympathy towards them if one of them were to commit suicide, and they had a sympathetic past.