mjc@cmu-cs-cad.ARPA (Monica Cellio) (04/06/85)
From: tektronix!reed!purtell@uw-beaver (Lady Godiva) >Something that I have noticed about this newsgroup is that very little >is posted here. Are there just no people out there that think about >suicide or related things (depression, the legal and/or moral, emotional >or spiritual aspects of suicide)? Or do people just not want to talk >about them? If not, why does this newsgroup exist? On occasion there have been flurries of activity on this net; yours is message #98 on my system and we've been receiving netnews for less than a year. It'll never be a major net, though. It's sometimes hard to "open up" to the entire net. Sometimes there have been small discussions of legal and ethical issues, but very little has been said about depression itself. I think there are people who want to talk about the issues you mention (because people have in the past) but for some reason many of us don't initiate these discussions. -Dragon -- UUCP: ...ucbvax!dual!lll-crg!dragon ARPA: monica.cellio@cmu-cs-cad or dragon@lll-crg
rds5695@ritcv.UUCP (Robert D. Seals) (04/09/85)
First, I'd like to say that I'm very pleased that CMU has only been on the net for a year. I'm from Pittsburgh, and have always been jealous of the notoriety CMU (deservedly) gets, since I chose to go to a school in Rochester. Fascinating, huh? Well, OUR net has 450 suicide articles. When we first got the net, I was generally pretty depressed, and wqhen I looked through the listing of groups, suicide was one that caught my eye immediately. There haven't been a lot of postings. Several poems (I think they are a great release for a lot of people, but generally very dry, even for *really* depressed people), and there was some discussion of moral ramification of plug-pulling. But most of the traffic is from people asking what the group is here for. Fascinating, huh? One of the problems is that people tend to not stay depressed, and therefore intereseted in suicide, for too long. Either they go one way or the other, and it doesn't really matter, as far as traffic to the net goes, anyway. When you become happy, as I usually am, reading stuff in net.suicide is pretty much of a bring-down, to say the least. I tried to bring up Ian Curtis and other stuff, but it was not met withg much excitement. Suicide isn't very exciting business. I'm starting to sound like Kurt Vonnegut, aren't I? Oh, there is a kind of famous book called 'Dead Souls.' Is anyone familiar with it? Robert D. Seals