Promoting Hope, Preventing Suicide

These incidents have weighed on my mind heavily over the last year too. I'd point out, though, that you pinpoint husbands and fathers solely, but I recall several instances of infanticide (baby in microwave, baby thrown over bridge, recently baby beheaded) by mothers driven to heinous ends, so, please, don't point solely to men as the culprits. I'll admit, some of the instances with women at the reins have more blurry motive, postpartem may play a role, etc, but at least a few of the instances were similarly economy-tinged.

Considering how materialistic people have become, I find it surprising that these violent acts, as common as they appear to be, are not vastly more common. The perpetrators of these things appear to place their self-worth, their value, their identity on the contents of their wallet, the size of their bank accounts, if those things become insolvent and worthless, they themselves become worthless. Their identity is so wrapped up and consumed with the notion of wealth, that if wealth has ceased to exist, then so have they. Obviously, the way around this is to simply value things that carry no monetary value, and thus cannot be diminished by market flux, or to value nothing at all, no preconditions or assumptions of wealth or value or meaning, thus since nothing meant anything, nothing can be lost, all you can do or hope for or cherish is to simply exist, but apparently this is a concept lost on most.

What baffled me for a long time is the question, "if your self-worth was defined by your economic stability, and one, thus both, have failed and has driven you to be homicidal, then why not kill the ones responsible (your boss, your landlord, bankers, politicians)? Why kill your family?" And even in the case where you might shift blame to the family, i.e., they eat your food, they sleep under your roof, they run up your phone bill, these things are insignificant, this can't possibly justify killing them, especially when you intend to kill yourself. So then what is it? The main provider for the family finds him or herself unable to adequately provide for the family, so, ok, why not just taste your shame and off yourself? Possibly this is ruled out for the simple reasoning that then, the family would be left alone and unsecure. In my humble opinion, I've observed that people are a lot stronger than we tend to give them credit, if the provider were away, the family could go on, they would make do, they would find a way, these people must see this, yet they ignore it, which leaves the motive of selfishness. These perpetrators can't stand the prospect of someone else taking care of their family, their property, succeeding where they so horribly failed. They have been defeated, thus they will take their family with them to rule out any possibility of someone else succeeding, it's a victory usurped, and thus won, like a sore loser ruining the winner's celebration feast.

Unless you are teaching a class on the subject, gender sensitivity is not a requirement when discussing familicide, murder-suicide, etc. We need facts. While there are men and women who commit such crimes, 90% of them are committed by men. This economic framing has only been a media hype to 1.catapult the issues related to the economy and the former and current Presidents 2. to brush aside good journalism that would actually investigate the family history past a superficial level. The only way to stop this type of violence is to stop the thinking in which people are entitled to control other people's lives at their own benefit.