Sui­cide as an ongo­ing topic

I am work­ing on project explor­ing sui­cide and the right to die. My road map for this project is an edi­to­r­ial I wrote detail­ing my sup­port for the legal­iza­tion of sui­cide. The basis of my argu­ment is to put a sys­tem in place to make it socially accept­able com­mit sui­cide. The results of this social nor­mal­iza­tion of sui­cide would be less sui­cides over­all.  I believe if it were socially accept­able to com­mit sui­cide then more peo­ple would seek help. Until that far off day arrives we must be vig­i­lant for the signs and symp­toms of impend­ing suicides.

The first rea­son­able site I encoun­tered on my quest to find the signs and symp­toms of sui­cide was www.suicide.org. The design aes­thetic of suicide.org is min­i­mal­is­tic and painful to look at. The site does con­tain some good infor­ma­tion though. Clearly the designer has not dis­cov­ered Mike Run­dles “How CRAP is your site design” arti­cle. Find­ing tele­phone num­bers for sui­cide pre­ven­tion cen­ters requires you to scroll past the site cre­ators impas­sioned plea to not com­mit sui­cide and first dial 911.

Buried in the side­bar is a link to an arti­cle list­ing the warn­ing signs of sui­cide. There are some solid exam­ples listed in the arti­cle such as, abus­ing drugs and giv­ing away pos­ses­sions. There are also some not so solid exam­ples like; per­form­ing poorly at work or school and act­ing reck­lessly. I am reck­less and per­form poorly in school and I have no desire to kill myself.

This sites ama­teur­ish design is tem­pered by its pas­sion­ate desire to make a dif­fer­ence. I appre­ci­ate the infor­ma­tion it con­tains, but will be look­ing else­where for fur­ther guid­ance in my research.