Martin Short has been taking some flak for “cyber-bullying” for his demented plastic surgeon character on the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Netflix series causing “dermatologist to the stars” Dr. Fredric Brandt to commit suicide. As New York magazine notes, “This is a common trajectory in stories about suicide: After someone kills himself, those who are left behind tend to focus on the precipitating event when there seems to be one one — a job loss, for example, or an incident of cyberbullying. It’s a dramatic way of looking at tragedies that supplies a simple explanation for them:”
But precipitating events are the easiest stories for outsiders — including journalists — to understand, and they’re also more interesting (especially, perhaps, when they involve popular TV shows), so they get “blown up,” continued Peck. “I remember all the media stories over the years — [someone] ‘killed themselves because of financial setbacks,’ that kind of thing,” he said. But it’s much more likely that such a suicide is the culmination of years of struggle caused by a variety of factors. “Your distressor is the thing that we see, but it doesn’t mean it’s the cause,” said Harkavy-Friedman.
There is an undeniable randomness to suicide: There are people who would have killed themselves had they not found the right treatment at the right time; and there are victims, perhaps including Brandt, who might have been able to hold on longer if they had found treatment, or more effective treatment. The best anyone can do, faced with a phenomenon this complex, is try to understand the patterns that do exist within it. “I wish this were more like physics,where we had a formula and could plug everything in,” said Tishler. “But unfortunately we do not.”
Spot-on. Though, to append my comments to Florida talk radio host Dan Maduri during an interview today, it’s interesting that those on the left who are exonerating Short for the random chance of his satiric characterization apparently pushing a depressed surgeon over the edge weren’t anywhere near as willing to excuse Sarah Palin for her routine political clip art in January of 2011.
Even when it was obvious that the apolitical nutter who shot Gabrielle Giffords and over a dozen others never even saw them. And yes, that includes New York magazine, eager to score cheap partisan points by browbeating Palin, back in January of 2011.
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