Or Not To Be

http://parlancer.blogspot.com/2008/06/morbid-thoughts.html Morbid indeed – the post is about suicide, including several documentaries on the subject.  Linked to Shakespeare via the book Or Not To Be, a collection of suicide notes. Also speaks of the “bystander effect” (and references Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point) which is a “universe is small” moment for me because I’m listening to that very audio book and just covered that chapter over the weekend.  Basically the bystander effect is the idea that the *fewer* people witness an incident (such as a suicide attempt), the more likely they are to help.  The more people witness, the less actually do anything, because “Someone else will do it.”  Seen most famously in the Kitty Genovese case when something like 30 neighbors heard the woman being attacked and murdered over the span of half an hour, and yet no one did anything.

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