A friend of mine named Jon Grayson, who is now a talk host in St. Louis, posted this on FB after hearing of Naomi's death. It was near Christmas. I was on the air at 99.7 WWTN in Nashville, and when I say it was near Christmas I mean it was either Christmas Eve or the 23rd. The thing you should know about that time of year is that it’s horrible in the talk radio game. Everyone is extremely busy and consumed with Christmas music or Hallmark Hall Of Fame movies. So there I was, on the air trying to get something - ANYTHING - going that might get a call or two so I could stop talking to myself. Finally I thought, “What if I just give in to it and do something completely maudlin?” So I said, “call me and tell me a good story about your perfect Christmas.” I said it could be a memory or a fantasy - just the best Christmas you could imagine. I got one call. It was a woman in Franklin, Tennessee (just south of Nashville) who told me that over the past few years all of her Christmases had been the same, and all perfect. She said they involved her two grown daughters coming to her house in Franklin, grabbing a couple guitars and just singing around the fire the way they had when the girls were little. I asked her how it felt as a mom to have daughters who still valued that time with her now that they were adults, and her response kind of puzzled me. She said what made her even more proud was to have daughters who were talented enough to both have careers in show business that they could drop and make their way home to Franklin to spend the holiday with her. That set the wheels in my mind into overdrive, and finally I couldn’t take it anymore and had to confirm my suspicions. “Wait…who IS this?”, I asked. The response was as sweet as honey, with just a hint of self-deprecation. “Well,” she said, “I’m just a little ol’ mama Judd.” It was the one and only time I ever spoke to Naomi, and all I will remember about her is that she saved my ass on a dreadful, pre-Christmas radio show when I had yet to reach 30. She was a treasure, and I will miss her. Rest in peace, dear lady. Think of it; a lady so rich and famous saw fit to give a call to help out a young talk host who desperately needed someone to talk to. I love that story.
I'm going to be a bit of an assgasket here, and ask how does one define suicide? See, back in the late '80s/early '90s, I had a friend who was HIV+, and he bought into the idea that the disease was a "manufactured" illness (meaning that he thought that it was caused by the overuse of antibiotics, which can cause a person's immune system to not be as effective against ordinary diseases). So, he stopped taking the experimental drugs he'd been given to try and keep the disease at bay. HIV killed him, officially. Speaking as someone who knew him, it was a suicide. He'd had a debilitating physical injury that had left him in chronic pain, and coupled with the fact that he was HIV+, he didn't really see much of a future for himself (what with all the folks around him dying due to AIDS). Had he taken the meds he'd been given for HIV, he might have lived long enough that there were some really good treatments for it available to him, and not long after, there would have been medical treatments to eliminate his chronic pain. Point being that if Naomi was someone who bought into the nonsense that folks are spewing about COVID not being all that bad, so she didn't get vaccinated, I could well see that being an argument that she succumbed to mental illness, as that's really about the best description of folks who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID.
Suicide is one's deliberate action to cause--or through deliberate inaction not avoid--one's own death. I'd say for an act to be credibly labelled suicide, the person committing it has to have the reasonable expectation that death is an all but certain and more-or-less immediate consequence.
You're assuming that folks would be willing to admit that certain acts would be fatal. My eldest brother is bugfuck crazy and believes all the stupidest shit spewed out by Fox News. You know, like if you expose your nutsack to red light, it'll boost your testosterone levels, because an idiot who got rich due to TV dinners told him so. He won't get a COVID vaccine, because again, Fox News tells him that it's dangerous. If he dies because he caught COVID since Fox told him that the vaccine was dangerous, I'm going to label him as having died from mental illness, as only someone who is bugfuck crazy would think that the COVID vaccines are lethal. YMMV.
The distinctive quality of suicide is that it is intentional. Killing yourself because you were wrong--or in denial--about the risk of an action is not suicide. Being mistaken--or even stupid--is not mental illness. The implication of what you're saying is that anyone who believes something you believe to be stupid should receive a mental health intervention.
At some point, yes. I mean, how do humans evolve past the vulnerability of succumbing to conspiracy theory if we do not study it and how, when, why such people do succumb?
I do not get suicide by gunshot. I'm a big baby when it comes to pain. So, I've always thought, if I ever committed suicide it would be by sleeping pills.
This is a known pattern. Women predominantly choose poison, men guns. Women want it painless, men want it quick. But there are plenty of examples that go against the trend, like Naomi Judd.
