Sandra Bland death ruled a suicide by hanging, Texas prosecutor says

[jberryhill]

36. I'm not sure what you meant

Whether she committed suicide or not is entirely irrelevant to the fact that she shouldn't have been there in the first place.

But suicide is a leading cause of death. Because of social taboos around it, there is no family in the world that says, "Oh, yeah, no surprise that happened" when a family member commits suicide.

Other than terminal debilitating illness, in which case ending things before they are certain to get worse is more or less rational, there is no 'logic' or 'common sense' to suicide. People of all walks of life do it every day with zero warning whatsoever.

A common misconception is that someone gets really, really depressed and commits suicide. People who are deeply depressed are more often unmotivated to do much of anything. It's just when they start feeling and acting "better" that they commit suicide. Why? Because they aren't depressed anymore and can actually motivate themselves to do stuff - like committing suicide. (This, by the way, is the source of the accusations that anti-depressant medications make people commit suicide. They don't. But they do get depressed people up and around and doing stuff - like killing themselves.)

99% of what most people think about suicide is horseshit. And that, in itself, is why it remains a leading cause of death. We put a lot of effort into other "top ten" things like cancer and heart disease. You'd think "getting people not to kill themselves" is simpler than curing cancer but, year-in, year-out, suicide remains a leading killer. It's common. But, and yet again, because of the social nonsense about it, people don't even realize how common it is. It's 'impolite' to tell people that someone killed themselves.

Now, I have absolutely no idea how this woman died. A person under a lot of stress - and here was someone confined in a locked room over a traffic stop on her way to her new job, her new life - all of which got flushed down the toilet because she was going to stay there until someone came up with $5000 - might react in any of a number of ways. And nobody knows how they are going to react to something like that until it happens to them. Period.