The National Association of Mental Illness is furious about a commercial General Motors ran during the Super Bowl that depicted a GM manufacturing robot taking a suicidal leap from a bridge because it had made a mistake on the assembly line. The robot is fired because of GM's "obsession" with quality.
In a letter to GM on February 7, NAMI warned that concerns over depictions of suicide in mass media have been raised in the past by the U.S. Surgeon General, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Institute of Mental Health -- as well as groups like NAMI -- because of the risk of "suicide contagion," the clinical term for "copy cat" suicides.
In addition, suicide rates increase as unemployment rises. GM has engaged in major restructuring that has caused many employees to lose their jobs, NAMI noted in its letter. "The irony is unbelievably callous," making the ad "even more distasteful."
GM's tepid response -- noting that the company had received a handful, but not a "tsunami" of complaints" -- did not improve matters. And regardless of one's position on the merits of NAMI's complaint (which, for the record, I find quite reasonable), assessing the worth of the point by reference to how many persons it seemed to bother probably isn't the most refined heuristic. The fact that majorities of people are not bothered by events does not alone imply their permissibility.
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