Not permanently, no, but in 2005 I was hospitalized for a week because I could not even tolerate water. Opiates required for the pain. A solid week with nothing by mouth a much of that not certain what was going on, but knowing if it wasn’t fixable I would die from it. Six months to return to normal eating, with no guarantee I’d actually recover.
So no, I don’t know what it would be like to suffer from that my entire life, but I have had a glimpse of that hell.
You don’t want to die, you want to make the pain stop. I get that sometimes the only way to “make the pain stop” is to die, but if someone could give you a magic pill to make the pain go away you’d take that over death. Am I right on that? That’s a different thing that clinical depression without ongoing physical agony.
Hell, I’ve even stated that there could be intractable forms of depression where it could be justified - but they are rare. That’s not what the typical depressed person is facing. We owe it to someone suicidal, as a fellow human being, to trying to HELP them, not walk away and let their illness kill them.
And if you don’t think MY outlook is helpful… well, I am NOT therapist. And I know I’m not. I don’t have the toolkit to help someone in that state and I don’t try any more than I’d attempt emergency surgery on someone, I’d get them to an actual surgeon.
Yep, every human being is selfish to one degree or another, just like every human being has to kill other things and eat them to continue to survive. But there’s a difference between what you have to do to continue to eat versus torturing your food to death and causing unnecessary pain.
Plenty of situations arise that means one or the other or both parties are going to experience something on the discomfort-to-agony spectrum. That’s the difficult part of actually applying ethics to your life.
It is not altruistic to coerce someone into staying alive indefinitely when their pain can not be alleviated. But I very much doubt that actually applies to most suicidal people. In the case of someone like my sister, her seventeen years of mental illness were not a continual dark slog of suicidal depression, there were good times and good days in there. She was going through a period where a number of things triggered her depression but they were all temporary. What she probably needed was an inpatient stint with some intensive therapy to restabilize her. Instead, she used a neighbor’s car and garage to inflict pain on everyone who cared for her as well as ending her own life. Way to go, sis. That was NOT a constructive way to deal with your problems.
Although not nearly as selfish as the young man turning to chunky salsa on the front of a train. I mean, my sister was considerate enough to post a sign on the door of the garage warning of toxic fumes inside. A strange mix of considerate and selfish there. But then, people do tend to be a mix of things at all times. It’s like making sure everyone is out of the house before you burn it down. Yeah, you could have done worse and yay you didn’t physically hurt anyone else but arson is still a Bad Thing.
Given how I feel about it maybe it’s best if they do talk to someone else. I am never going to say suicide is OK. It’s not. At best, in extraordinarily rare circumstances, it’s the lesser of two evils.
If someone DID tell me they were suicidal I wouldn’t attempt to counsel them, I would try to get them help by someone far more qualified than I am to do that.