In my experience, which consists of being a psychiatrist for >10 years, coming from a family with multiple successful (o the irony) suicides, growing up with a severely depressed and suicidal mother and having been suicidal for quite some time myself, a lot of people who experience these thoughts think everyone is better off without them because they are a burden in their living, mentally ill state. So that kind of negates selfishness IMHO. Of course there are also people with revenge as motivating factor, but those are not the majority in my experience. For a lot of people who experience suicidality the thought of others isn’t taking a front seat in their minds because they are in excruciating pain that is taking up all of their attention, and are thus contemplating or acting to take ending that pain to its ultimate conclusion. @Broomstick I get where you’re coming from, but I also think it’s a narrow viewpoint. Yes you have suffered from the suicidal actions of your family, but there probably was no goal of deliberately hurting you. There might have been, and in that case I’m sorry, but as said that’s not the majority of cases I’ve dealt with. The sad fact in this is that mental illness in this form inevitably leads to self-centeredness, which IMO is different from selfishness. It’s not personal. That can be hurtful in and of itself but it is an effect and not an intention.
No.
Sure, there’s a middle ground. And killing yourself is way, way, way, way outside of it. Killing yourself is an extreme action.
I gave you a nutshell view of ethics without any intention of writing a 1,000 page treatise on all the nuances of it and I’m not going to go down that path. You, @BigT have demonstrated you have zero intention of listening to me and your only concern is coercing me into changing my viewpoint to yours rather than agreeing to disagree.
I sure as hell did. And, for the record, if there is any suicide in my life I’m still angry at it’s not my sister (even if she did leave a three-page screed on how terrible we all were and how she was doing this to hurt specific people, so much for suicides never thinking about how they hurt others) it’s the little jackass who ended it all by waiting for a fully loaded passenger train to come around a bend, winding up splattered all over the front of said train. Showy, inconsiderate, and Og knows what eventually happened to the driver who, as I’ve already said, was sedated and carried off that train after the trauma of seeing a human being turned to chunky salsa literally in front of his eyes. That sort of action not only triggers grief in loved ones, it is enormously cruel to the person forced into the position of seeing someone about to die and being completely unable to do anything about it. THAT’s the one I’m still angry about.
This article says 55% of train drivers witinessing a suicide suffer from mental illness afterward.
The selfish young man who decided to use a passenger train to kill himself inflicted great mental anguish on at least one other person (I suspect some of the passengers were traumatized as well) that has a better than even chance of being life-long. That is selfish, saying your pain justifies inflicting pain and suffering on other people. It doesn’t.
Suicides where you force other people to be involved in your violent and gory death are worse than the sort where someone quietly goes off to OD on pills, for example. I think both actions are wrong, but one is far worse than the other.
If you ARE going to kill yourself please do it in a manner that does not involve your liquefied gore dripping down windows. That is a memory I’d be happy not to have.
Brian Laundrie at least had the decency to blow his head off where some other human didn’t have to scrub his brains off walls and floors or be traumatized by seeing it actually happen.
I get that someone so mentally disordered as to want to kill themself is not thinking of the agony they are about to inflict on those who find and have to clean up their mess, or what it will do to those they leave behind (or they have the mistaken notion that those they leave behind will somehow be glad to be rid of them - extremely unlikely). Their illness is prompting their actions, and they are not fully responsible for their actions.
For another analogy: I would really hate to have someone vomit on me. But I also know that someone that sick is not functioning normally and while I would hate the vomit I would not hate the person. I would do my best to get help for them.
I understand that someone suicidal is not functioning normally and while I might hate what their illness prompts them to do I do not hate the person.
That sucks and is indeed deliberately harmful
This. And I agree that this is an ultimate fuck you to the living. These are both cases of acting out by suicide. If this is your experience I understand your viewpoint. The fact remains however that these are not the majority of cases. However when it does occur it’s fucked up any way you slice it.
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.
In the case of my sister, no, there was not intention of hurting ME.
She did leave, in a three page suicide note, very detailed words on who she WAS intending to hurt with her action.
I get what you’re saying on a certain level, but to me the Venn diagram of “self-centered” and “selfish” is very nearly a circle. Self-centered people usually do selfish things. Selfish people tend to be self-centered.
I get that their mental pain is making them think mainly about themselves - they want the pain to end. That doesn’t change that their actions hurt other people.
As I have already noted, the worst suicide in my life was NOT a family member. It was a total stranger that inflicted pain on literally hundreds of other people with his actions. I am still angry at him, and always will be, for choosing the spread his pain around in that manner.
Spoilered because the I am not pulling any punches in the following. Don’t read if you’re sensitive or triggered by actual gore.
As a psychiatrist, I am assuming you understand that being on a train where everything is routine and finding yourself face-down on the floor with luggage falling on top of you (because that’s what happens when the driver hits the emergency brake) is the sort of alarming that sticks with you. Watching the liquefied remains of human being drip down a window is pretty horrible and sticks with a person. You understand that watching another person in full out screaming hysteria being sedated and carried away is horrifying. Watching (and listening) to people search for body parts tends to stick with you. Having those searchers give up and call the local fire department to simply hose the rest of the remains off the train is awful. Sitting on a train for six hours while they locate and transport a replacement driver was no fun. This was before the days of cellphones, so my parents hearing there had been an “accident” on the train and having no information about me for over six hours didn’t do them any good whatsoever.
Although I no longer have nightmares about that ride, I remember it all too vividly and always will. I remember the wheels of the train squealing. I remember the driver screaming not in physical pain but mental agony. More than anything else, I remember the blood and fluids and pieces of person splattered on the windows. Sure, that kid was mentally ill and not acting in his right mind. He also inflicted a shitload of trauma and pain on all the people on that train, although those sitting further back than the car I was in were probably spared the bloody ooze and chunky bits sliding down the windows.
My sister’s death leaves me sad. The train suicide leaves me furious and has a lot more to do with my views at this point that what my sister did.
Narrow viewpoint? Maybe. As I said, I wouldn’t attempt to counsel someone suicidal, I’d get to them to someone such as yourself who is equipped to handle that sort of problem.
Agreeing to disagree is only possible when something is (1) debatable and (2) of limited importance. I can agree to disagree about which TV show is the best. I can agree to disagree on my interpretation of a poem. I can’t agree to disagree when someone keeps on repeating things that are both false and harmful.
Most suicidal people are not selfish. They do not do things out of a self-centered nature. They not only aren’t out to harm others, but care deeply about other people. They are hurting, deeply. The pain they feel is psychological. This may be brought on by physical pain, but usually is not. They act not because they don’t care, but because they care so deeply it hurts. There’s a reason they tend to say they’re sorry—and someone being selfish is not sorry for their actions.
Yes, I will admit there are a very small few who die by suicide as way to lash out at others, due to selfish motives. But it is ridiculous to try to make them out to be the representatives for the rest of us.
I continue to not know why you keep on talking about how we should treat suicidal people. I also believe that we should try to stop most suicidal people from actually dying—just like I would any other illness. I think we should not only try to prevent the act of suicide, but also try to prevent people from getting to the point where they wish to attempt it.
But I also know that we have to stop stigmatizing mental illness, and stop painting it as some sort of moral failing. And being selfish is a moral failing. You’ve even made it clear that you believe being selfish is wrong. The thing is, someone who dies by suicide has not morally failed. They’ve nearly always lost their lives to an illness.
Yeah, I am trying to convert you to my way of thinking. Because my way of thinking aligns with the experts and harms fewer people. It would be immoral for me to not try.
I already responded uphread. I get you. And I understand your anger, especially in this case. I get the train drivers who’ve been through this, sometimes more than once, for counseling as well. They are traumatized, as were you. Still I’d argue that the lashing-out, externalizing mindset that was present in both these cases is not typical for people who struggle with suicidal thoughts. However, it might be the case that it’s a larger percentage in those attempts that turn out to be successful. At least in the Netherlands there are about 2,000 suicides per year, with about 500,000 attempts which do not end in death. And even if someone is not out to harm you per se, the fuck you/you are not enough reason to stay part is still there. I was absolutely furious when my mom made an attempt. At the same time I got why she did it and even felt relief for not having to be afraid it would happen anymore. Fortunately she lived and never tried again. This stuff is complex, nuanced and ambivalent most of the time, just like people are. And people absolutely differ in their motives. The ones you’ve encountered didn’t show much care for those around them, agreed. And caused a lot of hurt. I hope you manage to live with it.
Also agree. I tend to think of completed suicide as an accident, in many instances caused by an extreme temporary tunnel vision, be it because of depression, trauma, psychosis or the instability of self that comes with Borderline personality disorder. Still, at least here, only half of people who commit suicide are known mental health patients. This might indicate that a lot of mental illness goes undiagnosed, but research indicates that suicidality is some kind of independent value, that encompasses those who are mentally ill, but also operates on its own in a way. That’s why family history is so important, the risk for completed suicide tends to run in families, even if there is no mental health history.
If I ever start to get dementia, I will definitely take the Robin Williams approach if I have the courage. Is it selfish to want to spare my loved ones from watching me become decrepit and have to care for me?
I’d just like to say that every word of your post resonates with me, also living with chronic pain and multiple diagnoses (and some things undiagnosed). Feel free to hit me up for company/venting. It’s a help sometimes just to know that there’s someone else out there who gets it.
I disagree with this. Chronically ill and disabled people spend a tremendous amount of energy masking their symptoms, and trying to live life without imposing on others or making others uncomfortable simply by virtue of being disabled. I can’t think of a less selfish group of people.
I think the idea that someone is selfish simply by virtue of being ill is strange.
Thanks @puzzlegal. I was gonna to start a new thread this afternoon but this saved me a lot of work.
If they cared so deeply about other people WHY would they do something so supremely painful to others?
Their pain does not give them license to hurt other people.
Yes, yes, yes, - more of the notion that the only person whose pain counts and is worthy of note is the person who kills themself. With that attitude I’m not surprised that a teen suicide can generate a “cascade” - if you ignore the intense and deeply felt pain of those left behind and the only pain you pay attention to is that of the suicide is it that puzzling that other people might also choose to kill themselves, or try to, or feign and attempt, in order to have someone pay attention to THEIR pain?
Again - I don’t care how deep their pain is, it doesn’t excuse them hurting other people.
Right.
Just ignore that I find coercing people out of their beliefs to be deeply immoral and offensive. You are engaging in conduct I find morally repulsive in doing so. You are not going to change my mind on something that I have been contemplating for over 40 years now. You disregard my own personal experience. You disregard MY pain. What ever makes you think I will listen to you tell me over and over what a bad and horrible person I am because I refuse to let you indoctrinate me to your viewpoint? Do you honestly think that is the way to win people over to your viewpoint?
Maybe, maybe not. But that has been MY experience of suicides and attempted suicides. Lots of lashing-out. Lots of putting other people at risk of maiming or death while they are killing themselves.
I get WHY my sister killed herself - she suffered from severe episodes of clinical depression for nearly two decades. She died of her disease just as surely as someone with complications of diabetes can die of their disease. Funny, though - people say things like “fuck cancer” all the time these days, and people agree with them. It’s apparently OK to be angry at cancer. Angry at the mental illness that killed a loved one? You’re a horrible person. Mixed messages and double-standards all over the place.
I’ve had grief counseling, and it has helped. Thank you for your understanding.
I suspect a LOT of undiagnosed mental illness, everywhere.
Terminal illness leading to great suffering? Depends on the circumstances but I’d be totally OK with, say, a medical ethics committee making that decision.
On the other hand, there are probably better ways to off yourself than leaving your strangled body behind for a loved one to find. That’s pretty damn ugly. But not my call.
I lived 30 years with someone disabled and in chronic pain. Yes, he often masked his symptoms, but on his bad days he could be a real pain in the ass selfish dick. Being disabled does not make a person a saint, nor does being a chronic pain patient. The fact that they often are very dependent on others can force them to suppress their feelings and alter how they behave out of fear of being abandoned. They are no more or less selfish than anyone else.
I’d figure out a less messy way. Maybe nitrous oxide somehow.
I have many thoughts percolating but it may take a few posts to get them out.
I don’t like the swift selfish/unselfish dichotomy because I think mental illness is a lot more complicated than that. Maybe, possibly, my experience will be illuminating. I don’t like to go into detail about it because people who don’t understand will judge. This is very personal and difficult to talk about, but I can’t go around saying we should end the stigma against mental illness if I’m not willing to stick my neck out there.
I was in the hospital two days before my son was born, and then he had jaundice and had to be put under the billi lights, which meant he screamed nonstop. In about four days, on top of the physical trauma of childbirth, I got maybe four hours of sleep - according to my husband who was keeping track. Also my cat had to be put down the day I came home from the hospital. By the time I got home I was in a state of depression that is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. It was blisteringly close to psychosis.
For some reason I still don’t understand, I believed I was incapable of caring for a child, and that I’d made the worst mistake of my life. I believed this so fervently that I started researching safe surrender laws in my state, and was going to try to talk Sr. Weasel into surrendering our child. Of course, according to the law, it was too late. Which meant, in my view, the only alternative was suicide. It’s not even fair to say this was merely suicidal ideation. On top of the ideation I had gruesome intrusive thoughts and intense social anxiety about how much people would hate me if I had to give my child away. All I could think about, every second, was how loathsome I was and that I didn’t deserve to live. Thank God I had no thoughts of harming my child, but I felt nothing for him other than a desire to give him parents who were up to the task. As for me, I had ruined my husband’s life and therefore deserved to die. I started researching. Types of guns. Local gun stores. Where I’d do it. I seriously considered throwing myself off the Ambassador bridge, but I’m terrified of heights so I was unlikely to go through with it. And as far as intrusive thoughts go, I couldn’t stop picturing what it would do to my husband. I had intrusive thoughts of him discovering my body. I had other thoughts too, that I’m not going to talk about here. But they are worse than what I’ve shared.
In short, I was out of my fucking mind, but I was so out of my mind I had no idea how actually out of my mind I was. Suicide seemed the only valid choice. I had no capacity to consider other things, like the fact that I could learn how to take care of my child never even occurred to me. The one thing preventing me from killing myself wasn’t the newborn - I knew he’d be placed in a loving home if push came to shove - but my husband. No matter how suicidal I’ve ever gotten, I haven’t been able to stop being aware of how much my husband loves me, and even in this place. And every time I thought of doing something drastic, my love for him kept pulling me back. He needed me. He was at his breaking point, too, and I wasn’t about to abandon him to figure it out alone - but this also prevented me from seeking emergency help, or telling him how bad things were, because I didn’t want him to be all alone with the baby while I was in the psychiatric hospital. Unfortunately my love for my husband was pulling me back to a desperate hell on earth that I had no idea how to escape, but it at least kept me from killing myself.
I sat down with a notebook and wrote a story to myself, as if I were speaking from a more positive future. I wrote that things were difficult at first, but that eventually I figured it out and my decision to stick around led to more love and joy than I could possibly comprehend. That story felt like a lie at the time, but it turned out to be true. And it gave me something to think about other than all the bleak pronouncements I’d made.
I managed to articulate to my husband that things were very bad, but I couldn’t give him details. He wanted to bring people into the house to help but I was so ashamed, I refused. So he went ahead and made a unilateral decision to do it against my wishes. He brought in a post-partum doula who watched the baby for a straight night while the two of us just slept. I never even met her. But when I woke up from a full night’s rest, whatever the hell was going on before just… dissipated. It only lasted a few days. I told my husband I wasn’t breastfeeding, and everything suddenly felt possible. The following seven months were filled with the moderate everyday depression that I’m used to. It wasn’t a great time, but “great” is relative after the hell I lived through.
Now that I’m through it and looking back on it, I can’t explain what happened. I’ve heard of “baby blues” but this was on a whole other level. It’s hard for me to imagine a) that I ever thought I couldn’t take care of a child - I do it every day! and b) that there was ever a time I didn’t love him, because oh my fucking god do I love my son. It was clearly some combination of my history of severe depression coupled with the post-partum hormone dump and sleep deprivation, but holy hell. I still grieve that I wasn’t able to enjoy having a newborn.
I don’t think my suicidal ideation was selfish. Selfish would have required a level of reasoning and comprehension that I did not have. The primary driver of my suicidality was the belief that I was failing my child and he was better off without me. But there is something to be said for empathy and recognition of the impact that suicide will have, because it was my concern for my husband that kept me living. My love for him was a beacon in the blackest night.
To take an experience like that and reduce it to “is not at all selfish” or “is totally selfish” is to completely miss the point, I think. Mental illness is frequently myopic and solipsistic, and sometimes we can control that and sometimes we can’t. There are many factors, self-interested or altruistic, that may go into a person making that fatal choice. I find the extremes of both positions illustrated by @BigT and @Broomstick to be overly simplistic. I was not a helpless victim, even while I was batshit insane, I had agency, and I think we’d do better to teach people how to have agency in times of crisis. On the flip side, I wasn’t in a state of mind where I could accurately perceive reality. That was absolutely no fault of my own.
This opens into a larger conversation about what mentally ill people are and are not accountable for. I’ve wrestled with that question my entire life with regard to my mentally ill mother. Some would argue she’s too delusional to be held responsible for her own actions. And… maybe. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter, because the choices she has made still hurt, and have made it impossible for me to have a relationship with her.
So draw your conclusions as you may.
Wow.
To add something rather mundane
Not all suicide stems from a place of mental illness. I know of a few elderly people who decided they had lived their lives and it was time to exit. Some had painful medical conditions that weren’t going away. Some were just losing everything worth living for. One used a gun, one overdosed on pain meds, and one just stopped eating. I don’t think any of them was mentally ill, nor selfish. The one who used a gun could have been more considerate towards her survivors. But… none created much pain by exiting, and i think two left survivors who were grateful for the relatively painless exit.
When I had my first depressive episode in college, I hurt a lot of people. I was horribly self-centered and lashed out at people if they dared think they could understand the emotional pain I was in. As I got better and got help, it was important to me and my recovery that I recognize and take accountability for the way my actions hurt others. I had to come to terms with the fact that no one was obligated to be my friend, especially after I hurt them so. As I developed coping strategies, part of what helps me is to imagine how my death would hurt others to deter myself.
However, this is a strategy that helps me. I cannot say it’ll help others. And its not always the best strategy as it can often make me feel like an even worse person for even considering causing pain to others.
The point I am trying to get at is that, for some people, it helps them to think of suicide as a black and white thing. But the reality is that it is horribly gray.
Thank you for that post, Spice_Weasel. It can’t be easy to share, but it’s so helpful to the rest of us. I’m glad you pulled through that time.
Thank you for sharing that very personal story.
I’m glad you found a way out of that darkness.
My own mother was hospitalized after my birth due to what would now be called post-partum depression, or maybe even psychosis, after an actual suicide attempt. I’m glad it didn’t that as bad as that for you. Which is not intended to diminish in any way the pain you went through, which was terrible.
I’m not going to say anything more at this time (and possibly not ever) because that’s the sort of thing that calls for a thoughtful response, not an immediate one.
FWIW, I think your position underscores the fact that we need to be real with depressed people about the impact suicide has on their loved ones (at a minimum.) To not be forthright about this hard truth runs the risk of infantilizing us. I’m not convinced “suicide is selfish” is really a helpful framework, but you’re still hitting on something that is missing in a lot of discourse about suicide.