Killing oneself is a fundamental human right. It’s the one thing no one can take away.
Given that most of us are terrified of death, it’s strange the living call suicides cowards. But it doesn’t matter; the dead are immune to name-calling.
I would like to clarify my position on suicide. While I would never commit suicide and would never want anyone to commit suicide, people will (probably as long as there are people living) commit suicide. That said, the mere fact that any person actually commited (or commits) suicide is profound.
That any person could possibly commit suicide is even more profound. In a world where it is physically impossible to commit suicide, I would want to commit suicide. So I am left with a paradox: I would never commit suicide yet if I couldn’t physically commit suicide I would want to commit suicide.
I am far too new here to make any impact by telling my own story but this thread caused me to register so I could point out what I consider (as one who has been there many times) the most sensible approach to suicide I have ever come across. Written to the suicidal I really think it is wonderful in helping understanding, both for those thinking of it and those reeling in its wake
It’s much easier to deny and ignore wasting away. You can’t delude yourself about a suicide. You see a lot of the people that feel angry at suicides seem to implicitly believe that the person should’ve stayed alive despite the suffering because their (the angry, surviving person) lives were happier when the person was alive and suffering and they could mostly ignore it.
What a fascinating thread.
My 2 cents…
Suicide is not selfish.
Rather, the act of continuing to live despite severe debilitating depression is the most selfless act I can fathom.
That is a good link, and welcome.
Vinyl Turnip I see. I am against abortion for myself, and never considered it a valid option should I have gotten any of the girls I had sex with knocked up, I contemplated it at times when I had a fright of such a thing happening when I knew it wasn’t with the right girl. When my wife got pregnant, the question of ‘should we keep it’ came up immediately, and I thought of it for all of 15 seconds watching my whole life hinge on what I said in those following moments. I have the most darling baby girl I could ever ask for. Does it make me a hypocrite that even though I find abortion to be revolting I still respect a woman’s right to choose?
This is the same sort of issue. I chose not to kill myself. That does not mean I don’t respect the choice to do so, of the person that did so. I exercised my personal sovereignty by NOT killing myself. They exercised it by killing themselves. How am I a hypocrite? In both instances my opinion on personal sovereignty is uniform, as it is with the woman’s right to choose as I stated above.
SenorBeef Precisely, that is the problem, most people have no power over another person’s depression, as much as we would like to be able to say something that would help them feel better. It’s amazing the amount of disrespect that gets heaped upon the depressed person during life. “Oh you’re a loser, get a job, stop whining, just get your shit together.”, and when that doesn’t happen, the person feels absolved and walks away satisfied that the depressed person is just being willful and ignoring their good advice. They don’t understand it for the willlessness that it is.
However,
In the act of suicide there is one last act of supreme will, an irrevocable decision that shakes the foundations of the entire universe, at least for the person making the decision. It’s sort of a paradox. I think this is why they say that often suicide happens when you are rebounding from depression, as opposed to when you are deep in it. When you are deep in it, it is hard to muster the will to kill yourself. It is when you muster up some will, but are still deeply depressed that it occurs.
This brings me back to:
VinylTurnip If someone truly does not want to live and cannot find any reason to go on, then they have completed their stint here, they have nothing more to live for in their estimation, and it is time to exit stage left. I do not think there is any shame in that. Sometimes it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem, and sometimes it’s an existential decision come to with much forethought and contemplation. The continuance of life is not the end all and be all goal. It has no value in and of itself. It is what fills that life that gives it value. An empty life is like a shopping cart with no groceries, purposeless. You and I cannot fill another person’s life with purpose. You make it sound as though my opinion has a bearing on the choices that another individual makes. If anyone reading this cares about my opinion, and is contemplating suicide then the only thing I am telling them is I will not judge them harshly if they do. There is at least one other person posting in this thread with whom we had a mutual friend who committed suicide. As far as I know, I actually spoke to him while he was in the process of doing it. I knew he was engaging in risky behavior and tried to talk him out of it, he said that he knew what he was doing. It wasn’t until I found out that he was actually dead, and talking to mutual friends that I realized he knew exactly what he was doing, and the purpose of continued life that I tried to talk him into was not his intention. I did not then feel used, I didn’t really feel that he was a coward either, at least not more than social conditioning told me that this is what I was supposed to feel. I think this guy had more impact on me than I had ever realized at the time, but when he ended it, he ended it. That was all.