I used to believe that. Or rather, I used to think that was meaningful. If everyone’s selfish then the idea of selfishness as a character flaw really has no meaning. But we make distinctions between different actions based on how selfish they are. A woman takes a day off from childrearing to go to the spa? Most of us would say you need to be a little selfish once in a while. A man rescues his laptop from a burning building before his child? He’s scum. It can’t be as simple as ‘‘everyone’s selfish.’’
At any rate, whether it’s selfish to off yourself or not at the height of despair, I still believe it can be a rational decision even if you are chronically depressed, especially if you’ve exhausted your clinical resources and still continue to suffer. While I am not currently in danger of killing myself, I think that sometimes maybe it really is the best option.
It’s “selfish” in that you’re incapable of seeing anything beyond your own pain. That’s the only way I can think of it as “selfish”. You’re unable to be anything but, but it’s not a “bad” kind of selfishness, if that makes sense.
But let’s not forget – often people who are suicidal feel that their loved ones will be better off without them.
I’ve known several planned suicide attempts where the alcohol was part of the plan to get the balls to do it. One woman I was in the hospital with had an elaborate plan where she checked into a hotel, even brought comfort items from home, went over to CVS and bought liquor, numbing cream, and razorblades, and proceeded to go about her planned suicide. Someone intervened, quite by accident, and found her in a large pool of blood and close to death. I didn’t get a feeling that she was mentally ill in an irrational sense, quite the opposite, in fact, but she certainly had lifelong depression.
I remember her saying she felt like god saved her for a reason or someshit, so she may have been more irrational than she seemed. If so, a lot of folks share that delusion.
Well, doing it where his son and grandson would find him was shitty. I’d be really concerned about scarring my loved ones for life that way, but HST wasn’t exactly respectful in that regard.
About the only scenario I can think off where an able-bodied (IE, not in intense pain) person killing themselves is NOT the sign of mental illness is if a captured spy kills himself to avoid spilling state secrets.
The world is sincerely fucked-up for many people. I can understand wanting to opt out of it entirely.
Lost job. Can’t find another job because of over-/under-qualification, or because there are just fewer jobs. Unemployment ran out. Savings ran out. Can’t get welfare because too young. Not disabled so can’t collect disability. Don’t have kids so can’t collect money for them. Can’t get healthcare except at the emergency room. Can’t make house payments. End up homeless. End up schlubbing with friends and family, or out on the street. And, well, I don’t think it’s irrational to prefer death by free will to involuntary homelessness or prison.
Here I just wanted to add this quote (not as an argument) from some anonymous person on internet:
"We are hurtling through space on a cold rock in a massively empty universe. Every moment of life is a victory against the vacuum. Try to stay on task people. Every second you don’t give up you make things better for yourself and for your fellow life forms."
There can also be discussion on just what you define as “suicide”. If a soldier runs through a hail of bullets to save his buddy and then dies a hero, is that a “suicide”? Is the so-called “suicide bomber” a suicide or a martyr/hero? (n.b.: I think it was George W. Bush who argued that such should be called a “murderer bomber” instead.) If you off yourself due to severe intolerable pain or debility, is it still a suicide? The OP may have defined his own terms for this discussion – he listed a variety of reasons for self-death to be excluded.
So maybe so – suicide must ALWAYS be the result of mental illness, once you have excluded from discussion all the cases you can think of where it isn’t.
To answer the subject line “is it always indicative”, no, of course it isn’t. It isn’t even always a colossally selfish move. Think of The terminally-ill cancer patient. The person facing a debilitating and progressive disease. Refusing additional treatment might be seen as a passive form of suicide, let alone a more active “gimme an overdose” sort. Such a choice might well be made to spare the patient’s family the cost of additional support and/or the anguish of seeing their loved one shrivel and suffer.
Someone in an awful financial situation, but who happened to have decent life insurance (established far enough in advance that the anti-suicide clauses don’t apply), might decide that’s the best way to provide for their family. Admittedly, in that one the family is left in pain but arguably better off (in some days) than living in extreme poverty.
Someone in an untenable situation with no hope of it getting better; I recently read a series of young-adult novels set in a situation where there was truly no hope of things ever being even survivable again - all I could think was “the only rational choice is to just end it now”.
Anyway - there are lots of situations where I can see suicide as the “best” of a number of truly horrible alternatives.
Of course, these are, I suspect, the minority of such suicides; an analysis would most likely point to at least depression in a large percentage.