My brother’s friends killed himself this weekend. Posted some melancholy lyrics on Facebook, then went and threw himself under a train.
He’d separated from his wife, and the lyrics he posted suggest that was the reason he took his own life.
I feel very sorry for him. My heart breaks to think of the pain he must have been in. But he relieved himself of that pain by sharing it out among so many other people. His 30 year old widow, his two sons aged under 8, his parents. The train driver he turned into a killer. His friends.
I don’t think selfish is the right word, but to suicide is to transfer your unbearable emotional pain on to the people who love you.
My older brother was severely depressed. When his meds worked, he was rational. When he was off his meds, or when they stopped working, he was irrational. One day, they stopped working, with fatal results. I don’t think he had a choice in the matter.
I totally agree with you. By definition, selfish means " lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure." If someone commits suicide it is all about them and therefore selfish. That doesn’t make them a bad person it just means that their pain brought introspection where no one else mattered other than the relief from mental agony.
Of course it is selfish. I think the reason people are hesitant to call it selfish is they don’t want to blame the victim. But let’s face facts here: taking an action to stop the pain that your-SELF is feeling is a selfish act. Add to that the grief you cause others and it’s even more selfish.
Selfish acts are not necessarily wrong. Is it selfish to take a higher paying job, even if it means relocating and slightly longer hours? Is it selfish to buy a car for yourself that is slightly nicer than basic transportation, instead of buying the cheapest car on the market and donating the rest to charity? Is it selfish to go to Starbucks? Yes yes and yes. We make choices every day balancing out our own utility/enjoyment vs. others. Often we value our own results over others.
Suicide is like a POW who is being tortured and they eventually spill the national secrets. Is it a selfish act? Yes. Morally wrong? I guess that’s debatable, but I think everyone has a point where they will break and give in to the “selfishness”.
Isn’t it more selfish to resent the person whose pain caused them to take their life, thus viewing the act primarily on the basis of how it affects you?
I find it interesting that according to the early results, nearly all responders who have lost someone to suicide do NOT consider it a selfish act, whereas 25% of those who haven’t ever lost anyone that way believe it’s selfish. The phrase “you can’t know what it’s like until you’ve been there” comes to mind.
If we use an extreme example, a spy who swallows a cyanide pill in the face of imminent capture (to avoid giving away information under torture or drugs) has just done one of the most *selfless *things imaginable.
I suppose I can understand how someone decides to take things in their own hands if they’re suffering. I’m far from convinced that depression qualifies here, but I guess I don’t really know what I’m talking about in that regard.
The thing is, most suicide attempts are not well-considered. They happen on the spur of the moment. Most people who survive an attempt are later happy that they’re still alive. So I’m not just angry at my friend who killed himself, I also want to be 100% clear in the message to potential suicidees: don’t do it. It’s not ok. And yes, it’s selfish. The people who love you don’t want you to do it. And I’m not even talking about the trauma caused to innocent bystanders.
Leukemia might not be the best metaphor. But seeing it as similar to heart disease or Type II diabetes seems apt to me.
This expands the definition of selfishness beyond all reason. It would make taking an aspirin to relieve a headache a selfish act.
I believe if someone has lived a life in which they treated others with kindness and compassion, if they no longer wish to continue living that life, that should absolutely be their prerogative and should not be a black mark against them. They have given up their own life, which is more valuable to them then it is to anyone else.
Oh, I think it has plenty of bearing on the discussion.
There is a form of suicide that I’d view as unequivocally selfish - jumping out the window of a tall building and landing on a passerby, or deliberately crashing head-on into someone driving another car (it’s thought that this may have represented the ultimate in suicidal selfishness).
I’ve lost a few people to suicide, though none of them were extremely close at the time. I don’t consider any of it selfish, just very sad. They were good people who deserved better out of life than to struggle so much with their pain.
I don’t see any benefit in labeling it as anything other than a reaction to extreme pain. Calling suicide “selfish” only makes it less likely people will seek help. Taking someone who is already struggling and belittling their pain and suffering can only lessen their self-respect and self-esteem.
A good family friend killed himself with a shotgun at the family home. His daughter found him. Yes, I’m mad. He had family still to raise. He killed himself in a (to be blunt) messy way, at home, and his kid found him. She always wondered why she wasn’t good enough for her dad to stick around for, and she had to deal with seeing him on top of that. My dad (close friend) wrestled with why he didn’t see it, and so on, and so on.
And I have to wonder if he had gotten help if he would still be here.
On the other hand, situational again, I live with chronic pain, and there are times when I just want it to stop. It just gnaws on you. For me, at least so far, my kids and family have held me back. I won’t do that to them.
So I understand the impulse, and I won’t judge someone like Robin Williams, whom I believe had a long struggle with depression, harshly. The way this poll was constructed though, I picked option 1.
Actually, I was thinking of my first husband when I wrote that, but I grew up with an alcoholic father who was depressed (he was almost certainly bipolar, though undiagnosed). And one of my brothers struggles with intense depression at times. And I think all of my father’s brothers are alcoholics with a number of them diagnosed with depression or bipolar disorder. No quick suicides among them, but a ton of slow ones. And it always spills over to everyone around them.
I went through severe depression when I was a young man, so I’ve been there and done that, yes-almost threw myself off of my parents’ 9th floor balcony a few times. But there are apparently several different types of depression out there-you could call mine “existential depression” if you wish, and that is pretty much what it was. Nothing in my life was working, I loathed myself, and it seemed like I was the cruel plaything of fate-I had broken up with the girl that I loved, had dropped out of college, and had no direction, no hope for anything, no nothing, or so it seemed. I had managed to crawl a bit out of my hole by my late twenties, and then something happened that completely turned my life around.
Had I offed myself, I would have missed out on so much amazing things that yes my younger self simply would never have believed it if I were to go back in time and try to tell him all about it. In particular I would have missed out on touching all of the lives that I have reached as a teacher. Part of it boils down to a simple change in perspective, where I can derive pleasure from the simplest things, part of it is something closely akin to Grace-all I know is that I somehow killed my depression for good. My point can best be made by JRR Tolkien: “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” I’d say this applies double to one’s own self.
Perhaps selfish is the wrong word. But these people are living very blinkered lives, where they indeed cannot see any of these other ends even if you were to try to point them out to them. You simply cannot know how the future might unfold, how your life could possibly be utterly transformed in an instant, unless you were to stick it out.