Not someone I knew particularly well, but a suicide is just a statistic when you don’t have a face to associate with it.
My GF has several horses, one of which is rather popular locally (several hundred kids that I can actually account for), and has happens sometimes, occasionally a kid gets interested and asks to come out and ride outside of “special events.”
One little girl that has been coming out to ride several times a year for the past two years recently lost her father a month ago. A suicide. Of course, you never know what’s going on in peoples’ heads, and the times I saw him, when he was picking up or dropping off his daughter (a fourth-grader this fall), you’d never have suspected that he was depressed or otherwise troubled.
I’m also not a psychologist or psychiatrist, or anyone with any kind of knowledge of human behavior, so I can’t fathom what can make a person so depressed that they decide to check out, knowing that he would be depriving two people (wife and daughter) of someone that really needed him. Again, you never know what goes on inside peoples’ heads.
Up until now, though, whenever I read about a suicide, I never considered the people that they left behind–the “victims of suicide.” They are all to often forgotten. I saw her this evening, though, and she seems to be holding up pretty well. But it’s still something that shouldn’t have happened.
And, the chilling thought is that as bad as it was—it could have been worse.
There were four male cousins on my mom’s side of the family, including me. As of last May, two of them committed suicide, both by single .22 to the head. Those left behind are left clueless. Luckily, they left no children behind to question their actions. At a low point in my life, the thought crossed my mind, but the thought of my two children snapped my out of it in a nano-second.
The elder brother of an acquaintance of mine hung himself about six years ago. I can’t remember who found him - it was either his sister or younger brother who walked in the front door and saw him … just hanging there. A friend of mine was best friends with his sister, and everybody in their family was absolutely devastated. He seemed to have the perfect life - he was an attractive teenager who came from a loving upper middle class family. He had good grades, loads of friends, and his whole life ahead of him. I guess you never know.
I was married once. In the very early 70’s I got a call from the Highway Patrol to come to the Benicia police station to identify the contents of a purse. It was hers. Witnesses said she jammed on her brakes in the middle of the bridge, jumped out and without hesitation climbed over the rail and leaped two hundred and some feet to the water below.
They never found her body, leaving that tiny possibility that she was alive somewhere. True, we were separated at the time, but that was her idea, not mine.
I seriously tried suicide twice after that, once with seconal, once with carbon monoxide. I shouldn’t be here.
It took me ten years to get over it, or at least as much as you ever do.
My first suicide attempt was over 2 decades ago. About 10 years ago, I became close to catatonic from depression because my body refused to die, even though my soul very badly wanted to. I can tell you what I was thinking when I was at the point of suicide.
What I was thinking was that my life was a burden to those I loved, that they would be better off without me. I was broken, damaged, shattered, and I could never be fixed. I didn’t have the strength or the will to keep fighting, and I could not survive. To those of you who’ve loved those who’ve committed suicide, let me re-emphasize something. I did not want to hurt those I loved; I wanted to spare them the burden of my existence. In my twisted reasoning, I thought they would be better off without me.
In the early days of my recovery, I wondered why I’d been spared, why I hadn’t been allowed to die. I am much better now, having gotten treatment, etc. I also make no secret of my experiences with clinical depression, in the hope that they might somehow help someone. My heart goes out to all of you, and especiallly to that little girl. I hope people continue to tell her it’s not her fault, and I’ll hold her and her family in my prayers.
To build a little on what cjhoworth said, let me add that anyone considering suicide owes it to him or herself to seek treatment.
At the nadir of my own depression a little over a year ago, I found myself contemplating the big sleep. I actually attempted suicide once before (in the fourth grade yet), and so I knew I had it in me. This time around, I saw it for what it was: the One Big Undeniable Symptom of Depression. I am happy to say that I sought treatment and today am doing much better.
I don’t want to sound too much like a public service announcement, but if you are considering taking your own life, consider this first: if things really are that bad, then therapy won’t help. But if they aren’t (and you’ll just have to trust me that they probably aren’t), won’t you be glad you found out before it was too late?
Suicide means never being able to say you’re sorry.
I’m quite fortunate in that I’ve never gotten up the bravado to actually commit suicide.
I remember one day, for no apparent reason, I was abruptly assailed with thoughts of suicide. I got in the metro and thought of throwing myself on the tracks; I got out of the metro and thought of hanging myself from a sculpture in the station; I walked home and thought of letting myself get hit by a car; I got home and thought of cutting my wrists or taking an overdose. And the freaky thing was, I wasn’t sad, under stress, or under the influence - just suddenly, and crushingly, DEPRESSED.
I managed to get through the suicide thing by calling a hotline, but it freaked me out no end and I’m very grateful that nothing like that has happened since. Sometimes there IS no reason.
My sister killed herself ten years ago. Small caliber bullet to the brain. She was the one that got me into demonalotry. She left no note but I know it was because she heard the calling and was to be with the grand darkness.
My mother would attempt to commit suicide every few years. If you believe in the westernized (bastardized) Voodoo Dolls then my sister and I probably had something to do with her chronic depression.
I’ve known about a dozen suicides over the years, from kids I grew up with to friends of my parents. The most recent was a neighbor girl 3 weeks ago that was upset over a break-up. When her parents take walks past our house now, their eyes are just lifeless, their shoulders slumped.
I know there are different reasons for people committing suicide but I’ve yet to see a surviving family or friend that actually benefitted from the event. With kids it’s even worse. Not only would the pain have passed soon enough, they’ve no idea of the absolute finality of their action.
Moderator’s Notes:A Demon Plaything, I’m not sure I’ve seen a URL posted here that was in more poor taste than yours, which, as you see, I’ve deleted. Don’t ever post anything like that again, or chances are, it’ll be your last post here.
In high school, I had four close friends. We ate lunch together, had sleepovers and hung out at each others’ houses all the time. We were tight, you know?
Right after our sophomore year ended, on Father’s Day, one of my friends ODed. She took a few of every pill in the medicine cabinet, except her stepmother’s thyroid medication, which she knew her stepmom needed. Apparently, some of the pills cancelled each other out, because she survived. I went to see her in the hospital the next day. It was totally surreal. She acted like nothing had happened, like everything was perfectly fine. The hospital released her, and she slit her wrists a week later. She spent the rest of the summer in a mental hospital. She was released the week before school started, and her parents took her on a weekend trip to Las Vegas. She told me later, sitting in the bathroom of the hotel, she wanted to try again, but the thought of her friends and family - all the people who loved her - stayed her.
A year later, she transferred to another school and refused to talk to any of us again. I have always believed that she wanted to forget about that difficult time in her life, and we were reminders. Rationalizing her reasons doesn’t make the rejection go away, though.
Here’s a tragic story: the younger brother of a girl I knew slightly shot himself in the head shortly before he was due to start eighth grade. He was thirteen. I hated hated hated my life when I was that age, but to end it? Oh, it makes me so sad.
In the mid-90’s, I worked on a project with a bunch of other high priced contractors (read: lots of big egos). A few I didn’t get along with, a few I did, and a few I became friends with. One guy was pretty quirky, but we become pretty good friends. We had fairly similar tastes in music, food, beer (you know, the important things in life :)). I had even had the good taste to give one of my children the same name as his.
After the project was over, we went on to other companies, but still kept in touch. One day, I casually mentioned to a mutual friend of ours that I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of months. I was then treated to the gory details of how he had driven “up north” (to Sudbury, for those of you who know where that is), checked into a motel, drunk a bottle of vodka, and then shot himself in the face. I was flabbergasted.
I’ve thoght about suicide when when I was in high school. I was the unpouplar one, harrassed and made fund of. What stopped me then was the idea that if I killed myself my family would be hurt, my few friends would be hurt, and the ones making my life misreble would have won. There are times now I find myself thinking about suicide but I would never commit it. I want to see how my life turns out, not end it too soon, One way I thought of doing it is taking a large plywood board, hammering nails through it and put it between me an the steeringwheel (pointy side towards me) then drive into a fixed object at a high rate of speed causing my airbag to push the spiked board into me. Again I WOULD NEVER DO THIS IN REALITY so no need to contact my ISP or local mental health center.
Add me to the “tried to off himself” list. I tried by hanging, slitting my wrists, almost every way I could. Eventually I got on some medications that helped me out a lot. I’m a lot happier now. I feel for everyone whose posted so far.
Uncle Beer, the link was funny ways to commit suicide. However, if you bothered to look at the rest of the site it was dedicated to suicide prevention.
The father of one of my best friends killed himself about 10 years ago. Shotgun to the head, it took months to clean out the car. I’m told that the town of Poughkeepsie practically shut down for the funeral – he was a reasonably important exec at the IBM plant there.
For the most part, the family went right on with their lives. His wife was the one who had to make the biggest changes, but she never seemed to fit the profile of “devastated survivor.” There was some friction with the deceased’s mother, who felt the family should have seen it coming and prevented it, but that’s all healed over now.
