So, killing yourself is preferable to making friends? Going on a dating site? How do you know the SO of your dreams wouldn’t show up the day after you did it?
Someone who tried again and again and fails is either amazingly incompetent or someone who really, really doesn’t want to do it. It isn’t that hard if you want to.
I’m struck by the story of the person who was rescued on the bridge. The rail was too high to jump on the side he was on, and he didn’t want to cross the road because it was too dangerous. Doesn’t that tell you something about his mental state?
I think it’s good to try to help suicidal people who are depressed or suffering from some other mental disorder. A major reason why I think this is because most (non-terminal illness) suicidal people don’t attempt suicide “time and time again” like you stated.
A recent thread about guns and suicide quoted this article, which indicates that most people who unsuccessfully attempt suicide never attempt it again, and many suicides are fairly impulsive acts (and if they don’t immediately act on it, they’re not likely to do so in the future). To me, this seems like a good indication that if you offer help to a suicidal person then the odds are great that they will appreciate it in the long run.
Well, I think I agree with you in substance; if anything IMNAAHO you don’t take it far enough.
My position is this: every man and every woman has the right to live his or her own life, and to end it, if , as, and when they will. All the sanctions against a person’s choosing to end his or her own existence (assuming there’s no outside coercion involved) are basically illegitimate ande come from an idea that the individual’s life belongs to other people or outside authority more than to whoever is living that life.
Basically because there are those who would instead of living their own lives would rather interfere in the way others do theirs, and claim the right to control others’ actions.
For a lot of reasons; some are understandable, but none are really valid. The survivors’ affection for the would-be suicide outweighs in their minds the person’s right to his/her own life or death; that and the natural desire to avoid grieving and missing the person after his or her demise, combined with authoritarian tendencies, make them think they have a superior claim over someone else’s existence or nonexistence that should be enforceable. Also they have just generally gone along with the notion that outside authority should have more of a say in the issue than the individual involved does, and taht ther’s something more important than our ownership of our existence. The tenderness and sadness are understandable and justifiable, but the authoritarian presumptions are not.
Because they can, and because they consider their will to be more important than that of whoever they exert it on, so they’ve put themselves in a position of authority to coerce and control other people.
Just so, as far as it goes. The choice should not be limited to those who are physically ill, though. Only the individual living a life truly knows whether or not that life is bearable or worth living and the choice is only theirs to make. This is important enough that it includes those who would end their lives for what might seem to us, or actually be, the stupidest of reasons. Given their freedom, there will always be some people who are going to f*ck it up, but protecting them from that is not a valid reason to deprive me, and you, and anyone else of the option.
What might become of those who will go on is something anyone who is thinking of ending his or her existence should definitely think long and hard and well about; however, in the final analysis the opinions and reactions of outsiders are in a very real sense irrelevant, and should not be valued by the wider world over the individual’s right to live and die by their own will. That life doesn’t belong to anyone except the person living it, and to claim preemptive rights over another’s life is the most grossly unfair and selfish of impositions.
Because they loved you and wanted you to stick around, maybe? If someone close to me was expressing the desire to suicide, I would express my own objections quite strongly. However I felt about it, though, the final decision would be theirs to make and I wouldn’t feel justified in actually interfering; I’d be grief stricken and probably furious, oh yes indeed I would, but that would be mine to deal with.
Strong words. It would appear that whatever was going on with you was worked out somehow though, and I’m glad for you – at least your continued existence has enabled me to discuss this interesting philosophical question with you tonight!
… … … [edited to arrive at the points I wished to address]
Personally I don’t think you’re at all ignorant, or really needed to be set straight, indeed you’re on the right path wrt the question. However, I’m certain there are many on this board who’ll disagree.
My argument is an emotional one, but I don’t know how else to handle this subject.
Almost exactly one year ago, I posted this:
Apparently I never elaborated on it, but it was my fervent belief that if someone wants to kill himself, he damn well has the right to end his own suffering, and no one ought to stand in his way. I said it from a place of resentment at all the times I have been held back from taking my own life out of consideration for the feelings of other people.
I have come very close to killing myself twice. The first time I was 15, had about 30 pills lined up on the kitchen table ready to go, when I got a phone call from my favorite person on the planet (my Aunt), who to this day has no idea what I was doing and that she saved my life.
The second time, I was 20 and nearly hung myself with a bedsheet in my dorm room. I couldn’t stop obsessing over it, and came so close to actually doing it that I scared the shit out of myself. I saved my own life by going in for an emergency therapy session and wound up (rather unexpectedly) in the hospital. I didn’t realize I was that sick until I was there, but fortunately my therapist did. I was in a state of perpetual panic, sobbing hysterically even in public, crying the way you would if you believed you were going to die and you didn’t want to. It’s bizarre, but I didn’t see that I had control over whether I killed myself or not. I was a danger to myself and I didn’t want to be.
So the simplest answer to why we try to stop people who are threatening suicide, is because we know about their plight, and if they really wanted to die, we wouldn’t know at all.
Actually, not a single person in my family knows I almost killed myself when I was 15, and I STILL didn’t really want to die. All it took was that phone call for me to realize there were things worth living for. That is how fleeting the suicidal impulse is, and one of the reasons it is so tragic.
At any rate, one year ago today I would have been firmly in your camp, fighting for the individual’s right to do with their life as they see fit. My feelings for loved ones touched by suicide/depression were at best stoic and at worst bitter, all of my sympathy being as it were for the person who was depressed and in pain.
Three months ago, my 30 year old uncle killed himself. Completely out of the blue, left behind two children aged 9 and 5, one of which could not be supported by his mother. My grandparents now have full custody of the 9 year old, my 70 year old grandfather and my physically disabled grandmother are now raising a child. What my uncle did was make an impulsive split-second decision in the midst of a life where he had actually been regaining some joy and meaning. Things were getting better. He was in love, and he left a very stunned girlfriend behind just hours after having a fight with her.
The week following I can only describe as pure hell. Nobody deserves to suffer like this, least of all my grandmother who I’m sure will eventually be canonized for her sainthood, least of all his bright and beautiful children, the little boy who, when told his father was dead, insisted everyone was just trying to play a trick on him. I was there that week, going through the things in his bedroom, and I found some of his journals. They were dark, hopeless, violent, lost… like I had been. Why I never made the connection between his depression and mine, I don’t know. I was angry with him. He wasn’t an easy person to like.
So now, on the other side of the equation, having a piece of my life missing that is never going to come back, having no chance at redemption, wanting at least to say to him, ‘‘I’m sorry I was too wrapped up in my own shit to see how you were hurting,’’ to at least give him a hug, something to ease his pain, given all that, you know how I feel now, about suicide?
Shame. Shame for every second I even considered it.
This was true in Catholicism in the past but no longer:
<<Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.
2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.>>
For some happy percentage of the human race, the desire to live is an effortless assumption. For the remainder it’s a difficult conclusion, at which some never arrive.
I like Tolstoy’s idea that man was made for happiness, but this world is not made to provide it. So instead of actual, ellusive happiness what we really need is a belief in the possibility of it.
IIRC (but no cite) everyone has his or her own baseline of contentment, to which he or she returns after any experience good of bad. If that baseline is too low, a major trauma or the eventual wear & tear of time can trigger self-destruction. Rights and wrongs and comparing my ups & downs to yours have nothing to do with it.
Quitters.
I do see how in theory people should have the right to end their own lives. But ending your life because of something curable? Not a good thing.
So, you don’t understand. Let me try this approach, not that it will do any good, but I like beating myself in the head with a blunt instrument anyway.
Let’s suppose growing up you had a close friend of the family. You spent a lot of time with them throughout your formitive years, and valued your relationship. However, through normal occurances, the time you spent together dwindled as time passed due to other obligations until it dawned on you that you hadn’t seen them for years.
Now you find out they are dying, and you visit them on their deathbed, and keep apologizing for not spending more time with them. You’re inconsolable and destraught for weeks after their death, wishing you could go back in time and change things.
Now, let’s replace the incurable illness with suicide.
Still think that there aren’t people who care about you? Still feel suicide doesn’t bother or affect you?
It’s all a matter of perception.
I have been sitting here for probably the last 15 minutes deciding if this was something I wanted to write. This reply. Because once you write something on the internet, it never goes away. Though I think by sharing some past personal experiance it may clear up or some how maybe help you understand why I have the thoughts and views that I do.
When I was 17 I planned out every last detail of my death. Everything around me sucked and as much as I tried to raise myself above the negative atmosphere I was living, it felt like I was in quick sand. The fighting to be happy was causing more problems then soultions. As I have discuessed in previous threads, home life wasn’t the greatest. My father was an over controlling prick that when he was wasn’t constnatly yelling at me, talking down to me or putting his hands on me, he was underminding me by saying that it was okay to be slow. That I was so much like him that he felt bad. Mind games.
It wasn’t a split second decsion. It wasn’t in the heat of the moment. I sat on the floor and thought it out and came to the conclustion that I wanted a “do over”. While sitting on my bedroom floor, I wrote out many letters. When I was done, I took a laundry basket down stairs to the laundry room. It is in that room that my father would get his uniform together for work. Once I got down there, his service gun was out of his holster. A glock. I took it, hid it with in the clothes and walked back upstairs. Not only was I finally taking complete control of my life, but what better way to piss him off most then to use the gun he has to carry every day.
I remember walking through the living room with the laundry basket in hand, his service gun hidden within the close… he looked at me and said, “Get the fuck out of the way.” and I remember thinking, “I won’t be in your way much longer…”
I sat on my bedroom floor, took the gun out and I wasn’t scared. I was actually pretty calm and happy because I made this choice. Then the phone rang. Damn phone. It was my cousin and well he isn’t stupid. I had been upset for a while and all of a sudden I am happy? He called his mother, who in turn called my mother… who then called my father who came into my room.
What happened afterwards was worse. Screaming. Yelling. Crying. I got really pissed. Why care about me now? Everyone in the room constantly degrades me. Constantly be littles me. They care now? Why? I was very upset with my cousin and still don’t really trust him. I don’t feel he did it for me, I felt he did it for himself. So that he would have a clear concousis. I believe it had nothing to do with me and it was completely selfish on his part.
I still strongly believe that it was and still is my life. I should and will do what I want with it. Whether it be traveling accross the country, moving out of state or taking my own life. It is my life and my choice what to do with it. I don’t believe that anyone has the right to stop me from doing whatever I want to do with it. Am I depressed? I don’t think I am, though I am taking an anti-depressant. Maybe I am not depressed because I am on the anti-depressant, though that doesn’t stop me from thinking about suicide from time to time.
I talk frequently about this to my BFF and a few time with my family. That while some people think about their favorite hobbies daily or weekly, I think about suicide. From time to time I will catch myself thinking, “Well that would be another way…” then I laugh at a joke in the next breath. Does that make me insane or mentally unstable? I don’t think so.
I just really don’t understand the rush to save people that what to make that ultimate decsion. I don’t understand calling out all the troops to save a person that is very intent on ending their lives.
olivesmarch4th. Reading your reply made me really stop and think. It even made me even second guess my postion on the topic because your words are truly heavy hearted. I want you to know that. You are a strong person and maybe some day I might come out to the same place you are. Though today I still see a problem with people trying to get invloved in something that I believe has nothing to do with them.
I wouldn’t leave people in the dark. All questions would be answered. It would be made very clear why.
ETA - I forgot to spell check. :smack: Sorry.
Completely different. In your example (that I noitce you used a profound moment in my life) she died of old age. Many, many years were wasted by her friends feeling they had better things to do and when her body gave out, many people took notice of what she actually meant to them. Sure there was lost there, but on her friends for being completely and utterly selfish. She left this world on her own terms. She decided to live it out until her body gave out.
If someone commited suicide and their friends (like in your example) felt a profound lost, wouldn’t that be on them?
Like that moment in my life, I learned a lot myself and to tell people how I feel about them before it is to late. To not take a moment for granted with them. I think that should be true of everyone because life is to short no matter in what way or form you die.
I used something that I assumed you could relate to. I also asked you to replace “dying of old age” with “suicide” and then re-read it using that context.
This. your family and friends would do this if you committed suicide, but they would have no recourse, no last minute conversations.
Anyway. This discussion is as much fun as sticking my hand in a running blender full of lemon juice. There will never be an understanding between either viewpoint of this situation - but thanks for the discussion nonetheless.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
BrknButterfly, have you talked to your psychiatrist about your thoughts of suicide? This happens in enough people that it has a name: “suicidal ideation”. In most cases it does not lead to an actual suicide attempt, but your previous attempt might be a significant risk factor. It’s certainly something you ought to at least mention to your doctor. Also, it may be a sign that your antidepressant is not the best choice for you, or that it has started to lose its effectiveness. It’s not that you insane or mentally unstable, it’s just that depression can sometimes color your perceptions in ways that you’re not necessarily aware of.
Have you talked to a counselor about your anger toward your father? Being able to express those feelings in a safe environment can be a very positive, burden-lightening experience.
It’s absolutely your choice how you want to live your life, and suicidal ideation might be just a part of who you are. But it might not be, and discussing it with your doctor can help you be fully informed about whether it’s something that you might want to consider addressing.
Again. Don’t put something off for tomorrow that can be done today. Same could be true if someone died in a car accident. Suicide is just another form of death. If family and friends were upset because they didn’t get that “one last talk”… well then call up your friend today. Do something with them today.
I’m sorry you feel like this… it’s nothing more then a discussion. I hope you aren’t reading more into this then you should. It’s a debate. Pros and cons of it. Just different views, tis all.
While I appreciate your concern, … I am fine. The past attempt was more then 10 years ago when I was, in so many ways, a child. I have seen many doctors and they all agree I am fine. If any one of them thought I was putting myself in danger, I am sure something would have been done.
Truly, this thread isn’t about me… it is about why people feel the need to make decisions for other people. Why they think it is in their best interest. I am not in any shape, way or form thinking about doing anything in myself. I am just wondering why people or society feels they need get involved in another person’s decision. Why there is this overwhelming urge to save people. Save strangers. How does one know what is best for someone else?
I don’t think they do or can.
Thanks for writing back, and for being so candid. 
For me it would depend on why they were doing it. Had a bad breakup with a lover? I will do what I can to stop them or convince them to at least give it some time. Lengthy painful illness? I will wish them well.
I have long believed that my life will probably end by my own hand. I told my SO years ago that if I contracted HIV or other fatal illness I would end my life and he agreed that he would not interfere. (The odds of this happening at this point are vanishingly small) I fully believe it is up to the person to decide to end their life or not, but there are circumstances in which I would try to get them to delay it or not do it at all.
So wait, you’re STILL mad at your cousin that he tried to stop you from killing yourself?
Look, I don’t understand here. You talk about how no one has the right to stop you from killing yourself. But that’s irrelevant, because no one has the ability to stop you from killing yourself if you’re determined to do so.
Your cousin stopped you from killing yourself that one time. But after all the crying and hullaballoo that your family went through, and all the suicide watches and so on, if you still wanted to kill yourself afterwards you could have done so. Nobody is stopping you from killing yourself.
I guess I don’t understand the notion that trying to talk someone out of suicide is somehow disrespectful. If I thought my friend was making a mistake by doing action X, I’d try to talk him out of action X. Is that disrespectful? Especially since the minute I’m out of sight, he can just carry out action X anyway, no matter what I say. If I’m so annoying, he can always just decide that he can’t me my friend anymore.
And if action X is suicide, well, suicide ends everything. He’s not going to have to put up with me nagging him not to commit suicide if he completes it. The notion that he’s going to attempt suicide dozens of times, yet I’m always being a meddlesome busybody and stopping him is just not realistic. Unless he’s in a prison cell or pysch hospital, he can find a way.
What’s exactly is so wrong with helping people? If someone was inconsiderate in preventing your suicide and prolonging your pain, well, all it takes is one completed attempt and it’s all over.
The “rush” is because so many people who attempt suicide or have suicidal ideation are glad to be alive afterwards if they don’t complete the suicide attempt. Suicide can be a momentary impulse, and if the person gets past that moment, the impulse is gone. So does it mean anything when we interfere with someone’s suicide attempt, and later they say they’re glad we did? If I talk a friend out of driving home drunk, have I been a busybody? If he was sober he wouldn’t try to drive drunk, but because he’s drunk he can’t make a rational decision about driving drunk. If tomorrow when I’m not around and he’s sitting around sober, and decides he wants to drive drunk, so he gets a bottle of vodka and his car keys, well, there’s not much I can do about it.
Likewise the person who doesn’t have a mometary suicidal impulse, or occasional suicidal ideation. If someone is talked down from the ledge by the cops, and is observed for 72 hours, and goes home, and then decides that they still want to kill themselves, well, what can the cops do?
Not to put advice gurus out of business or anything, but while we shouldn’t take our loved ones for granted - we all do it - that “live every day like it’s your last” stuff doesn’t work. At least, not for most people. It’s emotionally exhausting and not practical. People lose track of each other and sometimes they just get busy and screw it up. Your interpretation that this constitutes ‘not caring’ is wrong and inaccurate, although in my experience it’s pretty typical of depressed thinking.
It really isn’t, though. You can’t stop somebody else’s seizure or heart attack, but somebody who kills themselves can be stopped - it’s clear that talking to someone who is suicidal can make a difference, and you’re indicating the same in your posts by.
Unfortunately reality intrudes. If I called and talked to everybody important in my life every day, it’d be hard to work and go to the store and sleep and do the other stuff people do because they assume, usually correctly, that they will still be around tomorrow and so will the people they want to talk to.
I was very upset with him back during that time, though no I am not currently mad at him. I just don’t trust him.
I am talking about the times when someone says they want to harm themsleves, why people believe stopping them is a right choice. While the majority of people don’t agree with me (and I am not saying they have too, I am trying to understand why) I don’t see where it is in someone else’s business to say, “Hey. I am not letting you do that.” Where is it a right for anyone to get involved?
For the record there was no suicide watches. They asked me what I wanted and I told them unconditional love, so they got me a puppy. Molly. Who actually died last year. And why I didn’t? I don’t know. I had plenty of chances… and I am sure I constantly thought about it… though I didn’t want anyone to hurt the dog.
Because the way I see it, it isn’t any one else’s business. It’s their life to do what they want with it.
I have seen them do welfare checks on an hourly bases to make sure the person is still alive. I just don’t understand it. With it being his life and his choice, why check on him? Let him be. Why use the manpower and what not for a person that can do whatever he wants?
I just generally don’t understand why a person would care what someone else does with their own life…