Suicide
 

Its a pretty depressing topic. Perhaps it should be moved to ANGST but I'm trying to avoid that by having a somewhat serious discussion about it (mods, if you disagree then feel free, I do not mind).


the reason I bring it up personally is because of a man who recently commited suicide not far from my home. the blood stains are actually still on the street i believe which are just a little bit eerie to be honest. There was a woman involved who got a divorce and took full custody of his children and he felt like he had nothing left and took his life. Now I'm leaving certain bits out here but you get the idea: it crushed his father (my grandfathers best friend) and I imagine his children as well. its all rather chilling and i'm not really sure why its affected me so much, though I have my own personal ideas. The whole thing is rather strange especially since I never knew this man to be frank. **shrugs**

I read something that said that human beings are the only organisms with enough free will to be capable of willingly taking thier own lives. This made me curious - has anyone here ever had suicidal thoughts at any point in thier lives or have you ever known anyone close, family or friend, that has gone through with it? How did it make you feel personally? Obviously you are still alive so if you have come close or have thought of it, how did you deal with it? In your opinion, is it really an extreme cowardly act, or in some cultures is it an honorable way out. How does one deal with depression so strong that they feel that there is nothing in thier life left to live for?

Yup, been there, not done that. I've been told by "professional expertise", that being the pyschologist and family doctor, that suicidal thoughts are normal for a person to perhaps think of, but once they get the ball rolling and actually fantasize about such a thing and draw up plans and the like, then it gets a bit more precarious. Supposedly though, the ones who actually act on them are considered "abnormal".

I've lived through suicidal thoughts that occurred to me during my late elementary years (grades 6-8). Fortunately I don't know a single soul in my family with the intent on taking themselves out.

I have a couple of disorders (Asperger's Syndrome and Autism) so it made me an easy target for bullying back then. I lived through it for several years, got tired of it and I got the idea that nobody in my city cared for me in general or for anything I did (I often resorted to physical attacking when I was young, resulting in the troublemakers getting away with everything). I swear, I must have been the most angsty, bitchy, whiny kid in my school for those two years I went insane.

I started visiting and registering at online message boards around February last year and I started to make friends. My opinion of everything changed, to seeing it was just my school that sucked and not my city/Earth.

Suicide is a common problem in society and I easily see why people would act like this. Maybe their loved one died, got divorced, or maybe they're isolated in their own world full of jerks. But nonetheless - the pain can last a while, yes, but suicide is often not the best option, as there are ways to overcome strong depression. It's especially harmful to Christians as the Fifth Commandment, "Thou shall not kill", greatly applies here, since it affects yourself as well as others.

I have no experience in solving divorce or death related issues, but my answer to loneliness would be to hunt the internet for someone whom you can trust and get along well with, and also as someone to talk to. Internet dating might be an extreme though, since oftentimes the other person lives hundreds or thousands of miles away. I have two very close friends on my MSN and they both know how to help out in suicide problems, so that's one example.

A few years ago, there was a man in town who literally killed his two adopted kids, killed his wife, and then shot himself on the steps of city hall downtown.

This somehow warped itself into urban legend with the kids around here, and they all drive by their house looking for his ghost or some shit.

I remember it being in the papers.

But I don't really care too much about suicides. If you want to kill yourself, hey - it's your choice. Don't burden me with it. I can't make up your mind for you.

I think about it a lot. My uncle killed himself four years ago, a girl I had known since kindergarten tried to and luckily failed, and my best friend's father killed himself in September. I've been dealing with social anxiety disorder and clinical depression without any kind of treatment for the last couple years, and I'm sure that affects my thinking, as well.

Over the past few months I've actually given it some real thought - the most painless way to do it, the least messy way to do it. Trying to rationalize the act, even though I've seen what it does to the people around someone who commits suicide. Here's the big thing for me - I've dug myself a deep a very deep hole, to spare everyone the details, and I don't see myself ever getting out of it. Suicide seems much more likely, and I've felt lately as though I've just been biding my time until I finally work up the nerve to do it.

And as to what it would do to those around me - well, they'd be better off without me, of course! Sure, my family would be devastated now, but it would be better than watching me grow up to be a worthless piece of shit. There's an element of making a final statement of sorts for me, too. I wouldn't leave a note or give any sort of warning signs - I'd just be dead.

I give a lot of thought to how people would react to it, how they would talk about me after I was dead. They'd sure talk about me more than they do now, when I'm alive. I've always really wanted more attention from people than I get, but I've never been motivated to do enough to warrant it, or to even ask for it. What better way to indirectly get it than by killing yourself? The grand irony being, of course, that you're not alive to recieve it.

I know these are irrational thoughts, but it's amazing how strong they can get. I always hear that people who commit suicide are selfish, but now that I think I understand what they're thinking when they do it, I don't think they're being selfish at all. I guess it's different for everyone, but I imagine the thoughts just keep coming and coming until they take over. You convince yourself that your family and the world at large would be a better place without you, and you finally do it.

Yea, I've thought about it. A lot actually.

The dad of a friend of mine killed himself. Hung himself in their garage. Marital problems I believe. She (my friend) was pretty apathetic about it from what I remember. This guy who I hardly knew killed himself back when I was in high school. He would talk to me sometimes but we were simply just acquaintances so his death didn't really affect me much. It's sad yea but I really didn't know him to feel anything.

I've always considered myself a pretty selfish person under the guise of a generous one and I've always regarded suicide as a selfish act. Mainly cause you're not thinking about anyone else but yourself. How the world has "given up on you" so to speak. They don't really care how it will affect other people and try to justify the act by saying "they'll be better off without me." Well, how do you know that? You'll be dead.

Leave me alone. Kill yourself, I do not wont to hear it. Been there done that and only to have the bastard come back to me for more dramatic I-want-to-kill-myself-bullcrap. Do not "talk", just do it if you are serious.

Suicides around here aren't a common thing and to tell you the truth, it rarely gets brought up in conversation. We had this discussion once before and I clearly stated that I had no sympathy for those who were willing to selfishly put countless people in grief just because they couldn't cope. There's always those who are all bark and no bite with this as well and they're simply the bottom rung pussies.

In the past 10 years I've been to a lot of funerals, but only 2 of those were suicide related. I was the pallbearer at one of them. A girl hung herself in her garage presumably because her boyfriend broke up with her. Even while lowering her into the ground I couldn't feel sympathy for her. Her family, on the other hand, was clueless as to the real motives of her suicide and they were incosolable, lost and just plain shocked. Ruins that never needed to be caused in the first place.

I don't know. I guess you could say I'm indifferent, but the bottom line is: If you're going to do it, don't be a selfish cunt and think about who you will harm first. But don't come crying to me and ask me to give you a reason to live or I may end up putting a large hand-cannon in your hand and tell you to blow your brains out. I haven't seen that in person yet.

Suicide helps nobody. I see it as a huge fuck-you as the people you leave behind - even your loved ones.

A few years ago, I knew someone who went through a very depressive phase. She was really insecure, and felt that she had nothing left - She tried ODing. After she got out of the hospital, I had some chats with her, and things were patched up and for the next few months she was happy, optimistic and felt that she had everything to live for.

She lost her life in the tsunami in 2004. It's the only loss I've ever not felt indifferent towards.

Fate is cruel. Suicide is the worst way out... Live your life to the fullest.

I know of a few people who have been suicidal for a long time. When they have seriously attempted suicide repeatedly for a number of years, and chance of recovery is looking slim, it makes you wonder if it would be better for them to succeed. I know that sounds horrid, but wouldn't you rather have someone you love end their suffering than live in pain? Any form of severe clinical depression is just as debilitating as physical illness can be. Of course there is a chance of recovery, but after a long time you do begin to question the likelihood.

I've been there. It's not pretty. And there are very vivid moments in my life after that I've been so grateful nothing I tried worked. But the depression was due to other illnesses in my life; it isn't something which will haunt me forever and ruin my life.

sucuidal thoughts are something i've had since i was a child (think primary school age, so around 5 onwards). i used to think about ways to kill myself and sometimes even taking the rest of the family with me, or just killing them and running away, i'd also think about what people's reaction would be and what life would be like without me (obviously, no one would care because i'm the quiet one in the corner =p). i still do, but only about killing myself. though i usually get these thoughts during my periodic depressions which just occur randomly or because of aggravation from either family or university.

it's easy to call people who consider/commit sucuide selfish, but they're in a different frame of mind, you lose track of everything and can only concentrate on the bad things and being in a bad mood just means bad things just seem to keep occuring. but in my case, i usually just need to rant at people and get some attention >.>

i think part of whats bothered me about the whole situation really is how a single chain of bad situations can affect one persons life so much. What I find really strange though is how a single event after a person becomes so depressed can either trigger the impulse to do it or cut off that impulse entirely. Its a little horrifying to think that (sometimes) after someone tries suicide once and fails that they'd go for it again and again again. you'd think that they'd discover that maybe god/nature/whatever diety you believe in was maybe trying to throw them a clue that maybe they are needed in this world after all. =\

i think what bothered me the most personally however was actually seeing those congealed blood stains on the street where it happened. have you ever been in or near a place where something has happened (say the death of somebody or something just as powerful) and just felt really eerie being there? Thats kind of how it feels and quite frankly, it weirds me out. :P

Oooh, speaking of a big "fuck you"... so about a year ago really close friend of mine who relied a bit too much on me for emotional anchoring and I got into a misunderstanding. It lasted a few days, and the last time I talked to him, I tried to make peace, and we sort of did, but he told me that the last few days had been rough and he was going off campus to spend time with some family friends for the weekend. That Sunday I'd say he overestimated the waiting area on the train tracks by about three yards, but the suicide notes he left behind seemed to indicate otherwise. But get this - he wrote about seven or so personalized notes, giving no reasons but saying thanks for everything nonetheless. I wasn't included though. And these are people he would admitted having fallen out of touch with. What a guy.

Actually yes... Yes I have. About 6 years ago I was hanging out with a friend of mine getting ridiculously drunk at his house one Saturday night. It was 3 am and it was just 3 of us, smoking cigarettes and drinking MGDs. (ugh)

We heard an argument breaking out across the street and then it died down almost immediately. About a half hour later the front door opened, one guy stepped out of his house with a shotgun in his hand and sat on the bottom step of his porch. I couldn't really see because it was fucking dark and there were hedges in the way, but I imagine that he put the shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I just saw the flash and his carcass slide off to the side to be partially hidden by one of the hedges of his house. I wasn't even so much in shock but I remember I was so drunk I actually wanted to drive home, get my camera and come back to take photos. Then the guy started twitching and we figured, "Oh shit, he's really dead. We gotta call the cops."

About 20 minutes passed by and sure enough, the cops showed up and all we did was sit on the front lawn, drinking beers and watching the coroner scrape him off the side of the house and load him into the ambulance. To be quite honest, it was kind of neat. Later on we found out he had gotten in an argument with his wife and clocked her out with a frying pan. He thought he killed her and shot himself in grief... Ain't love a bitch?

This is fine in the main QP--ANGST is for people asking for personal advice, not asking for a discussion on a general topic. =)

Suicide can be attractive because it is about control. When everything is slipping beyond control and you're in a situation where pain or despair is overwhelming, suicide is really the strongest statement of the control we have. Since we are, as Dubble said, the only organisms to conciously kill ourselves, it is really an affirmation of our unique sentience and free will.

Having seriously thought about suicide in my past, I concur with those that say suicide is only a temporary solution. When pain or loneliness became too great, thinking about suicide was actually comforting to me because I felt like I had that last measure of control over my life. Ironically of course, acting on that impulse deprives us of control forever.

I also want to say that I don't necessarily think that would-be suicides are "irrational." Probably the majority are. But there are people out there who suffer incredible anxiety/depressive episodes continuously for their entire lives. Perhaps you can be pathologically and permanently irrational, but for many (especially the terminally ill and infirm) I think suicide is entirely within their rational frame of mind.

I'm not advocating suicide by any means. My depression returns with such regularity every March/April that it's like clockwork. I have no explanation for why it occurs that way, but I know that I have to revisit in my head thoughts of suicide. I take medication to deal with it and it tends to work. However, I do think it's true again that suicide (even if we THINK we are serious about it) can be a "comfort option," something that feeds on it's own misery if you will.

Not to bore you with the details but i have been close to suicide mainly because i sometimes cannot handle suppressing my anger which can only be satisfied by causing harm/death to a human which would in turns tear my moral judgement to pieces if i did that. Anyway, it is sometimes a traumatizing experience for those around you and the person themselves. I mean, i came close to taking my life on the cold tile of my kitchen floor in front of my mother as tears of fear ran down my eyes, i just held the knife in front of my heart until i turned around and realized that i was hurting my mother more than myself. I mean, in reality, suicide is just an easy way out of dealing with life issues and if everyone killed themselves when life seemed the worsted then there wouldn't be much of society left. To me i take it as, people who cut themselves need attention, people who kill themselves need help but sadly it is the other way around with most people and this causes some suicides to just go uncared. Some people even sink so low as to use someones suicide as a form of evidence against violent video games which is morally wrong since you have no idea why someone killed themselves if they are not alive to tell you and just having a suicide note doesn't always explain in full detail.

I've had thoughts about suicide before but I never really plan to act on them. Part of the reason being I'm not religous so I don't really know whether or not to believe in an afterlife. So I'm worried that when we die, we just cease to exist and that thought scares me alot more then anything in life can possibly bother me. So when I feel like complete shit and that my life isn't worth living, I just kinda lay there and don't do anything for awhile. I just plain don't know what to do when I get depressed because it's hard for me to enjoy a game or DVD when I feel like crap.

I've never known anyone who committed suicide, although apparently my best friend used to contemplate it alot and I just never realized he was being serious. He's one of those people you can never tell if he's serious, joking, or being sarcastic. He sounds the same no matter what unless he's flat out pissed off, then you can tell no matter how much he tries to deny it.

THINK about that for a few minutes. Does not being religious sound like a good enough reason to toy with suicide?

That is the problem, you cannot live in fear of death or death will consume your life. It is best to just not worry about what happens after because if there is an afterlife wouldn't that be bad because you were trying to get out of life in general? I mean, i have head of people who kill themselves out of religious reasons but if you are afraid of an afterlife it is not worth the effort to worry about it or not when contemplating suicide. In all honesty, most people don't think about what happens after suicide, they just hope it will be better than what they are living now. And most of the time most just want to get away so in turns life would be more torture.

To me i just advise against suicide, i mean, even if someone i don't know says they feel like killing themselves i can manage to persuade them to rethink about that choice. There is no point to it sometimes and people just don't like to wait things out.

I think you misunderstood what I ment, I ment that's part of the reason I would never actually think seriously about killing myself.

It's not so much that I fear death, it's more that I overanalyze everything and make decisions on everything based on logic. To me logically if killing myself may completely end my existance, then that could not be better then just dealing with whatever bullshit has me depressed. Anyhow I don't even think about it anymore. That was a couple years ago that I went through that crap.

Ah. Yes I did. My apologies.

That seems odd to me, because I desparately hope that there is no afterlife. I'm not talking about suicide, I just hope that when I die, that's the end. Please, let that be the end. If there is an afterlife in the Christian sense, then both sides seem just as bad. I don't want to go to hell, but I'm even more certain that I don't want to go to heaven. Heaven scares the living crap out of me. It's a reason to stay alive, if it really exists.

[offtopic]But what if Heaven is where you go when you die and hell is earth?[/offtopic]

I guess i cannot say that is a great reason to keep living but in reality yes, when someone kills themselves usually that means they want to totally end their existence, i mean, no one should kill themselves to believe that it would be better in an afterlife (if there was one), that to me seems, illogical. But suicide was never categorized as logical to begin with...

I've considered suicide. I still do from time to time. Since I look at existence as ultimately pointless, I consider suicide in a neutral, objective way. I feel everyone should be in control of their life, and I do not regard suicide as selfish, cowardly, sinful, etc.

Once I advocated someone kill themself as means of freeing herself from her troubles. She was pissed, but I was only trying to help :(