Suicide

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.