POLL: Suicide thoughts

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A friend of mine killed himself two weeks ago. He never gave any signals that he was that depressed. He hung himself in his own house. Must have been an awful sight for his wife and daughter. I never understood people who would do such a thing as committing suicide, but to do it like this, where he leaves his family with a picture they'll never forget, makes me more mad than sad.

 

Your life is your own. The times I thought about suicide I always knew that what people who were left behind me thought of it was not an issue, since I would not be there to contemplate on it. Yet I do agree that committing a suicide in a manner that will uselessly make the people close to you suffer even more than they had to, is unforgivable.

As for suicide being the same as giving up? Maybe it is. But it doesn't give anyone the right to go blaming people of it, since quite clearly the only person who had any idea of what he had to go through was the one who isn't around anymore. The fact that somebody's problems seem light and meaningless to you doesn't mean that they are that to him. And an opinion of "suicide is giving up, failing, and unforgivable in all circumstances" will change quite swiftly with any person, given the right circumstances. So lay off with the narrowmindedness, please.

Many of my friends and familiars have died. Not one because of suicide, though I do know some who've tried. There's nothing you can say to someone like that to come off of it. But I don't think it's merely a disease that someone would want to do that. As for a "mentally healthy" person it takes an incredible amount of courage to even try. Many people who've committed suicide have in fact only realised that life is not the big thing our genes and culture may make us believe. And they have the courage to end this charade instead of weakly staying alive for what they know is nothing.

As should be obvious by my posts in some other threads, I don't believe that life should be something to thrive for at any price, and over all else. Life may be a gift, but as nonexistence or "limbo" as some call it, equals the middleground of "neutral", then even that is better than a life of suffering. If a person loses a family, work, house and who knows what else, or if that person always loved running around and moving, doing physical things, and got paralyzed, I don't think it's wrong at all for him to wish to end his life.

 

Foradasthar, I agree completely with you.

 

Failed once but I'll never do it again. The world is much prettier if you look with both eyes.

 

you dont have to have problems, set backs or depression to want to commit suicide, some people simply do not want to live.
when i was suicidal it wasnt because i had problems in life, i did well in school, im physically fit, didnt have many cares in the world, but the simple fact was that i didnt want to live it, i looked at life and thought "what a pointless endevor" everyone dies at some point, so everything you work for will someday be for naught, why bother postponing it?

 

Thought about it, yes, but never to the point of considering it. I've always been very fortunate and well-raised that it just never struck me as a viable solution.

@Eze
It always pains me to hear about adolescents in your condition. The important thing is to find things that you have going for you (there's bound to be dozens, if not hundreds), and hang on to them. The hormones run rampant at that age and remove much of our rationality. The important thing is to have the self-confidence and strength to face it.

 

I attended a seminar on this once, hosted by medical professionals well versed in the field. One of their assertions was that the suicidal person is not thinking rationally. They mentioned a teenage girl who had a pistol, stood in the middle of a room, laid out a bunch of pillows to cushion her fall once she had blown her brains out. The reality of death had no meaning to her, as the pillows indicate.

A desire to die may strike a lot of people, but it takes an illness or other severely unbalancing event to make people actually try. It is certainly NOT "courage" that makes people try suicide -- I would argue that it takes a great deal more courage to survive and tough it out.

 

Well that depends on the reason. If the desicion to commint a suicide comes out of logical deduction then yes, it does take courage to see it through. If it's an ailment in your mental condition, then courage is hardly a factor.

Note that most suicide cases do come out of a serious depression or some suchlike condition where you can hardly say the individual is in his normal state of mind. But not nearly all of them. The world isn't as black and white as that.