i don't get the whole "suicide as cowardice" point.

depression at its worst can take away any will to live from you.

a guy who used to work at a mental istitution once told me the story of one of his patients: a clever, bright man haunted by depression.
he wasn't a loon, a retard or anything, just a bright man who couldn't see the point of living anymore.
this man's depression and his negative thoughts got so bad through the years that he started acting suicidal.
eventually they had to lock him in a soft-walled room so he couldn't smash his head against the wall and die.
one day they found him dead: he had shoved his whole fist in his throat.
in the process, he had knocked all of his front teeth off.

in the words of this friend of mine that unsuccesfully tried to help him: "he got to a point where just being awake in the morning was untolerable, because he got scared and horrified by the simple act of thinking. he was scared of his own mind".

depression is an illness just like cancer, and, like cancer, can get to a terminal point.

gaetano wrote:a guy who used to work at a mental istitution once told me the story of one of his patients: a clever, bright man haunted by depression.
he wasn't a loon, a retard or anything, just a bright man who couldn't see the point of living anymore.
this man's depression and his negative thoughts got so bad through the years that he started acting suicidal.
eventually they had to lock him in a soft-walled room so he couldn't smash his head against the wall and die.
one day they found him dead: he had shoved his whole fist in his throat.
in the process, he had knocked all of his front teeth off.

in the words of this friend of mine that unsuccesfully tried to help him: "he got to the point where just being awake in the morning was untolerable, because he got scared and horrified by the simple act of thinking. he was scared of his own mind".

I think that this incredible and heartbreaking story is going to bother me for a bit, but thanks for posting it.

A few years ago, The New Yorker published a story about suicides off the Golden Gate bridge. Two details have stuck with me since I read it:

(1) There hasn't been a single known instance in which somebody committed suicide by jumping off the Bay Bridge. Furthermore, ~90% of jumpers faced the city as they jumped, and the remaining 10% jumped from the other side of the bridge. This suggests that the subset of people who kill themselves by jumping off of bridges in San Francisco idealize/romanticize suicide, even if they're incapable of realizing it. It's not a beautiful or noble or poetic way to end your life; it's sentimental and childish.

(2) A handful of persons have survived the jump. In every case, the jumper realized the second that he or she left the bridge, that all of his or her problems could be managed. That information, as obvious as it was, has terrified me for a few years. I agree that nearly every person on the planet has at least entertained the idea of suicide, I would bet that nearly 100% of non-terminally ill people who successfully kill themselves reconsider the act once they've reached the point that they can't undo it.

It sorrows me to consider that, for some people, the wiring has fried in the part of your brain that reminds you that human beings are resilient and can deal with all sorts of pain and suffering; that happiness can be found in meager things; that suicide is a deluded revenge against people who did you no wrong and not a favor or blessing to anyone; that we can always cut our ties, leave, and start over from square one.

Suicide is crap.

we don't live in a world of possibilities -- we live in a world of limitations, and it's only getting worse. sometimes it becomes too much of a burden to simply behold how out of tune everything is, how empty daily life can be, how insincere and opportunistic people generally are toward one another, how our present society encourages stupidity and pettiness, how our bodies are constantly decaying, how the environment is going to shit, how awful things happen to wonderful people, how commerce has a stranglehold on art, how inherently biggoted everyone is, how governments thrive on deceiving and slighting the very people they claim to represent, how impossible it is to find someone you're compatible with both emotionally/intellectually and sexually, how everyone is essentially too absorbed in their own life to reach out when you need it and yet you can't get rid of them when you'd like to be left to your devices, how... well... okay... you get where i'm going here.

Bullshit.

But the whole concept of existence does do my head in. Obviously all of the human religions are totally invalid. I mean seriously, trusting a bunch of nomads and lunatics 2000-4000 years ago who didn't even know what air or water was to give us answers to the big questions is just retarded. But that still leaves us with the big "why", which I doubt is something that can be answered.

So kill yourself now or die later -once you are dead you no longer exist... try remembering life before you were born- the universe will keep on going just the way it has whether humans are alive or all dead, it really doesn't make any difference at all.

Humans should stop pretending that we have any effect on the universe. We don't and the universe could care less if we are around or not. The universe wasn't made for us, we were made by the universe.

Embrace the void!

Bullshit.

If you value human life at all and have any sort of ethics you can’t say suicide is “maybe alright.”

You can’t be someone’s chemotherapy, but you can be the tonic for a depressed person. I don’t think people kill themselves because the government’s all rotten and Greenland’s glaciers are all gonna melt. People kill themselves because they think other people find them burdensome and have stopped caring.

Life is like a movie, if you've sat through more than half of it and its sucked every second so far, it probably isn't gonna get great right at the end and make it all worthwhile. No one should blame you for walking out early.

Bullshit. You can’t eat cheese fries when you’re dead. Can’t drink a High Life either.

Cheese fries vs nonexistence. Duh.

gaetano wrote:i don't get the whole "suicide as cowardice" point.

depression at its worst can take away any will to live from you.

a guy who used to work at a mental istitution once told me the story of one of his patients: a clever, bright man haunted by depression.
he wasn't a loon, a retard or anything, just a bright man who couldn't see the point of living anymore.
this man's depression and his negative thoughts got so bad through the years that he started acting suicidal.
eventually they had to lock him in a soft-walled room so he couldn't smash his head against the wall and die.
one day they found him dead: he had shoved his whole fist in his throat.
in the process, he had knocked all of his front teeth off.

in the words of this friend of mine that unsuccesfully tried to help him: "he got to a point where just being awake in the morning was untolerable, because he got scared and horrified by the simple act of thinking. he was scared of his own mind".

depression is an illness just like cancer, and, like cancer, can get to a terminal point.

I certainly don't mean to trivialize this man's death--or his life--but being "scared and horrified by the simple act of thinking" and committing suicide by fisting one's own mouth would seem to qualify him as a "loon."

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:

gaetano wrote:i don't get the whole "suicide as cowardice" point.

depression at its worst can take away any will to live from you.

a guy who used to work at a mental istitution once told me the story of one of his patients: a clever, bright man haunted by depression.
he wasn't a loon, a retard or anything, just a bright man who couldn't see the point of living anymore.
this man's depression and his negative thoughts got so bad through the years that he started acting suicidal.
eventually they had to lock him in a soft-walled room so he couldn't smash his head against the wall and die.
one day they found him dead: he had shoved his whole fist in his throat.
in the process, he had knocked all of his front teeth off.

in the words of this friend of mine that unsuccesfully tried to help him: "he got to a point where just being awake in the morning was untolerable, because he got scared and horrified by the simple act of thinking. he was scared of his own mind".

depression is an illness just like cancer, and, like cancer, can get to a terminal point.

I certainly don't mean to trivialize this man's death--or his life--but being "scared and horrified by the simple act of thinking" and committing suicide by fisting one's own mouth would seem to qualify him as a "loon."

sorry, i didn't explain it properly, as i wanted to make a long story short.
the man was a normal person that got into depression and through the years became "loonish" enough to being hospitalized and , in the end, escaping from life by any means necessary.

my point is that depression is an illness, not an act of cowardice;
i believe most of the people who commit suicide are ill.
just an opinion...

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:I certainly don't mean to trivialize this man's death--or his life--but being "scared and horrified by the simple act of thinking" and committing suicide by fisting one's own mouth would seem to qualify him as a "loon."

I would only agree if you included "incredibly frightened and desperate" in your description, but I don't think that's what you mean.

If you associate thinking with existing (it is after all what all our perceptions are processed through), then if you are afflicted by a deep horror of existence, the act of thinking - and hence existing - would be terrifying. Personally, I find it quite reasonable to imagine a sane state of fear where the act of thinking fed back into terror. I'm sure that I've experienced similar on a merciful few occasions. This is not a rational reaction, certainly, but I would not call this state insanity.

With regards to the horrible method of suicide, given the situation that he was in, I would imagine that any way he might have tried would have been similarly gruesome. But if he was that desperate, then such a method would still be preferable to this continual fear as described.

Maybe I'm wrong. Hell, if he was feeling in this state continuously, then it could actually drive him mad. In which case, his ultimate reaction could be read as an instance of sanity.

I don't know. It is just very sad and very shocking (to me) that someone could be so terrified by actual existence that he would take such extreme methods to kill himself. Calling him a "loon" feels (again, to me) like belittling him, which feels wrong. Maybe he was insane by clinical definition; but I don't think that the story as told suits this "loon" description.

(Apologies to have gone on a little on this, but like I wrote above, this story bothers me.)

Wood Goblin wrote:
(1) There hasn't been a single known instance in which somebody committed suicide by jumping off the Bay Bridge.

There is no pedestrian access to the Bay Bridge. GG Bridge is lousy with walkers/cyclists.

No one wants to look at Oakland, anyway.

Wood Goblin wrote:
Suicide is crap.

Yes it is, but Dostoevsky is NC.

i agree in large part with steve's comments on the subject.

i don't want to trivialize suicide in any way with my little story, but i think a couple aspects are important. years ago after coming to live in germany, i went through a real dark time, very deeply unhappy. this deep dissatisfaction led me to try in some way to start playing music again after having turned my back on it for seven years. during the painful time of trying not to be overwhelmed by my distance from new dreams, i started to feel uncomfortable around high, open places, like balconies. where before suicide was something that i "contemplated" intellectually, joking with my best friend that we'd kill ourselves if we weren't so afraid of putting our families out, now it was something that i "felt", it was like a presence. it's no accident that people express it that way: "i feel suicidal". i felt like windows were pulling at me or whatever. i feel really pretty stupid telling this story (which i never talk about otherwise), but i guess it bothers me when people get all high & mighty & condemn the "self-indulgent choice" of suicide, or however numerous people have phrased it here. yeah, maybe from time to time there's truth in that, but in my experience i think it's probably most often experienced as a force from outside that those who end up taking their own lives are simply powerless to resist. in my case, i was still aware of what was going on. i guess because i was already in the process of changing things, i was able to observe it & i sunk my teeth deeper into the music & rode it out.

ultimately, you belong to yourself. it's a huge taboo & stigmatized in my opinion because that is a dangerous thought. makes everybody a loose cannon. i realised i can leave anytime i want, but i don't want to, & the thought that i "own" my life strangely gave me alot of strength.

sorry if that was rambling. i don't in any way mean to trivialize the suffering of those left behind or somehow romanticize the act. just another perspective...

edit: i know there are kind of two contradictory thoughts going on here. i think suicide is ultimately incredibly sad & a horrible waste of potential unique beauty, but i think that the right to determine your own life & death is inalienable. & a potentially empowering realisation.

this is definitely one thing i'm not interested in having to call crap/not crap on though. i abstain.

tocharian wrote:

we don't live in a world of possibilities -- we live in a world of limitations, and it's only getting worse. sometimes it becomes too much of a burden to simply behold how out of tune everything is, how empty daily life can be, how insincere and opportunistic people generally are toward one another, how our present society encourages stupidity and pettiness, how our bodies are constantly decaying, how the environment is going to shit, how awful things happen to wonderful people, how commerce has a stranglehold on art, how inherently biggoted everyone is, how governments thrive on deceiving and slighting the very people they claim to represent, how impossible it is to find someone you're compatible with both emotionally/intellectually and sexually, how everyone is essentially too absorbed in their own life to reach out when you need it and yet you can't get rid of them when you'd like to be left to your devices, how... well... okay... you get where i'm going here.

Bullshit.

Surely at least a few of those "points" that I originally made weren't the most well-thought-out, rhetorically sound things anyone's ever posted on the internet, but you can't just flat-out deny that there are legitimate reasons for a person to be upset and profoundly disappointed with life. Furthermore you can't deny how these things could undermine a person to the extent that the possibility of non-existence would be appealing. (Actually killing oneself over them may be "bullshit" in your eyes, but that's another matter.)

tocharian wrote:You can’t be someone’s chemotherapy

Which is probably for the better, seeing as how chemotherapy is a wretched ordeal and not uncommonly humiliating.

tocharian wrote:People kill themselves because they think other people find them burdensome and have stopped caring.

You honestly believe there's a single, definitive reason for why people kill themselves? What's more, you believe that you, User Tocharian, are somehow privy to it!?

Marvelous!

tocharian wrote:Cheese fries vs nonexistence. Duh.

Yes, if you happen to be a simp, it really is as tidy and oversimplified as that: cheese fries versus nonexistence.

Case closed.