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Suicide: A discussion.
_J_
PedantRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
PedantRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
Human beings exist in the world as mortal beings who will all eventually die, we assume. Death occurs in many ways but in most cases death occurs outside of an individual's control; the individual does not choose to die but rather they die as a result of the circumstances of their life.
But what of suicide? What of the act of killing one's self?
Some think suicide can be justified while others think suicide is an affront to the sanctity of life and/or a mortal sin. Some people think suicide is incredibly selfish while others maintain that the option of suicide is a right all people have.
What do you think and why? What problems result from your way of thinking? What influenced your particular view? What problems do you see in other's views of suicide? Why are those problems problematic? Is suicide ever justified? Does suicide need to be justified? Ought suicide be prevented?
Debate! Discuss!
Edit: Any discussion of Suicide will involve a discussion of depression but if we could focus on suicide rather than depression that would probably help the thread stay on topic. If we hit page 5 and this devolves into an argument about psychology no one will be happy.
But what of suicide? What of the act of killing one's self?
Some think suicide can be justified while others think suicide is an affront to the sanctity of life and/or a mortal sin. Some people think suicide is incredibly selfish while others maintain that the option of suicide is a right all people have.
What do you think and why? What problems result from your way of thinking? What influenced your particular view? What problems do you see in other's views of suicide? Why are those problems problematic? Is suicide ever justified? Does suicide need to be justified? Ought suicide be prevented?
Debate! Discuss!
Edit: Any discussion of Suicide will involve a discussion of depression but if we could focus on suicide rather than depression that would probably help the thread stay on topic. If we hit page 5 and this devolves into an argument about psychology no one will be happy.
_J_ on
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Emotional reasons for suicide are much harder to quantify.
What is the difference, in your mind? What is the quality the terminal patient / inevitable or present pain individual have that the "emotional" person lacks?
What justifies the suicide in one situation but not the other? What is that "horrible illness" doing that creates that allowance for suicide?
Sometimes a person decides he doesn't want to live any more, but it's not because of emotional or physical pain or fear. It's because he's just had his fill of living. I don't see anything wrong with that; if you've given the whole life thing a go, and you're bored with it, or you've done everything you wanted to do, or you're just itching to see what's next, or any combination of those, by all means, die. I mean, it's your life to end, and you'd be doing it on better terms than most people. If you're in that situation, you're happy with your life and ready to move on. As far as I can tell, that's pretty much the definition of a successful life, fundamentally speaking.
Well, severe depression is pretty much a horrible illness. The problem being that it's really hard for someone suffering from it to make a rational decision, weighing their immediate pain against the likelihood of relief. And because of the complete lack of societal acceptance of suicide, it's not exactly easy to give your family or friends advance warning that you're going to kill yourself. It's a really hard issue to take a position on because there just isn't really a good solution.
I didn't say it isn't equivalent, I said it's harder to quantify
Physical pain can be charted almost numerically and you can imagine when it is so intense that, if it's not going to stop, there's no point living and you might as well take a needle full of death
However emotional pain is really hard to identify and quantify; it's harder to understand, harder to sympathize with, harder to see evidence of, etc etc
Regardless, taking drugs for physical pain is wonderful and encouraged, but taking drugs for emotional pain is a subject of much debate. I am of the opinion that if your choices are reduced to drugs or suicide, because of emotional pain, popping some pills to fuck with your brain is better than obliterating your brain with a bullet or similar.
We have a name for that: depression.
Do other circumstances change this? If a father of 3 children ages 5-7 is bored is he justified in killing himself or does he have a responsibility towards his children? What of an adult whose children are grown? What of an individual who is married with no children? What of an individual who is seriously dating? Casually dating? I assume you would be fine with a single person living on their own, but what of these others?
No no no. Depression is, basically, being very sad. I'm not talking about people that are depressed, people that commit suicide to escape emotional torment. I'm talking about people that are bored. I don't equate boredom with depression. I don't think anyone with an adequate understanding of both would.
I don't buy that at all. Wanting to die just because is not healthy behavior, pretty much by definition. Call it what you will, but what if the use of prescription meds could make you no longer "bored with life?" Would you still say suicide is the right decision?
I'm not saying you are incorrect or anything. I'm trying to find what that fundamental aspect is that makes suicide justified.
It seems to be "escape of pain" but with some qualifiers that could make some pains justification of suicide but other pains not justifications and so ought to be handled.
You're making a distinction between depression and apathy, it seems.
I can see that. Depression is the feeling of being depressed, stuck under some problem or sadness or burden.
Apathy or boredom doesn't require a sense of being trapped; it can be a complete lack of interest in reality as a result of fulfillment.
Makes sense to me.
Exactly. Too few people in the country - and in the PA forums, for that matter, judging by HA threads - are aware that ennui or flattened affect are just as much symptoms of depression as anything else.
No, it's not.
Depression spans quite a significant portion of the emotional spectrum. It's more than just "being very sad".
Depression is not "basically, being very sad."
Of course it's not healthy, but in this situation, health is no longer a concern for the person in question, now is it?
I don't think that what-if is relevant, because frankly, I don't think it's possible. The key difference between this motive of suicide and most others is that others are typically characterised by a desire to die, while this is characterised simply by no longer desiring to live.
Of course those circumstances change things. If you take on a responsibility, like, say, children, you should see it through. But I think I should make it clear, that in this scenario, I don't see the person's suicide any differently from the man simply leaving the family by any other means.
All too often people see it as just something to snap out of, or they see it as a "phase," or they see it as the person's fault for being so negative or whatever.
And, further complicating matters, 9 times out of 10 the depressed person will deny that there's anything wrong with them. They will say they are seeing the world for how it is, or seeing how worthless their life is, or coming to touch with things, etc. It's a physical problem in the brain chemistry, however, and that feeling is an illusion.
The ability of the body to produce and regulate emotions is fucked up, and often one ends up in a state where one is just numb to everything. You don't feel particularly grieved, you don't cry all the time, you just sit there, numb. Nothing elicits an emotional response. Pleasure is completely foreign to you.
And a funny thing about how the brain works is when it's not in recent exposure to chemicals or emotions (one and the same one might say), it forgets about them. So the further you are from life-altering pain, the more you find it hard to believe you actually felt it when you got into that car-accident 10 years ago. And with depression, the longer it's been since you've felt pleasure, the more you are able to convince yourself that it's not possible to feel anymore. And the numbness, the dullness, seeps into absolutely every facet of existence.
This is why I don't think suicide is selfish or worthy of condemnation; it's worthy of pity. The instinct towards self-preservation is a powerful one that's only overridden in extreme circumstances, and since suicide is one of those circumstances, it can't simply be written off as one's "choice." One could make the argument that it is statistically insignificantly improbable that someone kills themself in a perfectly normal mental state, just to "see what it's like." In 99% of cases, the suicider is not thinking normally, insofar as normalcy has any meaning. This should set off alarm bells. Help is crucial in times like this.
Either way, somebody's going to walk in on my body lying lifeless in a puddle of my own fecal matter, and it will suck for everyone who didn't hate me.
Then, in a few years, it won't matter how I died.
It's bullshit like that that makes people who are depressed feel shitty. It's easy to tell someone to be happy it's a fuck of alot harder to do it sometimes.
If I could provide several necessary qualifiers for suicide due to pain, I would say that the pain must be:
a) extreme pain, ie pain that cannot be borne, whether it's physical or emotional
b) permanent or extremely long-term in duration
c) inevitable or unsolvable, ie other solutions must be attempted first
d) worse or at least comparable to the emotions that would be experienced by those closest to you
All of the above must be met to warrant suicide, I'd say.
In fact, a lack of interest in things you used to enjoy is a textbook symptom.
Agreed. Suicide for any reason other than ones you mention is just idiotic and short-sighted. Speaking as someone who was once suicidal for emotional reasons, I'm very glad I wasn't able to go through with it. Life's not always great, but it beats the alternative.
So your problem with suicide would be that if a person commits suicide in 99% of cases it is the case that the person is not thinking "normally" and so the suicide is a result of an altered mental state and not the person's true desire?
It is very very very rare that someone has a reason for suicide I would consider legitimate. Being in a vegetable state is one. Having lost everyone and everything imaginable in a disaster is one.
Being bored with life is not one. Honestly, if anyone says they are bored with life, I just slap them a few times and tell them to snap the fuck out of it. There is such an insane amount of things to see and to do in this world that it is practically impossible for anyone who is psychologically healthy to be bored with it.
Yes? You could maybe argue that they shouldn't be, but having a loved one kill themselves is going to be a lot harder to cope with than if they were really old and had a heart attack. In both cases they die, but the emotional strain they have on those close to them will be very different.
Well we're getting into tricky territory, because we're sort of, as a society, arbitrarily defining some things as "normal" and some as "not." But yes, I would say that in normal brain functions one would not want to commit suicide, so if one does, one is off in some serious way.
Suicide is such an extreme act that in order for it to be seriously considered, one almost by definition needs to be in the throws of a numbness, or a dullness, or a deadened depressed state. If one were capable of experiencing regular pleasure, like normal people, one would not think of it as an option. Pleasure is nice, and we seek it out. If you think it's gonna happen soon, you're gonna stick around for it. And if you think it's gonna happen regularly, you aren't goin anywhere.
If, however, pleasure is cut off from you, suicide becomes an attractive option. And that's by definition not what a normal brain should be going through.
Whoa, easy there. That is not helpful. Suicide is the last resort to end interminable, unimaginable pain. People who seriously contemplate suicide for emotional reasons are not idiotic and short-sighted, they are experiencing interminable, unimaginable pain.
It's a bit odd to me that someone who has actually had depression would talk like that.
I think that human beings are fundamentally responsible for their own self and any other responsibilities are the result of socially accepted rules created to foster and sustain a functional society. If an individual wants to die then the individual has the right to die. If society wants to put forth the effort required to create a situation in which the person would no longer want to die then society has that option.
But to force or coerce an individual to stay alive despite the desires of the individual is, I think, incredibly problematic and creates a situation in which the individual is forced to stay alive for the sake of society rather than their self.
Speaking as somebody who's had three people die on me in very different ways in the last ten years, yes, yes some ways of death are very different and sometimes easier to cope with than others. I haven't had somebody commit suicide close to me, but father did die suddenly and completely without warning. Compared to my grandfather's months of wasting away from cancer, my father's death was much harder to deal with, despite the fact that I wasn't that close with him. Suicide will only compound that situation.
The whole point is that depression is far from interminable because it is, to some extent, a treatable, physical illness.
Is there really anything necessarily wrong with that? If it is the easy way out, why not take it? Sure it will effect their friends and family in the short term, but they'll get over it. And the individual won't have to continue on in an existence they don't particularly care for.
I think what was meant by that was that the depressed person views it as interminable.
Be careful with your generalizations here. Suicide is a rational response to some (albeit quite rare) situations. See above re: torture, terminal illness.
Sorry for not being clear, but I'm speaking as an addendum to my previous post. I'm only talking about suicide on the part of depressed people.
I haven't addressed suicide as a response to interminable pain or horrible cancer or whatever.
Yes but they're wrong, because their thinking is impaired by their illness
Thus, they should not commit suicide
Obviously it is not that easy to resolve, because of the aforementioned impaired thinking, but committing suicide because you're depressed is a really really really bad idea.
Psychology is tricky territory. And if a person reads Nietzsche and becomes depressed then my assumption is that a psychologist would say that the chemical imbalance necessary for depression was present and sparked by Nietzsche. Because if there isn't a chemical component then it isn't real, or something.
How can it be the case that a "normal brain function" would not permit suicidal thoughts? That is an incredibly powerful claim about the role of the brain and some sort of "drive for life" maintained in every human being. Do you really think that such a drive exists? This seems to bypass the whole "fear of death" notion and instead claims that there is actually something within the brain that spurs a person towards survival.
That's interesting.
Yes, that.
We're not talking about feeling sad. It's feeling sad, all of the time, no matter what you do, and feeling like no matter what happens, you will never be happy again. Feeling this way all the time, for weeks, months, even years on end.
I'm somewhat skeptical that people who haven't experienced it can imagine what that's like.
I do not consider that a bold or controversial claim, at all.