The Last Days of BMX Superstar Dave Mirra
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If you have had past struggles with suicidal thoughts, or depression combined with addiction, then you should not own a gun. You might feel fine today, but relapses happen.
Other ways to attempt suicide are less fatal and more complex, giving you more chances to back out.
Harvard on the, powerful link between gun ownership and suicide: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/
Due to my lifelong struggles with addiction, I have often contemplated suicide. Actually, one of my closest ex-girlfriends off-handily remarked 20 years ago that she thought suicide might be the only answer for me, after doing everything in her power to help me over a 3 year period.
You see, she intimately saw the pain that my self-inflicted junkie lifestyle dispensed to others and, on a much deeper level, myself.
Today, I continue to live in the wreckage that I so carelessly created, with a brother whom will not talk to me no matter what I do and old friends whom don't return calls, and I'll be honest...life is pretty bleak when family and friends no longer exist.
Why is it that some, often ancient, cultures not-only-tolerate but almost-glorify suicide when an individual has lost their self respect or has been publicly shamed?
Maybe suicide isn't the worst possible option there is.
I remember earlier very open minded posts from you. Thank you.
I can relate a bit about the loss of family and friends and feeling desolated. While it is true you might not be able to replace your family, it is possible to make new friends.
It worked for me and I have never been happier, even without the family.
I will put my email in my profile. Keep going.
I used to do bike trails[1] and also rode every stunt on every double black trail on the North Shore in Vancouver. [2]
I know the feeling being described here, and I'd venture it is the _real_ reason people engage in these sports.
There is a calm when pulling off a really risky stunt, like gapping handrails or riding along a skinny elevated log, and it can be addictive.
>“I’m more comfortable on my bike, jumping, than I am walking down the street,” says Ryan Nyquist, 37, who still competes.
After doing trials for years, I would often say to people that I'd feel more comfortable riding my bike off a big dropoff rather than jumping down to land on my feet.
I can personally attest, that that feeling is hard to give up. I had to stop riding trials at around 37 because of damage to my spine, which thankfully remained limited.
Many of my cycling friends report missing it as well.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkfYm-rnfFI [2] http://www.pinkbike.com/video/222711/
(I am not either of the riders depicted the linked videos, just included them for context. Also I never came close to riding at Ryan Leech's level, who is also a very nice guy.)
Not being able to get into that flow is a dangerous thing because you'll always be searching.
I found it again in surfing. And luckily, the wipeouts are not so hard on the body in surfing, well most of the time. :-)
Someone very close to me committed suicide and this is exactly how I felt. I resolved to never look past this symptom again and try and be more active in how I respond in the future, if I ever see it again.
At the time, I remember feeling helpless and unsure how to help. If I could do it over again, I'd just be there and offer to listen more than I did. I'm not saying this would have made the difference, but it's what I would do in the future.
Sorry to hear abut your experience - that's rough.
Just listening is important.
> At the time, I remember feeling helpless and unsure how to help. If I could do it over again,
People might be interested in ASIST (Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training) courses.
You don't have to be someone working with people with mental illness or people who have declared suicidal intent.
https://www.livingworks.net/programs/asist/
https://www.mind.org.uk/media/112813/Applied-Suicide-Interve...
What physically competitive sport has no threat of falling and hitting your head?
How much "brain damage" is caused by the psychological and physiological effects of a sedentary life-style?
People are more than free to choose which sports are worth their inherent risk. The problem is that that risk isn't actually well understood scientifically, and generally people are totally ignorant of what little information is known.
Sports may be worth the risk (I think they are), but that doesn't mean we should give up on discovering what the risk is.
According to your uninformed comment, perhaps some?
CTE is not a joke, and isn't the product of a few head bumps. The fact that you put brain damage in quotes, as if the brain isn't actually damaged from such things, is beyond ignorant.
Maybe start here:
I was trying to point out that we are overly focused on the easily measured (negative) effects. His life-style also had positive effects, but they were not instantaneous.
Knowing what led him to suicide is infinitely more complex that asking "how many times did he bonk his head?".
I suspect I'm in the extreme minority though.
I personally think that programming is a pastime that contributes more to depression than any cycle sport does.
Also, the Netherlands is unusual in being so cycling-friendly. I suspect risk is much higher almost everywhere else on the planet.
The type and magnitude of injury one can sustain from BMX freestyle riding, particularly vert riding, is just not in the same category as the kinds of injury you'd sustain cycling in the traditional sense (short of getting hit by a car, which is also probably more likely for freestyle riders).
So, yes, get on your bike (or kayak, or running shoes, or whatever) and get daily exercise. That's a great idea. But, "extreme" sports are called that for a reason, and they do subject your body to much more significant risk of injury, possibly even serious injury. There is already good science linking repeated concussions to depression and other mental illness; and it's not crazy to suggest these folks are getting more concussions than the general populace (when I was involved in these kinds of sports, I had friends who joked about how many concussions they'd had while skating or biking).
I'm agreeing with everybody in this thread, I think, but the notion that "doing sports" is what Mirra was doing is sort of like saying a hurricane is "some wind", and that it's a healthy lifestyle is misleading. He was fit, obviously, but had also suffered numerous major injuries throughout his life, many of which likely still caused him pain and reduced mobility, even years after they'd healed. Concussions were almost certainly among the injuries he sustained.
If I'm not getting paid to do something, at some point the life impact risk is not worth it.
Stigma kills.
Some projects are aimed at tackling suicide in men. The UK has CALM Zone (The Campaign Against Living Miserably) and Australia has Soften the Fuck Up.
http://softenthefckup.spurprojects.org/
Perhaps people in the US know of good quality initiatives? (Certainly the "Zero suicide" stuff from Detroit has been useful for me when I'm trying to change people's attitudes that death by suicide is somehow inevitable for some populations.)
> Another says it didn’t happen exactly that way. But whatever went down, by the time the friend arrived at the truck, parked just outside, Mirra was already dead, a suicide, the police established, with no room to hope it was a mistake. When Mayor Thomas arrived at the scene, the front door of the truck was open and family members were beginning to arrive. Mirra’s friends and the cops all stood around, “staring at the rain, like, What in the world has happened?”
> In the tiny, tight-knit clan of 40-something BMXers, many could not believe that Mirra intended to commit suicide.
Some people wonder why the US's suicide rate is lower than the UK. This paragraph snippet hints at some of the difficulties in counting deaths by suicide.
If I shoot my self is that a death by suicide? Or an accidental death? If I overdose on opiate pain meds was that a deliberate choice, or an accident caused by confusion?
You can't leave it to coroners - there's too much variability (some didn't want to rule a death as suicide because they thought the family would find that too distressing) and because death by suicide has to be proved beyond all reasonable doubt while most other deaths can use the balance of probability.
The UK uses this definition:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
> Statistics on causes of death produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) are based on the information provided at death registration. These statistics are provided to the Department of Health on an annual basis. Open verdicts are generally coded by the ONS as deaths from injury or poisoning of undetermined intent. When national statistics are presented, suicides and deaths of undetermined intent are combined. This reflects research studies which show that the majority of open verdicts are most likely suicides, although they do not meet the high legal standard of evidence required for a coroner to record a suicide verdict. Therefore official suicide rates are measured by a definition that is broader than the definition of suicide used by coroners.
> In the remainder of this update we use the term suicide to refer to deaths from both intentional self-harm and injury or poisoning of undetermined intent.
The US uses a different definition:
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/definitions.ht...
> Suicide
>Death caused by self-directed injurious behavior with an intent to die as a result of the behavior.
If the US used the UK definition suicide would be the leading cause of death for men aged between about 11 to about 49. Suicide is still common in people over 50, but other causes of death (heart disease, cancer) start taking over.
Even with their tighter definition suicide is a leading cause of death in the US - ranked second for ages 10 to 34. (But see all that unintentional injury ahead of it) http://www.cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_of...