Quick PSA: If you are contemplating suicide you should reach out to professionals for help. You are not alone in this struggle and deserve to be happy and live a fruitful life. What do you have to lose by talking with a professional?
I survived a suicide attempt at age 17. I'm 53. I'm still frequently suicidal, in part because of an incurable medical condition, in part because the world is a shitty place, full of really shitty people.
I have not made a second attempt. There are myriad factors there. One is that if I'm stuck here, it's better to be stuck here without extra medical bills and people assuming me to be incompetent. My life is hard enough without those additional burdens.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18466273
It's probably not politically correct or socially acceptable for people to run around saying too much "I wish I had succeeded because my life still sucks." It's also basically counterproductive.
I often wish I had simply not been born or had died years ago when I was in the midst of a serious medical crisis or would just "wake up dead." Going to sleep and "waking up dead" has been a common fantasy of mine since at least my teens.
I just don't run around harping on that constantly. It would be nothing but trouble for me and is potentially a good way to inadvertently encourage others to finally off themselves. I consider that irresponsible, so I generally don't publicly say things like "I don't understand why more people with my medical condition don't kill themselves." Other people with my medical condition don't need to run across that opinion on the internet every time they turn around, so I mostly keep such thoughts to myself or share them only with my adult sons.
I have a Dread Disease. What it does to your life is horrible. There is no real hope of a cure. I am slowly getting better by pursuing "alternative" stuff (diet and lifestyle, mostly) and I get constantly attacked and dismissed for talking about that.
Being constantly attacked and dismissed instead of getting the support I need to succeed makes me suicidal. But the fact that I am slowly getting better means my life is vastly better than it is supposed to be and I know what it is supposed to look like and if I genuinely believed in my heart of hearts that what doctors told me was all I could expect -- that people like me don't get well and I can look forward to a long, slow and torturous decline ultimately resulting in death -- then I likely would have killed myself.
And other people with CF don't really need to run into my thoughts on that when it means essentially that I am left-handedly saying "Why don't you just go kill yourself already?" (or could be interpreted as such -- that's certainly not my actual intent)
It's not my business to decide how much they should be willing to endure. It's not my business to decide how much they should value life and try to survive in the face of that. I would consider it irresponsible behavior for me to constantly harp on that. So I don't.
But it doesn't mean that I don't think such things. So I can well imagine that a lot of people who wish they were dead just aren't sharing that information constantly because they aren't assholes.
Which is a very long way of saying "We don't actually know, so please stop trying to claim that we can infer X when we really can't."
Selfishness cuts both ways - what if they had kids? Or other responsibilities? Just like they didn't ask for the experience, their kids didn't ask for it too.
But yeah, I agree with your larger point
Remember this point, when a person commits suicide they most deeply hurt the people that love them the most. Is that right? Is that fair? They don't hurt the people that don't care about them, they hurt the ones that love them. It's such a cruel, unjust thing to do.
Everyone dies eventually. Having a loved one kill themselves vs any other reason, you can never really get over it. It's just a punishment to the ones that love you that continues on. So we are left with two reasonable options. First that you do it out of spite and anger to intentionally hurt people that love you. Don't need to talk about that, that's just wrong. Second, you think no one loves you.
So that last case, if really no one does love you, it's still not noble. It is the ultimate quitting, the ultimate admission of defeat. And it is irreversible. You feel this way now, at this moment, but you give up the chance to feel another way ever, for any redemption.
A wise person once told me that arrogance/selfishness and depression were two sides of the same coin; an unnatural focus on self. Life is not worth living? Fine. Die to yourself. Stop thinking about yourself. Your life sucks, its going to suck, fine. Start thinking about other people. You are walking dead already, but you still have a brain and some abilities. Do something for someone else.
Another extremely wise teacher, who tried to convince people to love each other, said this: "If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me." meaning before you could be like him and live for others first you need to die to yourself. And then he said that those people would find true life.
Edit: I'm not just saying this and telling suicidal people to suck it up. I've been through this personally from all these angles. I'm sharing what I have experienced and what worked for me.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/anthony-bourdain-...
If thinking about suicide as a form of giving up helped you our of your funk, then more power to you. I don't have any real experience on the matter, but I want to share this as not everyone relates to your experience and sees suicide as a form of giving up.
I think, in the end, they decided that it both was and was not selfish. It was selfish, in the regard that you're putting yourself ahead of others in terms of you being at peace while knowing others are going to hurt (and this person was found by their child-age daughters...), but they also said we can't really know it's truly selfishness because we have no clue what they're going through. We literally can't put ourselves in their shoes to see if there might have been another way out, etc. It was quite an insightful discussion, one I would've never expected from these kids.
Also, I know there are a lot of other reasons to kill yourself (onset of terminal disease, etc.) but I would wager the vast majority are rooted in unhappiness.
UK: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/suicide/
Other countries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines
The service I called was Lifeline Australia. I suggest that if you don't want to experience the absolutely dire and abusive mental health system that you don't call them. They may say they are confidential, but they aren't. Even after I made an official complaint about their lack of warning on their phone system (which states they are confidential!) they have done nothing about this. It really feels like they are trying to trick people into calling no matter what.
If you don’t mind me asking, do you think that comments like mine are self serving / and ineffective at actually preventing suicide?
Saying stuff like "you are not alone" while referring people to an unspecified "professional" is completely empty. It feels like a slap in the face. It belittles very real problems that people actively try to shut suicidal people up about.
I'm dirt poor. I have been for years. People here aren't comfortable hearing that. They seem to fear I'm asking for a handout.
I appear to be the highest ranked woman here. I had hoped to use HN to network. That hasn't been very effective. Pretty much every time I comment on that and suggest that my gender is a barrier to me resolving my financial problems, someone jumps up to inform me that I am wrong and stupid and HN simply isn't a good means to network and my gender is not an issue and sexism is not an issue and, also, I'm just a loser, basically, among other things.
Men routinely tell each other here "You must be very competent because you have so much karma on HN." No one says that about me. When I point out I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard, I'm dismissed, belittled, accused of being obsessed with ridiculous, empty and meaningless internet points etc ad nauseum ad infinity.
I have a diagnosis of atypical cystic fibrosis. Talking about that at all is typically drama. I have spent more than 17 years getting myself well. No, no one is writing articles about that. Instead, I get attacked for trying to say anything about health topics. I basically get called a liar, deluded and a teller of tall tales who can't possibly know anything whatsoever useful about medical anything.
If I say anything about my accomplishments in life, I'm accused of making stuff up, exaggerating and generally being full of crap.
Absolutely the only thing anyone is willing to believe is that I spent years homeless. That's basically it. And longstanding and intractable poverty is absolutely not a reason for anyone here to hire me, promote my work, help me figure out how to make money, etc. No, it's apparently just evidence that I must not have any valuable skills or knowledge that is worth any money whatsoever and fuck me, not their problem.
I've been here over nine years. The negative treatment I get on HN is one of the things that makes me suicidal. The blatantly obvious sexism involved in my intractable poverty that everyone routinely denies is one of the things that makes me suicidal. The fact that I have to walk on eggshells and not state that too frequently or too bluntly also contributes to me being suicidal. And most of the time I don't want to poke too much at that in part because being banned from HN would make my life even worse, and in part because a large part of the psychological anguish there is due to a short list of awful people who specifically crapped all over me in specific. So it isn't really fair to hold all members equally accountable for the incredibly bad behavior of a few people. On the other hand, there are any number of other people who could have helped me and thereby completely wiped out the importance of those negative experiences to my life. So it also doesn't really make sense to say it's just that short list of awful people and not "everyone."
And I carry that psychological load every single day and every time I log in here and I get zero credit from anyone, much less the short list of awful people in question, for not turning that into public drama on HN during an incredibly difficult time in my life that has lasted for years.
So listening to some paragraph long PSA referring me to some nebulous "professional" knowing the nine years of nonsense I've endured just makes me see red. Because I'm absolutely sure you wouldn't do anything at all to redress any of those wrongs right here on HN, much less cure my medical condition or give me the cash to buy a house (or do a fund raiser if you aren't that rich), not because you couldn't try to find ways to help redress some of my problems to some degree, but because you honestly don't actually care. It's not your problem and you aren't actually going to help.
So I find it monstrously uncompassionate akin to flipping me a bird for being poor, stupidly having been born female and making the egregious mistake of having a genetic disorder.
And that description is going to generally be true for most people who are suicidal. They are generally going to have one or more serious personal problems that the world at large neither wants to help with nor wants to hear too much about because it makes them uncomfortable. The specifics will vary, but, in a nutshell, suicidal people have big problems and they routinely get met with an attitude that they aren't really supposed to talk about them and they can't expect real help for any of that.
I just want my life to work. That's it. That's all I want. And I've literally spent years working miracles to try to get there and I still can't get there largely due to social BS.
I see PSAs of this sort to be more of that pattern of social BS where the entire world wishes me well and hopes my problems get better... Just don't expect them to help and "take your issues elsewhere, honey. Not my problem. You can be not alone with someone else, not me."
I have to agree. It sounds and feels like saying "don't worry, someone else has it worse" which I think people say thinking that should be comforting when, in reality, it feels more like an excuse to ignore and even belittle your misfortune.. "yeah, whatever, fuck me then"
> I see PSAs of this sort to be more of that pattern of social BS where the entire world wishes me well and hopes my problems get better... Just don't expect them to help and "take your issues elsewhere, honey. Not my problem. You can be not alone with someone else, not me."
Yeah. Being wished well with no help really gets old.
Another thing that gets old is giving testimony as to the problem space and then having a bunch of internet strangers pile on to make random suggestions of half-baked ideas like I'm just stupid. It's refreshing to see my actual point engaged.
In the South, the correct polite expression is God Bless. I'm not religious and I don't know the correct expression on the internet. I just want to leave some kind of meaningful acknowledgement of your comment and I don't know what that would be.
America is not a society where anything happens without money.
In eastern countries, there are easy to go community centers like temples, churches, local social organizations, festivals etc., all for free. Just go in. There is always someone to reach out to. There are always welcoming people.
I know you want to believe that the world is a good place and someone who's suffering enough to consider death as an alternative can be helped easily and cheaply, but that just isn't the reality we live in. My experience is that free help is a bunch of minimum-effort volunteers. Depression can be a very complicated thing and it isn't well understood by very many people, often even the expensive professionals just throw drugs at it.
I know the original comment was at the individual level, but from a big picture perspective I do think "money" definitely matters. Specifically, the United States health care system lacks compared to other rich nations when it comes to coverage and accessibility. Based on an ecological study I found (https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/16669716) it seems like there's a definite link between suicide rates and this issue -- factors like funding for mental health and insurance coverage matter a lot here.
Why are people getting medical support from a religious organisation? Why aren't they getting evidence-based treatment from healthcare professionals?
Also, the differences in religious institutions in east and west is also vast. Food, shelter, and healtchare are provided for free by thousands of churches in the United States, I'm not familiar with anything similar in the East and I've spent many years there.
Heck, an entire political party blames individuals under duress for their own financial condition.
This would not happen as much in the east. While time value of money exists, life so cheap that people can take time off, anytime in their life, just go to a church and heal. And no political party will blame them for their financial condition. They will always get resources from other people, for free, just because they are in need.
I understand that the question might be unpopular, but think about it. Suicide is well within the realm of self-determination. If a person decides, "I'm done.", why should we not allow that, or, seek to prevent it? We might say, "It causes harm to the family." So does divorce, but our society is practically giddy about out growing spouses as a sign of maturity and knowing ourselves better.
"It's so final for a temporary condition.", might be your next line. Is it temporary? Let's say you have actual depression. Not mild depression, but major, chronic depression. That's not temporary. Drugs don't appear to work. If they do, they're masking the problem. Stop them, I mean wean yourself off them, and you're back to being depressed. Why not allow people to end it?
To loop this back to the original question, why does one deserve, where deserve sounds like a right, to be happy? When did the Universe declare that? When did we vote on that? Ultimately this idea seems to be only emotive with no thought about the human condition and ability to make our own choices.
If we start saying you deserve happiness, then anything that makes you unhappy is an attack against your very being. It's a human rights violation. People are going to feel entitled to being blissful all the time. That is a danger road.
It is. This way lies truth. But one is too afraid to walk it. At the end of it is horror.