Suicide Attempters’ Long-Term Survival
hsph.harvard.edu
hsph.harvard.edu
Thanks in part to an incurable medical condition, I'm sometimes suddenly suicidal and basically deranged. At such times, my adult sons don't leave me alone.
They mostly try to avoid discussing it with me. They don't try to make me feel better or act like unpaid therapists because it not only doesn't work, it's actively counterproductive.
Their policy is to take care of me physically (food, drink, warmth), keep me company and "do not engage Teh Crazeh."
In other words, trying to argue with me at such times about how irrational I am amounts to adding fuel to the fire. It just makes me more upset.
I've lived with this a long time, so I'm often able to just tell them "I'm not right and can't be trusted to be alone right now."
As my health improves, such incidents have become fewer, farther between and shorter in duration. It happened a lot while homeless. It's been much less common since getting back into housing.
In depressive episodes your mind believes strongly in how hopeless your situation is. When people challenge that conviction, you'll only come up with more reasons, no matter how hare-brained or even psychotic at times. It's just the way it works...
This is a lot more complicated than you're making it out.
plenty of people kill themselves in front of their family. Others kill themselves when their family are in the home. Others kill themselves in public. Others kill themselves in hospital wards when they're on 15 minute observations. These are not a tiny fraction of the total number of people who kill themselves.
EDIT: I'm glad you've found something that works _for you_, but it's really important to recognise that your experience is not usual, and that many people would find it invalidating.
EDIT: Page 33. https://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=38469
> Living alone -- Women: 45% Men 50%
This shows that living alone is a risk factor, but it also shows that most people who die by suicide do not live alone.
Page 55 suggests that it's external support that helps, not support by the family:
> 149. In 834 (43%) the patient lived alone. They were less likely to receive additional social support from outside the home (e.g. from a relative, friend or neighbour) as part of their care plan compared to those who did not live alone (138, 44% excluding unknowns vs. 270, 71%
Some people don't have a strong intention to die but use a method with high lethality and do die.
> It can't hurt to try, at worst you'll only live a little longer.
Some people have abusive families that increase risk.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Are you implying a significant enough fraction of people that it bears discussing tries to commit suicide but doesn't really want to die? And even if this is the case, how is that relevant to what we were discussing?
> Some people have abusive families that increase risk.
I never said it had to be family did I? And even if this is true, why does the fact that this is true for some people mean that the average person should not try it at all?
Edit: Not even the original comment was saying it had to be family. They were talking about having company. I don't understand why you are suddenly making this about one specific set of people.
Yes. This is why some countries use "accidental death with undetermined intent" as part of their definition of suicide.
Some people self harm frequently and severely. When we talk to them we find out that they do not want to die; that they fear death. But their self harm is so severe and extensive that they are at risk of death. For example, we see people trying to engage with mental health services, trying to get treatment for their self harm, but continuing to self harm and then accidentally dying by overdose.
> I don't understand why you are suddenly making this about one specific set of people.
Suicide kills significant numbers of people. It's important that advice is evidence based. "Have company" is not evidence based. When we give incorrect advice it increases risk; people die.
A former homemaker telling her story on a discussion forum does not carry the same weight of authority as, say, the CDC in the US putting out official guidelines on how to deal with a suicidal person.
I'm not the only person who has found it helpful to deal with my own suicidal tendencies by seeking a "babysitter" in my social circle. President Lincoln was prone to being suicidal. It was his policy to never carry a pocket knife and to have friends keep him company when his dark moods struck.
I know there are other things I've read pertinent that support the idea that this is an effective approach for some people. I can't currently recall more and I'm in the midst of moving right this minute, plus you have an extremely long history of attacking me personally, wildly misinterpreting my remarks, etc.
I do my level best to view that pattern as due to you being British and me American -- "two nations separated by a common language" -- but the pattern is so consistent that it's quite difficult for me to keep doing that. I cannot recall a single instance where your interaction with me did not feel like a personal attack.
Taking it down from actively and openly ugly and hostile to politely shooting me down doesn't read on my end like you've had a change of heart and are trying to build bridges. It reads on my end like you've just gotten better at politely following the rules while pursuing a personal campaign to go after me for some reason.
If your actual concern is that you believe me to be giving advice in some authoritative fashion that suggests "this is the one and only proper answer" -- which I generally do my best to not do -- there are many ways to address that concern that don't come across like you don't want me speaking on this subject at all.
I will keep your stated concern in mind and perhaps not intro my remarks with PSA in the future. However, that wasn't used to suggest "this is authoritative advice on the topic." It was used to suggest "This is not a suicidal person crying on your shoulder. It is intended to be a constructive and thought-provoking addition to the conversation." because it's really common for people to engage with my remarks as if I'm looking for sympathy or advice or otherwise make it about me rather than about the topic at hand.
I'm well aware that I can opt to not tell my story, but other people here are usually not told they should never ever say anything about themselves if they don't want intrusive attention of that sort. There seems to be a gendered component to the pattern where simply knowing I'm a woman inspires a lot of people to want to make a personal connection with me, regardless of what I say, rather than engage with my point.
I've been here a decade. I've put in considerable effort to figure out how to better engage here to reduce the worst of the drama, but the reality is that I can't control nor even anticipate every single reaction of the five million people a month that visit this site and it's a moving target. If I solve for x, five minutes later I will be dealing with some new iteration of the problem.
My experience is a statistical outlier best case scenario. That's exactly the point of sharing it.
It took years for my sons to develop the details of this approach. Our lives got vastly better when they stopped replying to $crazything with attempted rebuttal and began replying with "Are you hungry? Thirsty? Warm enough?"
> Living alone -- Women: 45% Men 50%
This shows that living alone is a risk factor, but it also shows that most people who die by suicide do not live alone.
That is not directly salient to my point that the act of suicide tends to occur while physically alone, which is certainly not an assertion that it's 100% of the time.
I'm well aware that family can be part of the problem. Family was absolutely part of the problem when I attempted suicide at age 17.
It's generally not constructive to assume the worst about total strangers on the internet and lecture them as if they must be abusive people if they have a relative who is prone to suicidal ideation. In fact, that approach tends to make problems worse.
Abusive situations don't necessarily start with any intent to abuse. They can occur because someone either feels responsible or actually is legally responsible and doesn't have adequate knowledge or tools for coping effectively.
Desperate attempts to control another person in order to avoid X outcome easily turn abusive. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
Sometimes simply knowing that it's possible to get through it in a humane and constructive fashion is sufficient to allow more rational impulses to rule the day. Giving in to a sense of desperation or hopelessness is typically not a good thing when facing serious problems.
Having people around you who can support you while maintaining their own boundaries, without getting themselves involved or colluding with that state of mind you’re in, can be really powerful. It means you’re still being treated like a human being who has needs beyond what they are panicking about in the moment.
Anecdotally, I’ve been through far too many of those kinds of breakdown to count and I was grateful when the friend I was with (who understood the underlying causes) asked if I needed a hug, or said “I love you,” and basically didn’t react to whatever I’d started crying about. I could be another statistical outlier in that sense but there was always a better alternative than engaging the conversation, and making it more real. You can probably guess that was family related.
It can also be invalidating and harmful. I've met far more people for whom it's harmful than I have who were helped by it.
It's also causing harm to those other people: a relative who attempts suicide will increase your own risk of suicide.
I've spoken to a lot of people who had a relative who died by suicide. Many of them had carer roles for their loved ones. Every single one of them who had this carer role spoke about the huge amount of guilt they now feel, and about their own significant increase in risk of death by suicide.
which is ? seriously wondering
If your happy but very drunk friend wanted to tapdance on the edge of a tall building, would you restrain them if necessary? Or if someone high on shrooms was trying to drink bleach?
A suicidal mind is often one caught in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality, even if it comes from internal wiring going haywire instead of external substances.
Preventing someone from killing themselves is in their best interest most of the time for that reason. Suicidal impulses are most often fleeting relative to normal lifespan.
I'm not confident that stopping someone would have the same effect as them living through it.
For me, yes, the failed attempt has served as a deterrent. Due to various intractable issues, my life has sucked for a long time. Adding more scars, more people thinking I'm merely crazy and more medical bills won't in any way enhance my life.
I don't want to survive another failed attempt and I'm usually in no position to make sure I succeed.
So, for me, yes, it's been a factor.
/Anecdata
One way of threading this needle is to perform attempts which are obviously going to fail, maybe eben intentionally so.
It may take any kind of attempt, be it intentionally or accidentally unsuccessful to lead to treatment or at least the acknowledgement of all parties involved that the problem is actually bigger than a bout of self-pity or lack of character.
Suicide figures are usually given on an annual basis, but we often mistake the figures for lifetime risk, and we are then surprised with how common suicide is within our own experience/extended acquantancy.
correct me if i fudge my math. 1- 1/5000 =.9998. .9998^72 = .985702, thus <1.5% chance of suicide over a life time.
.1 is still appallingly high vs .015 (and I think 1/5000 is actually a generous estimate, rates are age adjusted so its hard to apples to apples, but according to wikipedia its 13.42 / 100k - much less than 1/5k).
There are multiple conditions which can lead to depressive symptoms and suicidal tendencies. Some are more malign than others, which is a strange thing to say about conditions that make you want to kill yourself. But basically, suicidality in bipolar patients can only be significantly reduced by exactly one specific medication.
And yes, I was referring to Lithium as the only medication which significantly reduces the incidence of suicide attempts in bipolar patients. But that effect is only visible long-term.
About half of people who die by suicide have a history of self harm, and in the year after attending A&E for self harm people are at 30* to 50* the risk of dying by suicide.
We need the short term intervention to save life, and we need an intense package of community support for the next few months addressing the full range of bio-psycho-social needs of the patient.
We're not getting this right in the UK at the moment. I can't speak about the US.
https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs34
> The term self‑harm is used in this quality standard to refer to any act of self‑poisoning or self‑injury carried out by a person, irrespective of their motivation. This commonly involves self‑poisoning with medication or self‑injury by cutting. Self‑harm is not used to refer to harm arising from overeating, body piercing, body tattooing, excessive consumption of alcohol or recreational drugs, starvation arising from anorexia nervosa or accidental harm to oneself.
This definition excludes drug use, but that would be covered elsewhere. For example, the front page of NCISH (National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Self Harm, previously NCIS and Homicide by MH patients) has this (under "improving safety in mental health services"): https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/ncish/
> Reducing alcohol and drug misuse
> We recommend there are drug and alcohol services available that work closely with mental health services for patients with mental illness and alcohol and drug misuse.
> Our evidence
> Only a minority of patients who died by suicide between 2006 and 2016 were in contact with specialist substance misuse services, despite alcohol and drug misuse being a common antecedent of patient suicide in all UK countries. In England, there was a 25% fall in rates of suicide by patients in those NHS Trusts which had put in place a policy on the management of patients with co-morbid alcohol and drug misuse. Guidance
The article is about people whose suicide attempts failed, and ended up with them alive in hospital. Of these people, only about 10% will successfully suicide later.
There is no connection between these incidents and your justification for restraining suicidal people against their will. I am certain that there is evidence to support your claim, but this is not it.
If 90% who survived suicide did not attempt suicide again it sort of does suggest that had more people survived their suicide impulses they would also be one-timers. Sadly, sometimes one impulse is the last.
I read about bridge jumpers who survived (I think it was the Golden Gate Bridge, FWIW) and most said the instant they left the bridge they had a rush of clarity and profoundly regretted what they had just done.
Haunts me still to think about the ones that didn't survive but likely had that same moment of horror.
It might also suggest that those who survived a suicide attempt used half-hearted measures because it was an impulsive act, while at least some (though we'll likely never know that actual proportion) of those who did not survive their attempt went to greater lengths to ensure their death because their act was more premeditated and planned out than impulsive.
What about the other 10%? Was there a second impulse, then a third one? Sad as it may be to contemplate, not all suicide is a spur-of-the-moment thing, some people will go to great lengths to get their affairs in order and ensure their own death.
Pulling people back from the brink might stop them trying this time, but perhaps it’s that moment of clarity after all the noise and chaos inside their head has finally been resolved by making a decision and following through, that leads them to recognise the more sensible decisions they should have taken.
It was hard to understand the differences I perception when depressed and not.
One day a doctor almost as an aside said "When you are depressed, you don't see the world the way it is, but you also can't comprehend that entirely or maybe at all."
I finally understood why it was just so different on either end of the depression and non depression world and also how far "off" my ability to understand certain things were.
Put another way, even if I wasn’t depressed, I’d still be single, diabetic and have a ton of debt. What about that would change?
- failing love relationship can also be pain, some love the peace of being single
- diabetic may be managed (maybe your case is harder though, I cannot assume it's easy)
- some can find support to fill debt and like to rise above it as a challenge
Much in life is interpretation, and accepting damaging emotions as truer than neutral or positive is not my favorite choice.
Best wishes
For another, the perception/prediction of effort is very much different. In a depressive episode patients will estimate all tasks as fundamentally harder, leading to huge problems in motivation and making decisions. It's quite analogous to how increased gravity on another planet would affect your movements and decisions about your movements.
When the capacity for enjoyment or positive emotions is reduced, you won't be seeking enjoyment as much. Which is a vicious cycle, of course.
So yes, depressive symptoms are a big hindrance, even if you have other big problems, none of which I would want to diminish.
In depressive episodes the sliders for "optimism", "motivation", "thrill seeking", "social behavior" would be significantly lower than they are normally.
But the idea that those traits are not constant goes much against our cultural programming, I think.
2) your ability to seek help to cope with it would chang
3) your perception of time is often different during an acute suicidal episode - time stretches out which makes this particular moment feel all-encompassing.
In your example, being single and having a lot of debt can change over time. But if you were in the throes of a depressive episode, then you might believe absolutely that neither of them can ever change because they haven't changed yet/they'll take so long/it's impossible for you to expend the effort needed to change them/[...].
The facts are the same, but the conclusions you draw are different.
Or may not, I don't know, but I would be weary about assertions about depression from a person who isn't, even if that person is a doctor.
While it is different to compare while depressed, I don't think it is hard to understand that other people who have similar problems / life situations are doing fine... and maybe they know something / do things differently.
That alone doesn't fix anything, but it is a place from where you can evaluate and understand that the world, possibilities, etc, while depressed, shrinks to some extent.
Well, it isn't.
If you are not, then please don't go and lord your believes about peoples lives over them.
Guns make it a lot easier to attempt suicide and achieve it. In the US, guns are often more readily available than medical treatment. If you have a gun laying around, and you have a short bout of suicidal ideation, that can be an unfortunate combination.
On top of that, people believe it will be less painful than other methods, increasing the appeal.
Virtually any other method of suicide takes more effort and time. The more time an attempt takes, the less probable the patients are to go through with it, and the more likely the attempt is discovered in time.
Virtually every country has its own culture around guns and around suicide. Very obviously in the case of Japan with high suicide rates and even ritualistic ways of suicide. Therefore it is impossible to isolate the effect of gun ownership just by looking at different countries.
And "not being the primary way of suicide" is a really weak argument against tightening gun controls to save people's lives. Even if it is "just" 10% in Europe, 30% in Switzerland and about 50% in the US. Those lives are very much worth saving, and at least in Europe, it's already the norm to take away guns from people who have these problems.
Gun advocates often cite Switzerland as a country with very responsible gun owners. Still, if you compare the rates of gun suicides, accidents and murder to their smaller population, it's still quite shocking. But those stories rarely make news abroad.
People are using method that they think is most successful, and if they own gun, it's very probable that they will use it.
>And "not being the primary way of suicide" is a really weak argument against tightening gun controls to save people's lives. Even if it is "just" 10% in Europe, 30% in Switzerland and about 50% in the US. Those lives are very much worth saving, and at least in Europe, it's already the norm to take away guns from people who have these problems.
This is a weak argument, because it implies that by taking guns, people won't commit suicide, when they may just do it by any other method.
Which the high rates of suicide in several other countries with way less gun ownership than in US point to.
By the way, using emotionally charged statements like "those lives are very much worth saving" when your interlocutor did not suggest anything otherwise is at the very least unpleasant discussion style.
That argument is correct; a major suicide prevention measure is taking away methods. When countries switched from coal gas to natural gas, suicide rate went down for this reason.
Suicide is largely a in-the-moment decision and guns make it very easy to act on it.
>Which the high rates of suicide in several other countries with way less gun ownership than in US point to.
I don't think that's true, they may just have a different culture that leads to more suicide. Gun ownership isn't the only difference between the USA and other countries.
They usually don't want to have any pain, but prefer to die instantly. No method checks as many of these boxes as using a gun.
I got the previous argument as saying exactly that the main method of suicide in Europe is hanging, and not shooting, and therefor taking guns away from most people who don't have a positive need to be armed or with doubts about their reliability wouldn't affect suicides in a significant manner. Otherwise citing that article makes no sense to me, since it actually points to guns being a major factor.
It's impossible to infer the effect of gun ownership on suicide rates by looking at countries. Too many confounding factors, too little number of countries. Same goes for states in the US.
Suicide is a very culturally shaped topic, and on top of that it is affected by the health system, economy and various other factors.
We know that method substitution does happen, but people would be using a less lethal method instead of a very lethal method so that alone will save lives. Also, not everyone will use a different method. We don't really know what the rates are for people switching methods.
Reducing access to means and methods is about the most important short term suicide prevention measure we can take, alongside all the other stuff we need to help people avoid falling into suicidal thinking.
Which also isn't the norm in most countries with mandatory military service.
Unfortunately, those guns are indeed regularly used in suicides and murders, often in a spur of a moment decision.
Switzerland’s murder rate is among the very lowest in Europe. Only Austria and several of the tinier countries even come close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
We know that alcohol and drug misuse is a risk factor for death by suicide, and that providing drug and alcohol services is a useful suicide prevention measure. See page 17 of this UK document: https://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=40697 (which also links to their evidence)
We know restricting access to means and methods is an important suicide prevention measure. We know this from some natural experiments. When the UK moved from coal gas to natural gas in the home one very common method was removed and we saw a reduction in suicide rates. We again saw a reduction when we introduced catalytic convertors in cars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWPEVhrWZS0&t=415s
It touches on how we define a death by suicide? What is counted? What is not counted?
In the US a death by suicide should be defined as: (page 21) https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/self-directed-vio...
> Suicide -- Death caused by self-directed injurious behavior with any intent to die as a result of the behavior.
The US data is complex and confusing because: (page 12) https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/self-directed-vio...
> Despite the large volume of data on certain types of SDV, the utility and reproducibility of the resulting information is sometimes questionable. Mortality data are problematic for several reasons: geographical differences in the definition of suicide and how equivocal cases are classified; jurisdictional differences in the requirements for the office of coroner or medical examiner affecting the standard of proof required to classify a death as a suicide; and differences in terms of the extent to which potential suicides are investigated to accurately determine cause of death.18 The quality of the data on nonfatal suicidal behavior is even more problematic than that of suicides. The concerns about discrepancies in nomenclature19-23 and accurate reporting11,24 apply here even more than with suicides. Also, except for rare exceptions there is neither systematic nor mandatory reporting of nonfatal suicidal behavior in the United States at the state or local level, nor is there routine systematic collection of non-suicidal intentional self harm data.
So it's really hard to compare one state with another state.
Define drugs. Does it include alcohol? Does the (slow) deterioration of alcohol abuse count? If not, does the one from methamphetamine count?
Mind you, you wrote impact. Impact can be positive as well. Does medicine like SSRIs count?
For example it's less effective. A lot of things have to go right, and the consequences of failure are severe, on all levels. Also there is a good chance of surviving in a very painful state.
And on top of that it can be extended suicide, meaning you'll harm or kill other people. Some want that. Most absolutely don't.
It seems like there is something about there being no turning back that totally transforms one's perspective. Why, after weeks, months, or years of planning suicide, are peoples' perspectives able to totally flip in an instant, precisely when it's too late?
Can't ever get that in VR unless somehow the subject does not realize it's fake.
OTOH, the most effective treatments we have for depression are almost a century old, have tons of awful side effects, and were discovered by accident (i.e. MAOIs and electroconvulsive therapy), so I'm not too optimistic in the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries.
While video games and paper money can remove threat of consequences, VR is still extremely good at triggering ancient, subconscious brain pathways e.g. fear of heights. If regret from suicide is similar to fearing heights, then perhaps it would actually be useful?
But it may take going to the edge to realize that you want to live and want to die at the same time. An irrational suicidal urge does not remove your survival instinct or will to live, it can only hide it, at best.
I believe that this conflict is at the center of many "strange" or counter intuitive behaviors around suicide.
How so? If there is little to no expected pleasure and considerable expected pain in the foreseeable future, why is it fundamentally more rational to wait it out or "fight" instead of giving up? Both seem rational choices to me even if I'd choose the former.
For another, a rational death wish can't really be reversed, especially not within minutes or hours, as seems to be the norm rather than the exception.
We tend to rationalize irrational drives or motivations. But that doesn't make them rational. Depressives can and will try to prove to others why they have to die. But the basis seems to be more a neurobiologic function than an objective evaluation of facts.
The very pessimistic philosopher Emil Cioran (author of e.g. De l'inconvénient d'être né, "The Trouble With Being Born") who beside his suicidal thoughts died at age 84 once said in an interview, that suicidal thoughts are paradoxically the reason, why he stayed alive: The knowledge of the choice to end existence if the suffering is too much makes it possible to endure its insufferableness.
Maybe it is this choice, to live or not, that makes a lot things bearable? And it's much harder if this choice is gone for whatever reason, in one direction or another?
https://www.kent.gov.uk/social-care-and-health/health/releas...
In England suicide prevention is a Public Health duty, and public health is normally located within local authorities (a form of local government). So there are a variety of suicide prevention approaches across the country, but they should all be informed by the national suicide prevention strategy.
Kent and Medway felt one problem was with "male help seeking behaviour". They did a lot of work to understand what this actually means, then they released material that appealed to men. They avoid use of mental health language (eg, "depressed"), and they use the words that men use themselves "knackered", "stressed", "regret" etc.) https://www.kent.gov.uk/__data/assets/image/0005/95009/relea...
Have you ever wanted to ask a girl out for weeks, months or years, only to realize you are completely incompatible once you get her? Life is like that, especially when you're younger :)
But it get's very complicated to distinguish self-harm and suicidal attempts.
I'd also admit that some patients need to come to the edge to see that they also don't want to die, maybe as much as they want to.
I hope you can learn from these experiences, that your will to live or at least your survival instinct has not gone away, even during such episodes, but was merely drowned out by an irrational mechanism.
The river is tidal and not always that deep. Luckily she didn't jump at low tide when she could have broken her legs or ended up crippled for life. As it happened she ended up in the mental health ward. I imagine they will put her on drugs such as lithium and she will lose her mind. Or they might find they have no reason to keep her in and she might discharge herself to try again.
However, if she had crippled herself then she would not be able to attempt the same thing - jumping off the bridge. But her body would be a living reminder constantly with her of a failed suicide attempt. There would be some impostor syndrome going on with that, people going the extra mile for her due to her being disabled, not through birth or accident but through a failed suicide attempt.
Due to the nuances of a suicide attempt I am not sure that the statistics in this article have much real meaning. Also, what comprises an attempt? A walk into the woods where no rope gets hung from any branch is still an aborted attempt if the intention on the first step was hanging. But actually jumping off the bridge is past that point of no return. There is grey area in this, the teenager taking too many pills can be put down as a 'cry for help' even if there is a point of no return being crossed.
Survival is also a grey area, not just in terms of physical quality of life but mental. The mental health wards of a hospital will put people on pills that take out the high and low notes of someone's mind, turning them into a functional zombie. Survival needs to be qualified as not needing the harsh medication that goes with being processed by the authorities.
The good thing about fear and pain is that they are universally useful, e.g. both when we are on the verge of being reckless and suicidal.
So I don't see the distinction you are trying to make.
For example when you have a serious infection, especially with fever, the immune systems triggers quite a few mental symptoms similar to depression, in an attempt to conserve energy, lessen the impact of the infection and maybe even limit your ability to infect others.
But depression exists for evolutionary reason to conserve energy when we are sick, to limit the risky behaviours like movements (jumping from rock to rock, running after a wild buffalo) etc...
But the problem is that the mechanism which can set us into depression can be tricked by our perception of the reality.
What your eyes see and what you sense does not only depend on your eyes or your senses but also on how your brain interprets those.
If your brain interprets a perfectly sunny day as warning for really long winter, your system can be tricked into sending yourself into depressive state.
Now this can happen for variety of reasons like family problems, where you see your mom and dad hating each other while you were still developing at age 5, your brain development is affected and you sense more danger and pessimism than what a normal person would sense.
I posted over a year ago in a desperate attempt to find a job that I could do despite all my issues. I'd been fighting for that for years. Because there is no social system where I am, not one that helps people. Culture here is about bootstraps and anyone who doesn't pull them or have them is a mooch loser who "deserves" what they get. I couldn't get myself anywhere better because of my issues. So I had to try and make due in the same grind but with far less ability and energy. One kind soul, the only one in all this time, offered such a job and I tried to get there, things got worse for me from a few sides and I slid back and couldn't go. I am still TRYING and hoping, but hope isn't enough. You have to be able to act, and the ground has to stay under you and not collapse.
We all know how difficult work and earning can be even when we are young and healthy and love what we do, imagine doing it when in constant pain, with no family who loves you, with no access to high quality medical care. Imagine seeing everyone around you grind and be exhausted and not having the opportunity and endurance they do. Not being able to go home and enjoy something after work because it takes all your mettle just to survive a day.
I have taken to using HN to vent my feelings on this topic when it comes up, and probably sound like a one trick pony. I am not even sure I care anymore. I used to worry what impression I would leave. That I might upset someone or ruin an ally with my depressive state. It all seems like it is irrelevant now as I won't make it anyway. Years ago when I still had some shreds of bootstraps I couldn't get any help from people or systems. I am incredibly resentful because I believe I could have built something then to get through this life and do some good. Now I feel most of the time like I won't make it regardless. I feel only social support/financial security/medical access would even possibly give me a chance..and society and family have decided I am not "worth" that. My value has been recorded and notated. You cannot really beat a system like that. Once you lose you means to grind and become a drain on profits you become a thing to be disposed of rather than a person. Nobody WANTS to be in these shoes. Nobody CHOOSES it.
Until next time...or not...
I do. When I'm acknowledging my worst depressive tendencies, I feel so much resentment for the way we're told that living revolves around constant productivity and being valuable to others. I think when I want an "out", I really just want to be out of that.
I've had these feelings my whole life though. When I was 14, I was 100% sure I would never make it to 18. I ended up getting hospitalized and changing schools midway through highschool. The therapy and drugs didn't really help the root cause, but the experience made me feel like I had permission to fail in a way. I felt I then knew what it was like to be completely useless and written off by everyone as without value, but it was sort of empowering in a weird way. I felt like I was in the bonus-round of a video game. Not chasing death but not really afraid of it either. Later on, I realized I was less angry with the world when I just accepted myself as a hopeless outlier with no intention of properly assimilating and that people's expectations of me were going to end up aligning accordingly anyhow.
But I think some people need ways to "drop-out", at least for a period. Back in the past, I think monasteries let people with that need escape. I don't know how we're expected to do it today. I wish I did.
I have a clear before/after mindset due to my circumstances. I have great empathy for people who have felt this way their entire life and known nothing else. I don't know if that's easier or harder overall but its equally as miserable in the present moment. As long as our right to live, get healthcare, basic human things, is tied entirely to our ability to earn within a system that is dependent on competing with others and continually "winning", lots of people are going to get left behind. And for many that's fine and those people "deserve" it.
People who truly believe that what you describe is "ok" are far more broken than you and I will ever be. They may not know it or see the consequences, but that doesn't change the basic reality of the situation.
When you live within a system that does this to people, what options do we have? We can try to skate by and learn to be thankful for the scraps thrown our way, we can withdraw altogether, or we can try to change things, knowing that change can only be attempted at great personal cost and risk. For me, after I had accepted that I could withdraw at any time, the risks that come from attempting to bring about change are less scary.
I don't know which path you are on in world, but I wish you luck all the same and just wanted to let you know you're not wrong. The world is a messed up place. Selfishly, I'd like to have you around - even if it's only to point out the truth of it on HN as you've been doing. The truth is always valuable and every once in a while, something will resonant with someone in some way, and that means something. Your comment certainly resonated with me.
One thing that feels well-spent time for me is, fighting for men’s rights. Can only be done by suicidal people, because people will smash you for opposing feminism. But men need guys who can do it, so I do it, and I lose friend after friend, family, workplaces, NGOs (I used to help refugees) (well, I’ve done the whole charity experience, been everywhere, I’ve always donated a lot) and I’m kicked from social network after social network. Male feminists would dream of seeing me die in a mass grave, anonymously like a USSR political opponent. And that’s exactly how it will end up.
But it is really hard to take myself from the bootstraps and write another blog article, film another video or explain another thing about it. On the positive side, thousands of men have stunning words when they discover my work, like « I was sure, thanks for gathering the statistics » or « I’ve been looking for a channel like yours, who understands men, for 2 years » or « I’ve been watching your videos straight on for the last 72 hours ».
It’s cheerful, but what I wanted was, a (sane) wife, probably a sane world who cares as much for men as for women, a bit of love, and building something. And being millionaire doesn’t change anything to that. Suicide by defending men’s rights against the lies that feminists say.
It's low-priority because guns are much scarier on the news than their actual death counts warrant. More people die in car accidents every year than have died in the entire history of the United States in mass shootings--yet mass shootings are disproportionately used as a talking point. Yearly motor deaths are an order of magnitude more frequent than gun deaths, and that's if you count the more than half of gun deaths which are suicides--if you want to protect yourself from guns, simply not owning a gun is an effective measure. If liberals took proportional action with regard to harm on car safety to how we act on gun safety, we'd be pushing for frequent re-testing for licenses, lower speed limits, easier loss-of-licenses for repeat bad drivers, stricter drunk driving laws, etc. But that's not what's happening.
It loses us a lot of battles, because it alienates a lot of potential allies. True libertarians, for example, tend to be fairly pro-choice, but don't feel strongly about it, but very pro-gun, and feel very strongly about it. We'd have them on our side in votes relevant to abortion a lot more often if we didn't alienate them with regards to gun rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Mass shooting != gun violence. Roughly the same order of magnitude of people die from motor vehicles & firearms in the U.S., but very few people die from mass shootings.
I think I would agree liberals may overly focus on mass shootings because handguns are killing most of the people but gun violence is a real problem.
For example, whenever the pro-choice side hears someone from the other side propose regulations about requiring permits for clinics that perform abortions (something that in principle they might agree to), they fear that the person proposing the regulations isn't really pro-choice but only says that because outright banning abortion would not be politically feasible, thus they fear (rightfully so, since it has happened) those regulations will be so onerous or badly implemented that it will result in a de-facto ban on abortion, maybe those permits will be very hard to get or maybe the organization handing them out will be understaffed and underfunded (or both). Similarly, whenever someone who is pro-guns hears someone talking about mental health checks before owning guns (also something they might agree with in principle), for example, what they fear is that this system will be abused to deprive as many individuals as possible of their rights without due process.
Thus, in this situation, neither debate will move forward because pro side does not believe that the anti side is proposing any legislation in good faith, and the reason they believe so is that in many cases that has blatantly been the case, leading to farther spreading of the divide.
Additionally, as you say, someone might be both pro-choice and pro-guns but the political situation is such that they have to choose one or the other, and thus they choose the one they hold dearer to them, usually one that affects them more personally. Unfortunately for the pro-choice crowd, gun control laws seem to personally affect more people in the US than abortion laws.
To be fair, when speaking freely, the pro-life side admits that this is their goal. That is, most pro-life advocates proudly admit that outlawing abortion is their goal. The pro-choice side is so wary of these additional regulations because (as they are currently proposed) (a) their only possible outcome is to close lots of clinics, and (b) the argument that these regulations improve patient care is laughable.
Contrast that with the gun-control debate, where the mainstream gun-control "side" is not advocating for a ban of all guns. Yes, they are in favor of banning some forms of guns (i.e. guns which were banned in the late 90s in the US) and things like mental health and better background checks, but a complete banning of guns is not something that they are arguing for.
In the abortion debate, the "reasonable regulations" are always proposed by abolitionists. The goal is never to make abortion safe and available, it's always to make it burdensome and difficult for both the provider and the patient. Newly empowered by the Trump administration and the sense that they have a new supreme court that will agree with them, they're dropping this tactic and have resumed pushing for abolition.
(I don't own any guns but this screams nanny state to me)
Guns might serve some purposes in some situations. It's just an incredibly lousy tool for "defending ourselves", with negative utility on average.
If you have a source, it would help.
Gun ownership has benefits, but safety is not one of them.
Much like how most home robberies take place in the day, the perception of safety from gun ownership is at odds with reality. Hell, you are 25% more likely to be robbed in Alaska than New York State.
Another point to make is that there's an undercurrent of personal responsibility. The danger presented by having a gun in your home is something that can be managed if you are a responsible gun owner, but the risk of violence against your self is not something you can easily control. This is the important part, owning a gun for self defense is not about making you safer, it's about transferring the risk from something you have no control over to something you have some measure of control over.
Thus, arguing that owning guns increase your risk of dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wounds holds no weight with people who want to own guns, since it's a fundamental misunderstanding of why one would want to own a gun for self defense.
That said, feeling more secure is by far the most likely situation. While it’s far safer to leave your house in the event of a home invasion than to confront the robbers. Feeling like you can defend yourself is empowering.
Also, you cannot really measure how often a gun saves a life. On the other hand, you can measure the number of gun accidents and according to Wikipedia they’re less than 1% of gun related deaths which puts them at about 130 per year. IIRC staircases kill about 350 people per year (US numbers).
I would advocate some kind of mandatory safety training for gun owners, but it’s really not the big point here. Measures like banning guns altogehter, I think, miss the point as well. Some places seem to do well with high gun ownership rates, so there must be something else at play that causes the US’s high rates of gun violence. More effort should be put into examining and fixing that in place of steamroller tactics and fearmongering like in that Vox article.
It’s false to say it’s extremely rare.
Partly this is because there is little reporting and data collection that can capture situations where a gun is presented but not fired, but also because of the deterrent effect.
I do — it's a constitutional right because it is a fundamental ('essential') human right. A free citizen (i.e., not a child or prisoner) has a right to wield violence in defense of himself, others and property; to restrict that right (as opposed to restricting unjust exercises of violence) is IMHO fundamentally unjust.
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/03/42901...
And here you have a more Soviet styled recipe for eggs:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/chart-of-the-day-us-g...
Someone with a >3x greater than average likelyhood of getting shot might bring it down to 3x by having a gun themselves.
Probably we should start with television. Sure, people get some enjoyment from owning a TV, but think of how much they aren't exercising. Surely owning a TV dramatically increases the probability you are going to be obese and eventually develop heart disease. You are way more likely to watch a TV if you have a TV in your own house.
We should probably allow people to buy and sell whatever they want. Who cares if hitmen murder people, the people demand more hitmen!!! Hitmen can kill people that want to kill me, which makes me feel safe!!! Who cares if my judgement is extremely arbitrary and the hitmen are 3x more likely to shoot me than the people I want killed. Awesome. You've really opened my eyes here.
For all the other laws we can evaluate them based uhhhh, not on their pros and cons.
Once upon a time, there was a wise Zen master. People traveled from far away to seek his help. In return, he would teach them and show them the way to enlightenment. On this particular day, a scholar came to visit the master for advice. “I have come to ask you to teach me about Zen,” the scholar said. Soon, it became obvious that the scholar was full of his own opinions and knowledge. He interrupted the master repeatedly with his own stories and failed to listen to what the master had to say. The master calmly suggested that they should have tea. So the master poured his guest a cup. The cup was filled, yet he kept pouring until the cup overflowed onto the table, onto the floor, and finally onto the scholar’s robes. The scholar cried “Stop! The cup is full already. Can’t you see?” “Exactly,” the Zen master replied with a smile. “You are like this cup — so full of ideas that nothing more will fit in. Come back to me with an empty cup.”
https://medium.com/the-mission/empty-your-cup-a-zen-proverb-...
That's a rather hyperbolic statement. You are literally saying a gun is the only way you can defend yourself.
The presence of a gun in a home make it several times more likely that a resident of that home is killed by gun violence. The presence of a gun in a community at all increases the likelihood of gun violence.
In the USA? Good one! Hahahaha!
You could say that's not necessary for defense but plenty find themselves defended well enough without any arms at all.
You can't know if you're not suicidal. That's the whole concept of most suicides being impulsive acts.
E.g. there have been plenty of people who have bought a pack of cigarettes and then killed themselves 5 minutes later without even opening it. Any of us could be five minutes away from killing ourselves and not have even the slightest idea.
America was founded on genocide and cultured Europeans thought it was a good idea to kill entire populations who weren't Übermensch less than 100 years ago.
Remember who you're living among :)
As someone who struggle(s|d) with ideation, I realized that I too was on that path. If I kept idealizing suicide then I’d eventually succumb. Some recommendations:
1. Find a therapist with whom you can build a relationship.
2. Be open to medication. Even if side effects can hurt your quality of life, you’re clearly already suffering from QoL problems.
3. Keep an emotional journal. In it, also track common culprits like sleep, food, alcohol, etc. this can help you identify and avoid triggers.
4. Strongly consider active exercises to change your outlook. Force yourself to have a social life and hobbies. Cognitive behavioral therapy also has a number of (sometimes touchy-feels, yet effective) exercises. You can learn more from the book “Feeling Good”
Anyone with a car has a number of possibilities, one being carbon monoxide poisoning which we understand to be pretty peaceful.
You would put them through yet more pain just to see if they were really suffering enough?
You'll never get it if your reasoning is "my life sucks and nobody likes me".
Quite a few patients refuse to continue treatment at some point, which has effectively the same result. They could back out of that at any time.