Also, he unintentionally perhaps shed light on programming which a lot of us could relate to,
At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for this reason.
I thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling.
Like Bill Zeller, I retreated into programming at an early age to right a wrong and while programming is a lot of fun; I hid behind a screen to escape personal problems that I thought that the coding marathon high, money & prestige would solve. And the more fun programming got, the worse the issues got and the more I dived into my rabbit-hole.
This is not to take away anything from Bill Zeller; he is an incredible brave man alive and dead. Anyone who went to Trinity knows that it's a very hostile environment for coming out. The fact that he kept coding software then and beyond and kept a completely normal pretense is incredible to me. And I want to thank him for his iTunes ripping software, his inspiration to me when I was at undergrad and his brutal honesty in his suicide note.
I disagree. Maybe it's possible to understand some of what he felt from his eloquent explanation, but I don't think suicide is ever the only solution.
There will be other people reading this, who will be in similar situations. It fills me with so much sadness to think that there might be one who reads this and thinks .. 'yep, that was the right thing to do'.
There isn't anything brave about taking your own life.
I think he lived an extremely difficult life - and I think it ended in tragedy.
It's a tragedy that he was subjected to abuse, it's a tragedy that he wasn't able to ask for (or receive) help and it's a complete and utter tragedy that he ended up taking his life.
It was like a real-life version of a Chalker novel, without the escape of knowing it's just fiction. Horrible to read, given that his extreme eloquence and rationality make it crystal clear what was going on in his mind.
I don't think he was brave to take his life. I think he was brave to continue living it as long as he managed to do so.
What do you base this on? Wishful thinking about the capability of modern medicine? Or a belief that it's a person's duty to live through intolerable pain for the sake of others?
> It fills me with so much sadness to think that there might be one who reads this and thinks .. 'yep, that was the right thing to do'.
It annoys me that so many people will take a person who finally found peace from a life of intolerable pain, and have no thought but 'I would prefer they hadn't done that, to satisfy my abstract beliefs about right and wrong.'
I think the whole thing is very sad, but I feel very gratified to know that he is free of his demons forever.
It could be a personal belief, just like your belief that "he is free of this demons forever" or the fact that he somehow "found peace". I don't see anything wrong with someone believing that suicide is never a good solution.
> It annoys me that so many people will take a person who finally found peace from a life of intolerable pain.
There is something about that statement that is bothering me and again, it is just probably because it clashes against my belief on life, death, etc. matters (so don't take this as a valid reasonable disagreement, just another point of view). The idea that somehow "he" is better now. I emphasize "he" because somehow it implies his continued existence, and that is quite strange. What if "he" doesn't exist anymore so there is nobody to feel at peace?
Does that mean that I would have preferred for him to still be alive and be suffering? Would have that been a better way? I don't think so either, so I am just another confused person.
I guess the best scenario would have been been if he sent out what he sent out but he didn't actually kill himself.
Perhaps naively, I believe that would have helped him, it would have let others know about his problem, and others , maybe even strangers like us, discussing his actions here, could have shared our stories or tried to do something to help.
When I was in college a girl who was a close friend of a close friend killed herself, and I remember experiencing the same kinds of regrets that you are expressing. Wasn't there anything else she could have done? Didn't she know how much people cared about her?
Since then I've experienced things that have given me a different perspective, namely how a person's mind can be a prison of pain that all the external love in the world is a weak opponent against. I feel like Bill captured that when he described how even a relationship with a wonderful person whom he liked very much was sabotaged by his "darkness."
Maybe there is a drug that could have given Bill peace in life, but reading his note I feel almost certain that nothing anyone could say or do would have soothed his torment.
I don't dislike the idea of suicide because of a sense of morality. I think suicide should be avoided because it's so utterly final.
Your opinion also involves an abstract belief, don't forget that.
I'm an atheist - I don't think that heaven or hell awaits us when we die. I believe, when we die we cease to exist.
Your point of view only makes sense if one accepts the idea that nothing can be improved. If we accept that there's no hope left in the world - why bother at all?
There are whole fields of science dedicated to helping people improve their outlook on life after living with abuse. It's irresponsible to dismiss the options that are available.
I still feel suicide isn't the only - or best - solution.
How, really?
Also, he unintentionally perhaps shed light on programming
By killing himself?
Like Bill Zeller, I retreated into programming
Did you kill yourself?
It's difficult to read what you have to say as anything but self-absorbed wankery but perhaps I've got it totally wrong.
I don't think the OP was trying to be insensitive - but it's not possible to take anything good from this act alone. The only possible positive thing that can result is increased personal understanding of the challenges that our own friends and acquaintances might be going through.
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There's something that we need to understand about depression, suicidal depression: a depressed person can commit all their intellectual powers to rationalizing the awful feelings they have about themselves and the future. Someone sufficiently sharp can make an almost impenetrable cage out of these arguments. Their ideas can have the force of fact, of truth itself.
We find what we look for. Even the arguments we make to ourselves have their stakes and motivations. Mr. Zeller's written a great defense here of the futility of his own existence. He was apparently a smart guy; had I been there myself, I doubt I'd have been able to refute him. However, that he wins the argument doesn't mean that what he believes is true. It doesn't mean that he gets to have me respect his decision.
This is a hard thing, and ever so important for people dealing with someone who is depressed to this degree. Depressed folks can be very sharp, so we shouldn't let this kind of logic take us in. There is something deep and fundamental about life or death that an argument cannot sway; if my friend just can't go on and I can't find a problem with their reasoning, that doesn't mean I have to respect their decision. I just haven't found why they are wrong yet.
I don't believe that suicide is always wrong. I do believe that the lives we value should not be given up easily, and that we should not be easily swayed by the death wish words of the departed who we so dearly miss, mourn, and respect.
As for finding a reason where he is wrong, I'd say his dismissal of the counseling community was a bit swift because I know the difference between a good therapist and a bad therapist; but really that's beside the point.
The bottom line isn't about the acceptance of some "objective" truth. The only thing that would have mattered is if you could have guaranteed to Bill that there was a way for him to fix the problem and feel better. If there wasn't a way, then it's cruel of you to think he should have forced himself to endure a tortured existence just because you have an axiomatic objection to suicide. The truth is no one can say for sure whether there was a better solution for Bill, but since he spent 23 years dealing with it and wrote a pretty compelling piece, I'm gonna take his word over yours.
The real burn is that he not only didn't want to put his rapist in jail, but was terrified of any steps that might remotely end up in that possibility. It's certainly very sad, but it's also, not to mince words, fucking cowardice that might even lead to seeing this tragedy repeated.
I don't want to be harsh, but we cannot cannot cannot talk about this stuff as positive or rational at all. Because it not only isn't, but these patterns of thought are extraordinarily dangerous to someone who might think they are rational.
I did not feel sad as much as disgusted that, through our politicians, we have:
A) made illegal the most effective treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder : MDMA
B) continue to support the primary generator of new PTSD cases: war
If you want to do something other than sit around feeling sad for a while, help address one of the above problems and prevent the situation from happening again.
[further reading]
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/artic...
>Ecstasy is the key to treating PTSD At last the incurably traumatised may be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And controversially, the key to taming their demons is the ‘killer’ drug Ecstasy
http://www.maps.org/research/mdma/
>For-profit pharmaceutical companies are not interested in developing MDMA into a medicine, because the patent for MDMA has expired. Companies cannot profit off of MDMA because it is only administered a limited number of times, unlike most medications for mental illnesses that are taken on a daily basis. Consequently MAPS is the only organization funding clinical trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in the world
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5334479/ns/health-mental_health/
>1 in 8 returning soldiers suffers from PTSD But less than half with problems seek help, report finds
That said, standing on a political soap box about drug laws and war when Mr. Zeller's primary problem was obviously having been molested is ridiculous. Yes, it's possible that ecstasy in a clinical setting may have helped him, but he was let down in a lot more ways than an inability to get that particular treatment (as he says in the note, he wasn't even seeking treatment).
It's disrespectful to pin this political issue to a man's final note to the world. Even if this was an issue Mr. Zeller felt strongly about, he obviously didn't mean to be some kind of martyr for it.
edited to add: I don't disagree with your point, I just think your timing is awful.
A) You're going to have to do better than The Times, MSNBC, and a pro-psychedelic-legalization think tank to say MDMA is the most effective treatment. I'm not closed-minded to the idea that psychedelic drugs have positive psychiatric applications or that they should be legalized, but there's a lot of literature about treatments overall, and you've offered no comparative studies measuring the difference between MDMA and, for instance, cognitive behavioral therapy.
B) The stereotypical PTSD case is a returning war veteran. If you hadn't noticed, though, wars also tend to kill people and destroy things, and the added weight of PTSD among veterans doesn't change the essential moral calculus that much. Participating in the Vietnam War wouldn't have become a good idea if it wasn't for PTSD, and participating in the Second World War doesn't become a bad idea just because of PTSD.
But there's also no quantification of whether warfare is indeed the primary generator of PTSD cases; it's hard to find reliable statistics about it, but I would bet that most PTSD sufferers in the US are victims of sexual abuse rather than war veterans, since it's probably far, far more common for an American to be raped or sexually assaulted than for an American to join the military, go overseas, and actually participate in combat. Of course, rape isn't something we talk about much.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjvNCijeYlI
They even interview former rape victims and the affect it had on them.
You'll see that the government study listing its negative effects was false, disproved by several independent studies and later withdrawn bu the author, apologizing for his mistakes, like giving meth to his mice, instead of MDMA, oops.