Reflections on suicide

A friend of mine just attempted suicide. When I was in my teens, I attempted suicide several times. It wasn't a cry for help, because nobody ever knew I tried. It was a reaction to the bad situation I found myself in, at a time when my hormones were raging, and when I was mostly alone. The reason I stopped trying is because I saw the look on the face of the train driver in my last attempt, and I realised what it would mean to him and his family, and later it occurred to me, also to mine. So I jumped off the track.

A new film in Australia, 2:37, has been released in which suicide by teens is not only discussed, but an attempt is graphically shown. The director/writer has been under attack for this, with critics claiming that this will inspire teens to attempt it, although he claims that the pain and suffering shown will act as a deterrent. I'm not so sure.

But why do people attempt suicide? What benefit do they expect to get?

It might be thought that some people are thinking they can escape the pain and troubles in which they find themselves. But this will only work if they are sure, if they have faith, that they will somehow survive their death. This is why most religions tell would-be suicides that they will go to hell or some karmic equivalent if they do - a religion that encourages suicide will cease to be around after a while, although so long as only a fraction are suiciders, such as the suicide bombers, the practice can even be encouraged.

But most people are trying to make the pain stop, whether it is moral, social, emotional or physical. This raises a question - when is it rational to commit suicide? Often, such decisions are taken under severe emotional distress, but let's assume that the individual is rationally weighing up the costs and benefits. When is it rational?

In Roman days, one might commit suicide to prevent one's family from being killed or dispossessed. I have known people discuss it as a way of removing themselves from being a burden to their family. But my experience is that suicide almost always causes more of a burden to the family and friends than it removes. I had a friend commit suicide when I was in school, and another in university. In both cases they had plenty to live for, and in both cases their families were torn apart. Both used firearms, coincidentally.

I can imagine conditions under which committing suicide might be a rational act. If you do it to stop intolerable pain or avoid becoming a shell in the case of a brain or terminal disease, it might be a reasonable thing to do, if you can do it without the legal and social upheavals that accompany it. But most of the time, there simply aren't the benefits, mainly because you are dead, and the dead have no interests.

Those I have known commit suicide were not in that state. They were like those overcrowded rats, stressed out, either through bullying or profound alienation, that become mentally unstable due to the pressures of their lives. We force teenagers to suffer an amazing amount of stress. They are forced into an unnatural system of education, in which they have to keep up not with those who are at their level of development, but an arbitrary system of cohorts based on birthdate. Later adults find themselves in a situation of continued and unrelenting pressure at work, socially and economically. In conditions like this, it is the normal state of an appreciable fraction of the population to respond this way, because reacting that way to stress offers benefits in other conditions, like the recessive sickle cell anemia allele does in malarial countries.

It seems to me we need to back off a bit, but our increasingly inhumane economic system is designed to serve corporations not individuals. Well and good for the shareholders, I guess, but not for the students and workers. We lack community support, because we do not stay in a single community through our lives. Our families are artificially divided by careers and social structures.

I regret enormously not providing my friends more support and comfort, but that is the wisdom of hindsight. At the time I simply didn't know about their situations. But to anyone who is thinking of suicide, I say, remember that to get the benefit, you need to be around. A life lived under pressure is still a life. Find someone to help, and don't expect that others, wrapped up in their lives, will recognise the pain in yours. Speak to them. You will find there are those who do love you, and care about you. My life has been better than I thought it would be at the time of my attempts. I simply didn't have the right information.

It is very hard to talk about suicide without sounding like a greeting card. But while it is sometimes rational to do it, nearly all the time it is not. And there's no second chance. And death is messy and undignified almost all of the time.

A Sunday sermon...

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When I was a teenager the movie "Heathers" came out... it was never a big hit in the theaters, but became sort of a cult classic among us. It faced a lot of issues about teen angst, popularity contests, and the reactions to suicide. It's a really dark comedy, mocking the way adults trivialize teenagers feelings. Even as an adult, it gives me perspective as a parent, and reminds me not to take my child for granted.... he's as complex a being as any of us. Still, they wouldn't release a movie like it today, I'd bet.. at least not in America, since Columbine.

"It might be thought that some people are thinking they can escape the pain and troubles in which they find themselves. But this will only work if they are sure, if they have faith, that they will somehow survive their death."

Excuse me, but that's exactly backwards. I've never made an actual attempt, but I've suffered from depression for over 20 years now, and I'll tell you flat out: in the context of depression and other "mental anguish", the promise of death is to make the pain stop. Oblivion is what they're hoping for. The idea of an afterlife isn't, especially since Christian tradition sends suicides to hell.

Shakespeare knew this well:

To die: to sleep:
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,-'t is a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there 's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause:

And goes on in a similar vein (quoted from Thinkquest
)

By David Harmon (not verified) on 20 Aug 2006 #permalink

"It seems to me we need to back off a bit, but our increasingly inhumane economic system is designed to serve corporations not individuals."

In my experience, personally and with a now-deceased boyfriend, the motivation for suicide has more to do with issues of self-worth, which can become a kind of vaccuum pressure when it's absent. I bet this is true in a good number of cases, although I won't presume to say in all. In resolving these issues and in healing, I asked myself what was the cause of (his) non-existent self-worth, the kind of self-loathing that turned existence into full-on psychological (and psychosomatically physical) torture?

My answer was philosophy - one's outlook on the world. For the more intellectually demanding people, like my ex, this required an explicit and watertight grasp of life-verifying metaphysics and epistemology in order to live for any reason. He never found such, and I was incapable of serving up answers to millennia-old questions. Although I doubt an injection of good philosophy would have saved him single-handedly, I think being raised in a healthier mental environment and having access to healthy ideas as an adult could have stayed the executioner's hand long enough for him to find the treatment that worked for him. As it was, his therapists were all but playing tic-tac-toe on their notepads.

For this reason I don't see that making economic adustments would have any significant impact on depression and suicide rates, because I see these kinds of mentally influential ideas pervading society in a kind of cultural soup from which we all drink, and economics is just one tiny part of that. Change the ideas, and you change people directly, and economics as a down-stream consequence. Sound basal ideas must always come first, otherwise it's just rearranging twigs on an unmoving tree.

Katie I would love to think that suicide would be warded off by better ideas, just as I would like to think that philosophy was a ward against ignorance and superstition and magical thinking. But it seems to me that there are sufficient philosophical foundations for living a good and rewarding life out there, ranging from the Stoics to Ethical Naturalism. The problem is not that one can answer all the traditional questions, but rather that one who is not predisposed to be satisfied with any of the proffered answers will not accept them as a basis for staying alive. I think the internal pressures can prevent a person from finding satisfaction in any account. Ideas only go so far to change a person's attitudes to life.

The "pervading ideas" exist all right - but they have their effect largely as a reinforcement of prior dispositions, which are themelves triggered on those with the biological vulnerabilities by social conditions. Economics usually drives, rather than is the outcome of, ideas (yes, Marx was right so far as that), so long as you understand by economics that I mean the institutions that set up the boundaries of our lives. Being "raised in a healthier environment" is an economic outcome. Had my parents not had economic problems, my father would not have had the health problems that led to his early death. I would have been a lot less stressed, and the occasion for my decade and a half depression would not have occurred (although I am probably likely to be a gloomy gus under any conditions).

The relation between Ideas ↔ Economics ↔ Biology is a complex one, but assuming that the biological background is relatively stable across all societies, and that Ideas tend to be an outcome rather than a driver of social structures, I still think that Economics is the root cause. Of course, that Idea of mine won't allow me to make much impact on Economics...

In my own experience, ideas, philosophies and rationalisations are of little use in the depths of depression. You have to reach much deeper inside.

There were only two things that helped.

The first was to hold on to the thought that, however grey and hopeless things might seem, it was not that world that had changed but me. And I would change back again - in time.

The other thing - and this may seem puerile - is some lines from the Clint Eastwood movie The Outlaw Josey Wales, the scene where he and his companions are barricaded in a ranch-house awaiting an Indian attack:

Now remember, things look bad and it looks like you're not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. 'Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That's just the way it is.

By Ian H Spedding (not verified) on 21 Aug 2006 #permalink

I can't easily search up the news report now, but a year or so back a man in my community who was suffering from a medical condition that caused intractable pain committed suicide. He had sought medical and legal advice to find the most humane way to end his life, and which would not result in prosecution of his family or care-givers. He had a last meal with his family and retired to his easy chair, where IIRC he took a sedative and then placed a plastic bag over his head.

Not a happy choice, either way, but not being in his situation I cannot say that what he did was wrong. And I certainly don't think it should be illegal -- it is too personal a thing.

By Steve Watson (not verified) on 21 Aug 2006 #permalink

Thirty years ago (is that right, Matt?) my good friend and roommate took an overdose of sedatives. I found her "in time" and got her to the hospital. Instead of getting her the proper mental health care, they released her to go home that night. The next day I took her to a mental health center at UCLA but she left and jumped off the roof of the science building. I was not able to watch her every moment and it probably wouldn't have made a difference since her first attempt was obviously not a cry for help, but a genuine desire to die or at least not to live any longer. My friend was Jewish, but totally secular and AFAIK, had no expectations of any afterlife. She did not believe in any concept of Hell.

She had grown up with a Holocaust survivor father and a loony mother. She was depressed and mentally unstable much of her too-short life and probably just wanted to end the emotional pain. I think she was in love with me, but unfortunately, I am resolutely heterosexual and could not respond to her romantically, although I loved her dearly as a friend. She was messed up and miserable, but I didn't realize how bad it was until it was too late. I wish I could have helped her find a way to cope with her pain and her demons.

By Susan Silberstein (not verified) on 21 Aug 2006 #permalink

I surely do not mean to say that all who contemplate or actually do suicide have expectations of a better afterlife. I mean only that some who do this have in their minds that they will find peace after death. But "finding peace" requires survival of death.

Susan, I doubt that your friend rationally thought it through. When you're in that sort of pain, rational evaluation is the last thing on your mind. But do not regret your actions - you did all that could be done. I regret mine when I didn't. I was a typical self-centred young man, but that doesn't lessen my failure.

And coincidentally, I just listened to this:

I never seen you looking so bad my funky one
You tell me that your superfine mind has come undone
CHORUS:
Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you my friend
Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again
When the demon is at your door
In the morning it won't be there no more
Any major dude will tell you

Would that it were always true...

My sense is that philosphy rarely changes people -- they just pick the philosophies that match their own basic beliefs and attitudes. (For me, that's mostly Aristotle.)

Also, I'd guess that one of the basic reasons why I never actually attempted suicide was that despite being cursed with depression, I'm also blessed with a strong and supportive family. (Now proceeding into the next generation via my sisters and cousins!)

By David Harmon (not verified) on 21 Aug 2006 #permalink

On the other hand, I'm still smoking, even after my father died of lung cancer. (Sort of a slow-motion suicidal tendency.) But then, I've had five parents and step-parents who smoked at various times in my life.

By David Harmon (not verified) on 21 Aug 2006 #permalink

I realized that my interest in philosophy re: mental health is in large part motivated by the conflation of problems my ex had, only one of which was depression. Specifically, he was also paranoid-psychotic, and had lost his grasp on reality. Literally, he could no longer tell what was real, what was to be trusted, how to gain knowledge or certainty, etc., and this is what we spent hours and days talking about. I forget that these aren't traits of depression per se :o).

I have often thought that "Ordinary People" should be required viewing for Junior High School students, because of the frank discussion about teen suicide.

Also, Time did an article on the hundreds of kids killed by guns over the course of a year. Many, Many were suicides.

This post really caught my attention: for three years I was a volunteer on a phone helpline for people with suicidal feelings. The guidelines were: don't judge, don't give advice, always ask if a caller was suicidal, stick to feelings. Lots of people felt suicidal, wanted to unload repressed feelings and painful experiences and rang off feeling unburdened. I heard some hard, hard stories. Some had the pills (or other means) in front of them but didn't actually take them.

Sometimes, rarely, you sat and listened and talked while someone died at the far end of the phone: they wanted to explain to somebody who wouldn't condemn, wanted to sign off, wanted a voice with them while they died. If they changed their mind, we'd call paramedics, if they wanted to die we - remotely - went through it with them. You sat with a phone to your ear, listening, talking and eventually - silence. After a while listening to the silence, you have to hang up. There were many reasons, and it was not my place to judge but I can say this - if you're a friend or relative of someone who commits or attempts suicide, blaming yourself is egregiously wrong. You didn't fail them: if you're not suicidal you can't put yourself in the mind of a person making that decision so don't take that blame on yourself.

Your post opened the subject up, it's one most people find tough to cope with as a concept far less feeling suicidal temselves or caught up in the aftermath. I hadn't considered writing about it until promted by your post. Thanks for the kind words about Lunartalks.