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Suicide and it's implications


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So I've been thinking recently about the topic of suicide. Really, when you get into the implications of taking your own life, it's sort of incredible, in a very morbid sort of way. We humans are the only species capable of willingly taking our own lives. No other animal would act directly to Kill itself. In a way, we are the first ever failure of evolution. The big evolutionary advantage of humanity is our intellect. However, our intellect has allowed us to do things counterproductive to our own survival. Suicide is just one example (global warming, nuclear weapons, etc.) So what do you think? Have we beaten evolution?

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Suicide is also difficult to tamp down coming at it from a social side. (obviously)

Like, some people with no prior history (or no known prior history, at least) of suicidal ideation can commit it on their first try, in a moment that might not seem to be consistent with their longstanding character. (That is, if one assumes it takes a certain kind of character to commit suicide.) And some clearly depressed people, who have clearly thought about it, may take years to go through with it, and/or may remain alive over multiple attempts.

If anybody's heard of any hypotheses about specific common threads to be found in suicide/attempted suicide cases, aside from basics like some sort of dramatic self-esteem problem, depression or mental unwellness in general, I'd personally love to hear about them. The little I've heard about the subject has had more to do with treatment than origin.

Edited by Rehab
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Suicide in animals is something that isn't understood very well, but there have been cases of dolphins becoming depressed and ending their lives by refusing to breathe or dogs or bears exhibiting self-destructive behavior apparently in an attempt to escape captivity. It's also a little odd to assert that suicide in humans makes us first ever failure of evolution when you consider the countless organisms that went extinct due to their inability to adapt to a changing environment eons before our species was even remotely close to existence. Furthermore, it can be argued that suicide is actually beneficial to evolution because it weeds out potentially defective genes.

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Suicide in animals is something that isn't understood very well, but there have been cases of dolphins becoming depressed and ending their lives by refusing to breathe or dogs or bears exhibiting self-destructive behavior apparently in an attempt to escape captivity. It's also a little odd to assert that suicide in humans makes us first ever failure of evolution when you consider the countless organisms that went extinct due to their inability to adapt to a changing environment eons before our species was even remotely close to existence. Furthermore, it can be argued that suicide is actually beneficial to evolution because it weeds out potentially defective genes.

But those species did not perish through their own actions. They did not destroy themselves, they merely failed to survive. Also, I'm not going to disagree on suicide helping evolution, but I can see it making a lot of people mad. Also, most of those animals, as you said, wanted to escape captivity. I don't think that the dolphins really understood what they were doing.

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But those species did not perish through their own actions. They did not destroy themselves, they merely failed to survive. Also, I'm not going to disagree on suicide helping evolution, but I can see it making a lot of people mad. Also, most of those animals, as you said, wanted to escape captivity. I don't think that the dolphins really understood what they were doing.

How can you be certain that the dolphin isn't doing it intentionally? And if an animal is willing to die rather than be captive, doesn't that say something about the intelligence of said animal?

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Suicide is wrong, no matter how you look at it. About it, who commits suicide does it for some serious business, don'tcha think?

Someone who is about to commit suicide needs help, needs support, and is not able to think in a straight way.

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why

I would argue that in practice it's bad like 99.999% of the time. But is it really a bad thing that Hitler offed himself? (Sorry about the Godwin's Law, he was just the first example to come to mind of a "good" suicide.)

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Suicide is not "wrong". People call it selfish when in reality if someone feels so crushed by life that they do not feel as though they deserve to be on this planet anymore then what is the purpose of keeping them around? So the ones who say it is selfish don't have to feel sad and confused about it?

A good friend of mine took his life. He was one of the nicest people no one else will ever again have the pleasure of meeting. I remember supporting him, talking to him, trying to help him. I also remember the shame and anger and amalgamation of other emotions I felt when he texted me saying "You were a great friend. I'm sorry" and the subsequent realization that he had taken his life. I remember watching his family who disowned him blame his friend who ignored him and vice versa and almost fucking vomiting up what was left of my optimism at his funeral where the piece of shit Baptist preacher turned his death into a "don't do drugs cause heaven something something blah".

Everyone blamed him. Everyone acted like he was being selfish. This guy was not fucking selfish. Not once in his life had he done a single god damn selfish thing. Nobody took a step back and thought that perhaps the world around him granted him nothing but pain. None of us took a second to wonder why he did what he did because we didn't want to deal with all those emotions. It was like he hung up on us during a phone conversation and we couldn't call him a dick. I watched his memorial page on facebook turn into a fucking flame war. I watched as everyone eased back into their real lives and forgot about him once they were done processing their pain via projection.

I learned a lot from that time in my life. I learned how shitty we can be when confronted with suicide. I learned that sometimes there's nothing you can do about it. I learned that you can't judge someone for making a choice like that when you have no fucking god damn idea what's going through their head or heart.

If you think that suicide is wrong or bad or something then you are either still dealing with the situation and have yet to heal or you have never been affected by the loss of someone close to you to suicide and you should really rethink your position, because it's wrong.

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Suicide is not "wrong". People call it selfish when in reality if someone feels so crushed by life that they do not feel as though they deserve to be on this planet anymore then what is the purpose of keeping them around? So the ones who say it is selfish don't have to feel sad and confused about it?

A good friend of mine took his life. He was one of the nicest people no one else will ever again have the pleasure of meeting. I remember supporting him, talking to him, trying to help him. I also remember the shame and anger and amalgamation of other emotions I felt when he texted me saying "You were a great friend. I'm sorry" and the subsequent realization that he had taken his life. I remember watching his family who disowned him blame his friend who ignored him and vice versa and almost fucking vomiting up what was left of my optimism at his funeral where the piece of shit Baptist preacher turned his death into a "don't do drugs cause heaven something something blah".

Everyone blamed him. Everyone acted like he was being selfish. This guy was not fucking selfish. Not once in his life had he done a single god damn selfish thing. Nobody took a step back and thought that perhaps the world around him granted him nothing but pain. None of us took a second to wonder why he did what he did because we didn't want to deal with all those emotions. It was like he hung up on us during a phone conversation and we couldn't call him a dick. I watched his memorial page on facebook turn into a fucking flame war. I watched as everyone eased back into their real lives and forgot about him once they were done processing their pain via projection.

I learned a lot from that time in my life. I learned how shitty we can be when confronted with suicide. I learned that sometimes there's nothing you can do about it. I learned that you can't judge someone for making a choice like that when you have no fucking god damn idea what's going through their head or heart.

If you think that suicide is wrong or bad or something then you are either still dealing with the situation and have yet to heal or you have never been affected by the loss of someone close to you to suicide and you should really rethink your position, because it's wrong.

I think you summed up pretty much what I felt about the issue, but never really had a way of saying it. I have never thought anyone who took their life to be selfish. Indeed, it is if saying "hey, I know you're miserable and want to die, but would you mind staying around for 30 or 40 more years at least so I don't have to feel sad?". That's quite selfish in itself.

I'm sorry about your friend.

Edited by Tryhard
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In my own heart and opinion, suicide is the ultimate act of cowardice. Morally incorrect? Depends on the person. For me, i would see it as not as much morally incorrect as much as just plain cowardly. I understand the feelings people have when they feel suicidal, but in my opinion, not fighting against those feelings mean you already lost the battle.

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i don't see it that way. especially in situations where even 'logically' it's better to just off yourself.

if i were just starving and death was certain--or i'm in any such position where slow, painful death is unavoidable--you bet your butt i'm committing suicide. there's no point in not.

for not those situations, i think jiodi hit the nail on the head, more or less.

clinical depression, which is the state most people who commit suicide are probably in (i can't back that up, but it seems logically consistent, at least), makes you think the battle isn't worth fighting in the first place. you can't blame people for that.

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First off, my condolences, jiodi. That's no way to treat anyone (especially the guy who took his own life).

I can see certain times where suicide would be preferable, and if I was in a similar situation, I don't know whether I'd take the option. I think suicide is "wrong" in the sense that mental health care needs to both catch up and not be seen as something bad. My personal experiences tell me that no one that I know of has been ostracized for going to a doctor for a physical check-up. I think the same tolerance should be given to those who seek help for mental issues.

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I've dealt with a close suicide, too, (the two-year anniversary was this week, in fact, so it has been on my mind) and while it certainly seems that the people in this case dealt with it much more healthily than with jiodi's friend, when I look at how it has affected everyone, I really cannot defend it. By the time you are old enough to have decided to kill yourself, you most certainly will have become important to enough people that suicide will cause more pain than it will stop. I don't think suicide is really selfish, but it is self-serving. You "help" yourself, and in exchange hurt others. I don't think most people who commit suicide see it that way. I don't think there's a "fuck them" attitude involved. But, regardless of intent, that is what it does.

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Sure, I just wanted to make sure it was abundantly clear in case anyone ever has to deal with it themselves. It hurts and it sucks, but the best thing you can do is remember that person for who they were and celebrate what you loved about them. And it might be self-serving, but the way some of these thought processes end up is that they're "doing the world a favor" because that's just how low they feel. It's rough, either way :(

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Personally, I don't think it works all that well to narrow suicide down to even that much, at least in the mind of a given person having suicidal thoughts, because people can and have committed suicide for so many different reasons.

[spoiler=my suicidal ideation]

I've had suicidal ideation where I was afraid, yes, but it wasn't because I was scared of what I "had to do," it was because I feared that I was totally unable to do anything right, and was actually hurting more people by being around and inactive (having been severely depressed at the time) than I would have (or rather, wouldn't have) if I had never existed at all. Even though I knew it was objectively untrue, I literally felt bad enough about myself that it seemed like the world would be better off without me.

At its worst, it didn't even feel like fear. Just about every single thing I thought or did made me think I was an awful person, who deserved to trade places with a homeless person and starve to death in an alley or something. At the worst it was more "oh look, one more reason your whole identity is fundamentally broken and selfish to add to the fucking pile. None of your failures make any fucking sense unless the explanation is just that you're incapable on a basic level of accomplishing anything or helping anyone. Why are you even still around?" "Because I think I can get better-" "HHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA THEN WHY HAVEN'T YOU?" than it was, "I'm in too much pain."

I wasn't even afraid that I was incapable or unloved at that point, I was depressed enough I thought I knew it, because I thought that somewhere in everything I thought or said, I could ascribe both the worst possible motives that came to mind and an inability to change them. If somebody had told me I was being cowardly? Wouldn't really have helped. I'd already called myself that a bunch, and what I was in the process of doing at the time didn't snap me out of it so much as stomp me further in.

One of the things (of many, I may have noticed that therapy can sometimes have a bit of a "throw a million things at the wall at once and go with whatever sticks" approach) that helped me up a bit was that when I asked myself whether I would say the same things to somebody else who was in my exact position, I of course said no way! somebody going through depression, separation from friends and overall social anxiety doesn't deserve to feel like that. "But in my case, I know what goes into my selfish, burdensome incompetence, so I'm such a bad person that it makes sense-" "What, then? How? Why?" I couldn't really answer that to my own satisfaction. I ended up coming around to the idea that having genuine sympathy for other people was kinda begging me to at least be able to, I guess, "see my own point of view." As in, to see if I couldn't give myself just a little bit of the benefit of the doubt I was giving other people. (Benefit of the doubt in this case being more like "accounting for the mental state I was in," since you can't really "doubt" your own... you get the idea. I hope).

The last time I actually looked at any suicide victim data, I saw a much larger range of people doing it under a much larger range of circumstances than I might've suggested. Some gave few if any signs that might be called "cries for help." Many did it on short notice, possibly as an impulsive reaction to something big happening. I might venture a guess that many of the ones who did it while on mind-altering substances could've belonged to them. There's plenty of cases out there where the relatives have said it was "totally unlike them," and more victims than I would've thought weren't even depressed.

I don't generally like telling people to avoid talking about something, even if they don't know much about it, partially because discussing something can (and, I think, should) be a great way to learn about it. But in the case of suicide? I would appreciate if, especially before making any kind of value judgment about either the act itself or the many people who have committed it, you could take a moment to ask yourself how well you really know what you're about to say, and to how many people you can really apply it.

Edited by Rehab
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Well, I can say that I thought about it, I've seen people witnessing suicide.

I'm sorry if I sounded clumsy and cannot understand how a suicider thinks...
Basically,suicide is seen bad from who can't understand it. People badmouth suiciders because they feel "superior" to them.

"*snort* That guy killed himself, what a twat"

I am not totally healed from that tho (quoting your expression), as sometimes the urge rises - but I am too much of a coward to actually do it.
If I think of this, my urge stops. I feel disgusted, but I'm still alive, and it's what it counts.

Condoleances for your friend. They say that people die twice: when they die, and when they are forgotten.

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Glad to see the revival of this. In any case, I prefer to deal with suicide on a case by case basis. There are some times when it is justified, such as euthanasia, and others when it isn't.

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Suicide is not "wrong". People call it selfish when in reality if someone feels so crushed by life that they do not feel as though they deserve to be on this planet anymore then what is the purpose of keeping them around? So the ones who say it is selfish don't have to feel sad and confused about it?

A good friend of mine took his life. He was one of the nicest people no one else will ever again have the pleasure of meeting. I remember supporting him, talking to him, trying to help him. I also remember the shame and anger and amalgamation of other emotions I felt when he texted me saying "You were a great friend. I'm sorry" and the subsequent realization that he had taken his life. I remember watching his family who disowned him blame his friend who ignored him and vice versa and almost fucking vomiting up what was left of my optimism at his funeral where the piece of shit Baptist preacher turned his death into a "don't do drugs cause heaven something something blah".

Everyone blamed him. Everyone acted like he was being selfish. This guy was not fucking selfish. Not once in his life had he done a single god damn selfish thing. Nobody took a step back and thought that perhaps the world around him granted him nothing but pain. None of us took a second to wonder why he did what he did because we didn't want to deal with all those emotions. It was like he hung up on us during a phone conversation and we couldn't call him a dick. I watched his memorial page on facebook turn into a fucking flame war. I watched as everyone eased back into their real lives and forgot about him once they were done processing their pain via projection.

I learned a lot from that time in my life. I learned how shitty we can be when confronted with suicide. I learned that sometimes there's nothing you can do about it. I learned that you can't judge someone for making a choice like that when you have no fucking god damn idea what's going through their head or heart.

If you think that suicide is wrong or bad or something then you are either still dealing with the situation and have yet to heal or you have never been affected by the loss of someone close to you to suicide and you should really rethink your position, because it's wrong.

I feel your anger and sadness over this and I can without a doubt understand and see your point.

I would had stood up and cursed that preacher to suffer in whatever damnation he believes in, and I would probably had punched those people.

But.. by the end of the day, I will still see suicide as the second most selfish thing in the world ( the first being love ).

In some cases, it is understandable why someone does it. A surgery went wrong and left them unable to properly live. Another one forever bound to a wheelchair unable to move or breath. Perhaps someone being horribly burned by flames and being in constant pain from nerve damage. These sort of things I can understand.

But then we have people that are simply put, perpetually unhappy.

They have it all. Supportive friends and family, a good life, people that care about them, a significant other.

But their perpetual unhappiness leads them to simply, off themselves.

This, I cannot understand.

In my opinion, these people should just bite the sour apple and live on.

But perhaps, it is because that they have everything, that they cannot get any higher because they're already high so the only way they can go is down.

I cannot understand this. I cannot stand by that. I will reject it, and I will say that they are selfish.

Should I had killed myself when I felt perpetually unhappy because I believed that I was unloved by everyone?

Should I kill myself because my living situation sucks and it makes me melancholic to be stuck?

Should I kill myself because I have an utter hatred for all humans?

What makes suicide wrong?

What makes suicide right?

There is no ethical nor moral right answer to this.

But we who were left behind, we will feel that, that person was selfish. They left us without them in our lives.

How are we suppose to feel? Happy for them? How could we?

Those people, his friends and all, they reacted in the wrong way.

But it's also understandable why, just as it's understandable the way you feel.

It hits you right in the chest reading your text and it's very relateable.

This entire post wasn't all aimed at you, it was also written as to point out my opinions about suicide and how I feel regarding it as well as it has also been on my mind as I'm sure it has been on many others minds. I just quoted you because I wanted to let you know that I understand it and I feel it, I agree partially with it.

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