RIP

[mrdankelly]

Many of us with great big hearts automatically figure that suicide can only be inspired by mental illness, particularly when someone possessed of great talent and success snuffs him- or herself. This suggests to me, that the deceased spent their every waking moment experiencing reasonable joy and satisfaction before springing out of bed one morning

Comments

[wanderingaengus]

The point isn't that all the days leading up to the act were delightful. It's that the act is often spontaneous. Unnecessary and evitable.

There was an excellent article about suicide in the New York Times Magazine recently. Most suicides are more or less on impulse.In a 2001 University of Houston study of 153 survivors of nearly lethal attempts between the ages of 13 and 34, only 13 percent reported having contemplated their act for eight hours or longer. To the contrary, 70 percent set the interval between deciding to kill themselves and acting at less than an hour, including an astonishing 24 percent who pegged the interval at less than five minutes.
Everybody has bad times -- my quick guess at a number has 1,140,000 having suicidal thoughts in a year. (That number is probably low. I quickly Googled and found a study that reported suicidal thoughts as a side effect of an obesity drug. In the study .38% of people taking a placebo reported suicidal thoughts. Since mentally ill people were likely excluded from the study, I'd guess

[mrdankelly]

Really? What did the successful suicides have to say?

[wanderingaengus]

If you look at what they mean by "nearly lethal," you'll see that these people are essentially suicides who got lucky. Not people swallowing a bottle of aspirin and calling up their exes to add set dressing to their histrionics.

[mrdankelly]

How do you think this reflects on what I was saying?

[ammitbeast]

I'm assuming this is in response to the suicide of David Foster Wallace? Similarly, I'm one of those who finds suicide unthinkable except in the case of terminal illness

[txtriffidranch]

Speaking somewhat from experience, and that's all you need to know about what happened, the assumption that communications talent is a negation of a reason for suicide is bullshit. Also, speaking somewhat from experience, I start to wonder if the constant yammerings of "Oh, you have such talent" from know-nothings is a cause for suicide among writers and artists, not a buffer against it. Either way, in a sense, you're absolutely right in that there are lots of people willing to listen when you've reached that level. Unfortunately, much as in being promised a paycheck in two weeks when you're starving to death today, it's too little nutrient, when you're that far gone, to make any difference.

[txtriffidranch]

I also want to state for the record that I don't consider you one of the know-nothings. Were I in that bad a state again, in fact, your opinion would have great weight if you expressed such thoughts. I'm talking about the same wankers who run into their favorite writers working at Starbucks or at a liquor store and whack off about how "this is so unfair that someone with this sort of talent has to work a shitty job like this" without wanting to do anything to change it.

[quixotic]

maybe you're getting a different reaction because no one thinks hunter s. thompson was "sick" in that sympathetic way -- they assume he just decided he had lived long enough and didn't care about the people he'd left behind, because, well, i think the fact that hunter s. thompson was kind of a dick (and i say this as someone who considers herself a huge fan of his work) isn't surprising to anyone. i think when it comes to david foster wallace or, well, just about anyone else who commits suicide, people tend to find them a lot more sympathetic and bend over backwards to try to find some reason for them not to have been a total dick, even though, in my eyes, suicide is almost always the ultimate dick move.

[mrdankelly]

maybe you're getting a different reaction because no one thinks hunter s. thompson was "sick" in that sympathetic way...

Yep, exactly right. The viewers with alarm do love their wilting lilies.

[gargamehl]

Btw, it burned me to read about his suicide. I don't know why. I normally don't care either way. I never even finished Infinite Jest.