Suicide Part 2: Selfishness

[naamah_darling]

Part 1: Personal HistoryToday, part two on suicide. I've put it off for a long time because it's just tremendously difficult to talk about, and I still don't feel like I have my words right, and I still haven't responded to some of the best, most important comments on the last entry, but this needs to go up

Comments

[gaaneden]

Thank you for this. I have a friend who has flirted with the idea of suicide for as long as I have known her. Fortunately, she decided to get counseling but this helps me understand her thought process a lot more.

[greenjeanz]

Another great post! There's not much for me to say about it, just that it's good. :)

[sensorium]

Thank you for this post. As I mentioned in the comments to the last post, I've never seriously contemplated suicide, but I can certainly understand a lot of the emotions you talked about in this post. I think I may pass this along to a friend who has been talking about suicide some recently because I thin

[sensorium]

D'oh, the comment got sent before I meant to send it.

I was just trying to say that I think he sometimes makes it a moral issue ie "I am a bad person for the way I treat people" or "I must be weak for feeling this way". It makes me really sad when I hear that because I know it's not the case.

[smellykaka]

To reduce an act of such bitter desperation to simple selfishness is to reduce the suffering of a depressed or suicidal person to nothing more than the effect their death has on others. That is not right. It completely negates the individual's agency and humanity.

Among a wonderfully written post, this is the paragraph that sticks out most for me. I wonder how those that label suicides as selfish would answer if asked: "So, you expected them to continue to live a miserably painful life so that *you* don't feel bad? You don't think that's a bit selfish?"

Suicide is always tragic, and often misguided. But selfish? Never.

[boundfate]

Not to be argumentative over a sensitive topic - but if that person has chosen to have children and those children are small? Yes - I do believe that they should live a miserably painful life so that their kids don't have to suffer. That's part of choosing that responsibility.

[hakerh]

I disagree with you on that one, out of my personal experience. My mother was suicidal for much of her life, and addicted to prescription medicines to stop the pain. (She was an RN and had access.) She died of an unrelated accident when I was 8 years old, but she'd been institutionalized for suicide attempts a couple times before that

[boundfate]

::nods:: 8 is getting to the age when you can understand. Your viewpoint might be a bit different if she had died when you were 2.

[xanath]

You've brought me to tears with this. You've put into words everything I've felt and feared, about committing suicide and about the suicides of others.