I don't remember if it was Nietzsche or Hunter S. Thompson or who ever said it, but it was something along the lines of
"without knowing that at any instant I could take my own life I would feel very trapped and terrified, there is liberation in having the power to end existance"One of my favorite lines from nietzsche is
"The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night." I've always best understood depression, and most mood disorders, as issues of control. Suicide and the possibility of suicide in many ways give someone a feeling of power, the final say in their own life. I feel suicidal ideation is stigmatized, justly but without regard to the positive effect that contemplating suicide can have. Depression is fundamentally narcissistic in its solitude, and a rational contemplation of suicide can reveal the absurdity of depressive cognition and activity"It's pretty common for people to be suddenly find themselves at peace, even happy, in the hours before they kill themselves. Depression often includes issues with control, but it's usually a lack of control and feelings of hopelessness that feel depression.
And really, if you can't control your own death, what can you control? So in that sense and in the whole notion that it is the Holiday season, the most lonely time of the year given the amount of family function and celebrations as well as the addition of daylight hours becoming much shorter, it's no surprise that suicide rates go up so high.
I mean, yeah, it's long wondered why people commit suicide. After all, self preservation should be the cornerstone of any successful species.
but you would be hard pressed to find a well adjusted teenager who hadn't thought of the idea of offing themselves. But let's look into that whole concept and see why people do it? Why people would openly and gladly take themselves out of the equation of life.
People who attempt suicide usually have 3 salient characteristics. The third characteristic, especially, will often determine the lethality of the attempt.
1. The perception of burdensomenesss (real or perceived): Suicidal people often feel that they are a burden on their loved ones. This may be due to loss of work because of depression, long, expensive stays in a mental hospital, or a recent loss of employment. The last characteristic is especially true for males. Suicide rates spike during a recession, and that spike affects men the most since they are usually the partner that makes the most money in a romantic/familial relationship. While I believe in the right to die for the terminally ill, research has shown that terminally ill folks who take their own lives through assisted suicide report higher levels of feelings of burdensomeness than those who look into assisted suicide but do not choose to kill themselves.
Bear in mind that the psychological burden on the family and friends of the suicide victim is much, much worse than the burden that the victim may have placed on them in life.
2. Social isolation (real or perceived): This is the "no one would care if I killed myself" thought process. Like burdensomeness, much of this is due to perception. This point explains why mothers have a much lower suicide rate than women without children and why African-Americans (who typically place higher importance on family ties than Whites) also have lower suicide rates. It also explains men's higher suicide rates after a divorce than women's: men frequently take divorce harder emotionally because they are unwilling/unable to open up to their friends so they bottle it up. They are more emotionally isolated.
3. Acquired ability to self-injure: This was the most fascinating feature of Joiner's work to me. Several findings: people who have sustained multiple serious injuries in life are more likely to commit suicide, people with piercings and tattoos are also more likely (even after controlling for other factors), and people with multiple attempts are also more likely. It is widely assumed that people who attempt suicide multiple times are more depressed, explaining why they have more attempts. This may be true, but literature shows that attempts become more and dangerous (with regards to method) as the number of attempts increases. Joiner argues that these people are acquiring the means to self-injure through practice.
The notion that you can willingly hurt yourself helps explain a few more things. We know that veterans are in the higher suicide rate statistics, they have a larger likelihood of being injured during combat and have a front row seat to death on a daily basis.
Physicians also have a higher rate of suicide because they experience death very frequently and it could very well have become numb on them what you or I would feel towards the whole thing. It's know that those who suffer from depression have a higher pain tolerance than those who are not. So this higher pain tolerance explains why it's easier to bite the bullet.
In an even stranger statistic, men have a higher suicide rate than women, even though women attempt it 3 times as much as men. Just goes to show you, if you want something done right, let a guy do it. I'll chalk this one up to society putting a lot of pressure on males to "be a man" and all that sort of shit. Besides that, men are more in the line of fire of getting hurt and thus, increases the odds of causing harm to one self.
Then we go into the whole mental illness. Like stated above, it's the top priority of any species to make sure they have the will to self preserve. So when something is chemically imbalanced, that can greatly affect the willingness of openly committing suicide. It was found that nearly all victims of suicide have either a clinically diagnosable mental illness or are operating at sub-clinical but detectable levels of mental illness. Major depression, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and anorexia tend to be the worst for this.
For the most part, you really can't stop someone who really wants to commit suicide. For all the many reports of suicide, it's still probably the biggest under reported act. Car accidents with a single passenger are often attributed to driver error when many are probably suicides. Many people, including coroners, believe the myth that very young children, like pre-teens, do not commit suicide. There has been at least one case where a child hanged himself and the coroner listed it as accidental. Lethal drug overdoses that may be suicides are also routinely put down as accidents.
Why the fuck not..
This leads us to what is the act in itself. Suicide, by all regards is viewed as a selfish act. At least by those who are left behind. Again, remember that those offing themselves feel as if they are a burden to others. So perhaps it's a selfless act to take themselves out of being a burden. Much the opposite of what selfishness would be. But it goes without saying that the loved ones, friends and family alike feel like they were selfish in committing such an act.
They also often operate under the idea that they are socially isolated. If you actually believe that your death will matter little to others, how are you being selfish by taking your own life? Besides that, the thought process of a person lying awake in bed and thinking about offing themselves is probably not with the same thought process of someone who is pulling the firing pin back and spraying the walls.
Yeah, you should probably kill yourself.
They keep it simple. People who off themselves do so in ways that they perceive will be quick and easiest on their families or friends. The complete opposite of selfishness. They travel to places to kill themselves. Like, in New York, 10% of the suicides that happen in the city are from non-New Yorkers.
Even celebrity suicide isn't that easy. Kurt Cobain had to work up to his suicide and was considering it for a long time before the actual pulling of the trigger, if you just look at his lyrics you can tell. He was originally afraid of guns but then his friends convinced him to go shooting. Oddly enough, this also is how he got into heroin.
You know what, a lot more of you people should kill yourselves. Especially since you probably have nothing going for yourself in your shitty lives. But I do have one favor to ask, when you do do it, don't be a pussy and fuck it up by failing to take out as many people on the shit list as you possibly can. You only get one go at it, so please do it correctly.
If you're going to just sit in your car in a closed garage as you cry yourself to death listening to Lady Gaga instead of bringing a duffel bag of guns to a cop convention, then just get the hell out of here. You're wasting my time. There's something to be said about doing something very drastic like murdering Wall St. bankers before you do yourself in.
Like, if I was going to kill myself, I would probably drive onto the middle of the 10/101/110 and in the peak hour, ditch my car, run across 8 lanes of traffic causing a lot of small accidents. Then I would jump onto the adjacent subway line and get hit by a train, thus inconveniencing the hundreds of thousands of commuters that inconvenience me every morning.
Don't go out like some punk ass bitch somewhere out in the cold all isolated or whatever. Getting drunk and letting nature take its course is not a good method. Even if your corpse may end up feeding some passing animal. You would think that would be the way to go, but freezing to death doesn't seem like the best answer. Here's a very detailed account of what that is like.
Then again, if you want a peaceful way out, there's always the helium/nitrogen tank method. But I've already gone over that one plenty of times and if you haven't paid attention to it then, you wont now.
The best part about suicide is that you will never regret it... well, unless you fail at it. Then you'd probably regret the mess you're in.
If you're still reading this, perhaps I should recommend some really good viewing material. You should take the time to watch Frontline's "The Suicide Tourist", it's really very good and you can see it online RIGHT HERE.
Me, personally? I don't think about killing myself. Instead, I think of just dropping everything and traveling the world penniless for a few years. Though I'd probably end up dead going that route. But if you're fundamentally broken and therapy, support and medication doesn't help, well then. Perhaps suicide is a means to a proper end.
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