Understanding suicide.
Given my threads about depression and the like, I want to ask members about their knowledge about why people commit suicide.
This is a very complex question that I understand has differing sociocultural ramifications for differing countries. In Japan, the act is seen as sometimes a noble death. Insurance companies are more lax there about the issue...
But, there's no way around the fact that suicide is seen as an act of desperation with regards to some illness or financial reasons. Suicide is predominantly committed by young people. But, it is also prevalent among middle aged folk also.
So, what do you understand to be the real reason people are seeking suicide as a way out?
This is a very complex question that I understand has differing sociocultural ramifications for differing countries. In Japan, the act is seen as sometimes a noble death. Insurance companies are more lax there about the issue...
But, there's no way around the fact that suicide is seen as an act of desperation with regards to some illness or financial reasons. Suicide is predominantly committed by young people. But, it is also prevalent among middle aged folk also.
So, what do you understand to be the real reason people are seeking suicide as a way out?
Comments (70)
They must think that living is a voluntary activity or, in other words, that (the capacity to) will precedes or transcends being alive. As I observed, that belief will only be reinforced by those urging them to "have more volition" and "not give in". I also think that most suicidal people in the modern world are nihilists (self-obsession would be the vehicle they take on their suicidal path), so suicide for the sake of noble values like honor, like the Japanese seppuku you allude to, is virtually absent, except when it's invoked as a cultural vestige.
IMHO
—Edwin S. Schneidman
I have no idea if this is true in most cases, but it does capture so much of the sense of grievance and thwart that I frequently encounter when I talk to suicidal people.
This is an interesting statistic, though a little old.
Australian men aged over 85 have the highest suicide rate in Australia, and more than double that of teenagers, Australian Bureau of Statistics 2015 data
Also, a very interesting and well written book on his experience with depression and suicidal thoughts is ‘Darkness Visible’ by William Styron.
One of the things I remember Styron saying, I think it was him, was that he had reached s point where his mind was actually in such pain that he didn’t feel he could deal with it anymore. Note that he said his mind, not his head or brain.
Why does Japan have such a high suicide rate? -BBC
Suicides among Japanese young people hit 30-year high - BBC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan
I don't think suicide as being irrational. Some might even say that suicide is the result of an overly-rational mind.
Yeah, jogging my memory a bit, the socio-economic landscape of Australia has changed to such an extent, that elderly folk are having a hard time coping with it. I don't remember the details; but, maybe @Banno has a better idea of what's going on in the land of Oz.
The response to the intolerable situation of suicide might be a rational decision but it’s a decision based on a lot of pressure which wouldn’t seem to allow much room for calm objective thinking.
There are those who have long-term reasons to think about suicide: those with degenerative diseases approaching terminal status; those with cancer which can be treated with only palliative care; those whose lives have become unsatisfactory owing to illness/injury/age (usually in combination).
Actually, it seems to be the case that most people who suffer from terminal illnesses do not attempt suicide. They may talk about it, prepare for an attempt, or seek help, but generally do not complete the plan (when they could). Life becoming unsatisfactory appears to be a more potent cause of suicide.
Middle aged white men with high school educations or less seem to be most likely to kill themselves. I would submit that this is because their lives have become much less satisfactory than they believed it once was. This group faces many large barriers to achieving greater satisfaction: Their best-fit jobs have largely disappeared; they do not have a large set of flexible skills; because they are "middle aged" (35-45 years of age) they are no longer physically able to compete with younger men, or get new kinds of jobs which offer a bright future. Age discrimination is real. Middle aged men are also likely to have ready access to effective means of delivering their own death.
There are quite a few people for whom suicide seems to be a sudden response to a sudden change in circumstances and who were able to act on the impulse immediately (for this group loaded guns pose a much greater than typical danger).
Young people who experience intense emotional lability are likely to go from feeling great to feeling very dejected in a short period of time. Weaker impulse control which will come with maturity may not stop them from reaching for the means to attempt suicide.
Desperate Housewives's ghost narrator came across a box with a loaded gun in it. She impulsively pointed it at her head and pulled the trigger. Dead. Such a scenario is not common, but it does highlight the danger of guns: a loaded gun can deliver a certain death instantly. (Yes, it can be screwed up...). Drugs, hanging, car accidents, suffocation, etc. all take time. Bang. It's all over (for the trigger puller).
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-30/australian-men-aged-over-85-have-the-highest-rate-of-suicide/8569740
Old news, but things have not improved. There's a Royal Commission (no idea what the equivalent, if any, would be in the US - Not sure there is one) into treatment of the elderly, and another into treatment of the disabled.
Evil stuff.
These conditional risk factors for people with suicidal ideation are real instances of self harm, emotional volatility and impulsive action. Impulsive self harm rather than ritualised self harm is a big thing for it. So is lack of insight into its social effects; if someone is really convinced the world will be a better place without them, and doesn't feel 'weighed down' by the love of their family and friends, they're more likely to do it.
Substance abusers for drugs that have a fine boundary between OD levels and not-OD levels also fit here.
Edit: the story this tells for suicide attempts is that they're usually done in a fit of despairing passion, which makes use of previous plans (say, buying a gun).
guilt is the most common reason in my opinion. I believe there are more practical ways of dealing with guilt and depression then suicide. Suicide draws people a way from what little beauty is in this world. Suicide leads to future suicide among other people. I don't really see suicide as just a bad reflecition on the person who commits it but also a bad reflection on society.
I've often promised my self that i would sooner cut something off from my life or cut something out of my life before taking the final plunge. Becoming a Buddhist monk isn't entirely out of question for many.
What's the whole deal with suicidal idealization? I mean, psychologically what is driving the mind to generate these thoughts? Does this happen on a subconscious level? Freud called it the death desire or instinct; but, is that view held to this day?
I think the amount of pain, stress, suffering an individual is going through is secondary in suicidal ideation. What seems more important is the individual believing they have something to live for. Note, I say believe, because some people seem to have nothing going for them, and they think their lives are worthwhile somehow, and others seem to have the whole world at their disposal, and yet kill themselves, because they lack some inspiration to take advantage of it.
Personally, I think that a lot of suicidal people should be encouraged to participate more in charitable activities or things that help others--helping others is often what gives people a sense of purpose in life. It also helps to shift their focus away from the ego. Too much naval-gazing is unhealthy.
I agree. Suicide is usually caused by a person having some measure of ability to see reality for what it is but at the same time not being able to solve it. I would encourage people who are suicidal to deal with their guilt before ever getting married. I believe the single person can solve suicidal thoughts simply by moving to another country. Suicide is very sad and i wouldn't wish it on Hitler.
Quoting Wallows
Well, he did kill himself in the end. Unluckily, too late for his millions of victims.
Sorry, I don't quite understand this. Secondary as the root cause or a casual factor or confounding factor?
Quoting NKBJ
But, wallowing is fine? :sweat:
What makes you say that guilt is the primary motivation for committing suicide?
just my opinion. I've felt plenty of guilt over the years.
true.
Over what, and has this resulted in suicidal ideation?
Doubt there's one cause. You can probably group the causes into environmental factors like workplace or relationship stress, mental health issues with limited physiological or neural aetiology, mental health issues which have pronounced physiological or neural aetiology, and as a symptom of comorbidities of other disorders like chronic pain or (persistent) psychosis.
Or you might just be a gloomy sod with nothing wrong with you otherwise.
Edit: though I want to highlight that everyone can wanna die from time to time, even when there's no medical issue. Sometimes life inescapably fucking sucks.
send me a private message and i'll tell you what i was suicidal over. Other that i can't answer your question out in the open. Not idealization.
Secondary causally. If suffering alone caused suicide, then victims in the Holocaust and slavery would have all killed themselves long before their circumstances did.
A good summary:
https://www.suicideinfo.ca/resource/suicidetheories/
Thanks. What are more of your thoughts about why people commit suicide?
Why is this important?
Because it creates two different categories viz.
1. Killed by others/not-self
2. Killed by self
When viewed in this fashion it draws people's interest because suicide is paradoxical - self-preservation is a primordial instinct and exists in ALL life, including us. Yet, there are people killing themselves. It's disturbing and "inexplicable" and so we muse over it.
However, in my opinion there is no such thing as suicide as understood as killing oneself. It's always something else that does the killing e.g. depression and intractable pain both of which may arise from a variety of preceding causes.
Think of it like this. Imagine two scenarios A and B. In A a man shoots and kills you. This is clearly NOT suicide.
Now in scenario B the man points the gun at someone you love dearly and demands that if you don't kill yourself then he'll shoot your beloved. In this case if you focus, erroneously so, only on the mode of death which here is self-harm then you would scream "suicide!!" but if you look at the whole picture it actually is murder isn't it?
So there is no such thing as suicide construed differently from other forms of death. To think otherwise is a mistake and confusion is inevitable.
That's a very interesting take, and quite true, but what does it offer in terms of understanding. It's so intellectual and meaningless on the ground.
I thought identifying the true cause of a problem leads to a better solution. Much of the discussions on suicide are about the apparent paradox of self-harm. Just thought a different POV would clear things up.
I'm not meaning to be difficult. It just seems like your idea comes down to ridding someone of depression (the gun), which is the problem, or what contributes to the depression.
Edit: I mean the gun in the hands of man b.
But your right, in that light its murder. But murder of who?
Sorry it seems like I swung to the other extreme. It isn't murder per se. What I meant was suicide has an external cause and to focus only on the self-induced nature of death misses the point.
On face value I surmise that this makes sense. But, the issue is that suicide, even in a deterministic universe is still self-harm. You can't really get around this fact.
This relates to suicide committed by teenagers who only see themselves as one thing and are unable to view themselves as more than that. For example, intelligence is the only thing some people see themselves as and nothing more.
For adults, I would say it due to societal pressure of being perfect and having a perfect life or not being in the position you want to be in; seeing yourself as a failure and unaccomplished.
I don't know how to explain this but all cases of suicide are a last resort i.e. people who take their own lives are left with no choice. If everyone was asked to make a list of things they'd like to do then suicide would be the last on that list.
How do we use a list. We prefer the first on the list and when that isn't available we move to the next item on the list. It's a process of elimination and suicide is when no item on our list is feasible or desirable. In other words it's a forced ''choice'' or to make matters plain it isn't a choice. Actually the situation is very similar to our mistaken impression that suicide is self-harm. It isn't.
Not true, drugs, prostitutes, the "low-life" is always an option.
These aren't last on a to-do list. To be fair though I think people differ from each other quite significantly so that no two to-do lists will ever match item for item. So, yes, some people have different items on their list but the point is the last item on any list isn't a choice at all.
Would you ever consider suicide?
:razz:
But, you understand the issue?
May be :smile:
A person who suffers in this life therefore weighs his or her options: I don't know what happens in the afterlife. This life is pretty miserable. Am I better off dead, or better off going on living?
The question answered decides the further course of action. If the person decides that his or her perception of afterlife is better than going on living, s/he will kill him/herself.
Notwithstanding the above, there is a greater hurdle to pass for all suicides: the actual act, and the actual process. That in and by itself is scary, and most attempts don't end up in death, because the person recoils from the act. Again, it is the amount of suffering (and a bit of fortune / misfortue) that decides whether one can pass through this higher bar, the actual act.
Those are not a solution to most people's pain. Let's say you think the world is never going to provide you the love you want, you're heart has been broken a number of times (and perhaps this mirrors what happened in childhood some way), then someone suggesting 'take drugs' is not solving the problem and the yearning of the depressed person. A drug user might take the drug to find a respite from a similar longing, but they haven't given up yet and they are hooked.
If I felt like a loser doomed to be outside and unhappy and unsuccessful, for exmaple,
there's not way becoming a prostitute will seem to be bringing me closer to what I need.
what it comes down to is the person asking himself, "is this life really worth living?" different people have different struggles and different tolerance to life's garbage. in the moment there's a rush of adrenaline, a high that cuts through all the apathy. his own life is in his hands. he could've planned it for a month but head still feel that rush. no faithful person is absolutely certain about what goes down after he makes the decision. it's life vs unknown territory. in that moment, whether premeditated or on impulse, he is chosing the unknown.
This year, as I've been suffering my own existential crisis, I've had some experience of that same kind of feeling, but also coupled with a terrifying fear of death, even a ridiculously distant death (for the first six months of so of this crisis, I was fixated on figuring out some potential way for life in general to continue forever, rather than being doomed by the heat death of the universe in trillions of years or something). I've since come to the conclusion that there is a non-rational feeling of meaningfulness or meaninglessness that people can have, what I call ontophilia or ontophobia (love or fear of being), and if you are full of that feeling of meaningfulness, you neither fear death nor feel like living is an obligation that you have to fill with distractions because you're just grateful to exist right now and that can go on for as long as it does; while if you're full of that feeling of meaninglessness, you either (or both simultaneously) fear the prospect of ever dying, and feel like having to exist is an oppressive tedium that you have to distract yourself from by filling time with something.
Even though death is not a favorable alternative, it sure is better than suffering everyday.
Suicide can be mitigated by becoming more aware of other people or thoughts. There's an element of insanity about suicide. The insanity of suicide seems to manifest in perceiving one's future as completely enveloped by depression or some mood.
I think the best way to avoid suicidal thoughts is to first take some antidepressant, and engage in therapy or some constructive endeavor if one has enough motivation to do so.
Should you avoid suicidal thoughts in the first place? Wouldn't it be better to face them? What if someone uses suicidal thoughts for some sort of catharsis, like roleplaying, rather than as premeditation for an act? The role suicidal thoughts play in the genisis of a suicide is interesting and not necessarily as straightforward as "I have suicidal thoghts therefor I want to die."
Some suicidal thoughts never lead to an actual suicide. But even suicidal thoughts that are not connected to an intention to kill oneself can lay the groundwork for a future suicide - as you familiarise yourself with the thought patterns. An example would be: "having a favourite hypothetical method" --> "being comfortable with the method, thus removing one psychological disincentive."
I was a suicidal teen. I'm now nearly fifty and don't consider myself suicidal anymore, but I do still have the thought habits. I can tell a difference in the quality; I'm not serious. (They're more over-the-top, exaggerated; a bit like I'm parodying my younger self.) Btw, I don't have a hypothecical favourite method. All methods suck. I think that's one of the major reason's I'm still alive. Too afraid of the system shock that comes with dying (painful methods), and of waking up after an unsucessful attempt and having to deal with the fallout (unreliable methods). As a formerly suicidal person I can tell you that fear of dying and fear of death are not the same thing. I have the former but not the latter.
Talking about my non-serious suicidal thoughts is difficult, because of the taboo that surrounds the topic. I can be pretty casual about it, and people often don't know how to react to that. I usually have to explain that, no, I don't intend to kill myself, and, no, I don't intend to make fun of the topic (even though it sometimes sounds like it). I've just learned to live through my suicidal phase, and now suicidal thoughts are some sort of cathartic tool (and that sometimes includes black humour).
As a result, talk about suicide entirely in terms of prevention feels isolating. It did back when I was suicidal (it felt like people were more interested in preventing a suicide than in trying to understand), and it does now (because of the disconnect). When it comes to fiction I react best to stuff that depicts emotional difficulty without taking sides (e.g. the film 'night, Mother with Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft), or with absurd comedy set-ups (e.g. the suicide arc in the anime Welcome to the NHK). I react worst to shows that idealise a single solution.
In terms of this thread, I don't think it's helpful to seek a single solution to the problem. I mean, suicides range from the guy who walks in on his family to demonstratively shoot himself, to the guy who kills himself and leaves behind a binder explaining himself, a lot of articles about dealing with loss, as well as a list of therapists and help-lines. Suicide is really just a single puzzle piece in a person's life and you won't understand that single suicide without understanding how it fits in. You can abstract, but that would involve multiple non-exclusive categories, I think.
Basically, you can't understand a person's suicide without understanding that person's life. A life can have problems. Suicide doesn't solve those problems, but it does end them (and also prevent solution, though that's moot by then). Focussing on the suicide ("you shouldn't kill yourself, because...") can come across as priviledging the topic over the underlying problems (as in "It's fine if you suffer, as long as you don't inconvenience me with your corpse"). Not all suicides are problem-centred, though. My own phase was more akin to what Pfhorrest describes in his post above. Problems, here, are more nuisances - life's a struggle and there's no reward. Depression is actually welcome, because it's more comfortable than the anxiety of what sort of contradictory demands will come your way next. It's not big deal, really, you can push through that as you always have. But you become increasingly exhausted. People notice this, so they try to be nice to you, and through this process the things you enjoy turn into
obligations, too, and eventually you just forget how to want things, even though you're an expert in how to not want things. Eventually you just feel empty. That's fine during a depression, since you don't feel any sort of vigour anyway. During bouts of depression it's easy to dismiss life. You're not going to kill yourself; it's not worth the bother. But as it recedes? Or if you feel it coming? That's when there's an inner tension that's nearly unbearable; it's a sort of unspecified can't-do-anything-but-have-to anxiety. During that phase you're not likely to make any preparations, though. Half-hearted attempts would be the most likely (though that was never my style). You prepare while your fairly calm and even cheerful. In my case it ended with research, since I never found a method I liked. (I also wondered whether I really was suicidal, or if that was just my inner drama queen. Now that I'm definitely not suicidal, I think I was.)
Basically, I didn't want to kill myself because of a specific problem, but because I was just gradually losing my grip on life.
Quoting Wallows
This definitely helped during bouts of what I call the brooding spiral. Re-focusing helped by itself, and as a bonus I tended to find out that I was asking way more of myself than nearly anyone else (though that was a lesson that usually didn't stick).
In very specific circumstances... it is better to die at your own hands than to die at the hands of the enemy.
Quoting TheMadFool
We construe them all with language use.
:brow:
Not everyone dies at their own hands or at a time of their own choosing.
Taking one's own life - by whatever intentional means - at a time of one's own choosing is a case of suicide. From self-sacrifice for the good of others, through self-pity and loathing, whenever ones takes their own life, it is a case of suicide because it is not the same as other ways of dying...
Accidental deaths are not suicide. Homicides are not suicide.
Ontophilia seems to me an adaptation to - distraction from, as you've put it - ontophobia. Isn't it, after all, the business of culture (i.e. cultus), even moreso civilization (i.e. syphilization), to busy us enough with pain pleasure & boredom to avert our gazes from the abyss in order to keep us from noticing the abyss gazing back?
A suicide maxim: The switch doesn't flip itself On or Off.
Dealt a hand by nature-nurture, choosing is always ex post facto - to be or not to be - manifest in how one chooses to play that hand. Suicide (long) precedes the act; circumstances, it seems, postpone or delay or, yes, facilitate the outcome.
Btw, I prefer meontopathy (my coinage) because it more explicitly suggests the absurdity (or horror) of being human.
I really don't know what you mean by "facing suicide". Usually (in my case), there's a lot of anxiety when those thoughts appear.
Quoting Dawnstorm
That's pretty dark, man.
Quoting Dawnstorm
What do you mean by "psychological disincentive"?
Quoting Dawnstorm
Please elaborate. I seem to be encompassed by fear lately.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yeah, I'm the guy who stays in the kitty pool instead of jumping off the deep end. Did time or your age help you see the whole issue as some childish desire or fantasy?
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yeah, I agree with this. I prefer depression instead of anxiety.
I've noticed a pattern in pessimistic literature where any immediate feeling of meaning and contentment can only be read as a retreat from horror. The Abyss - and the existential confrontation with it - is elevated (sacred.) Anything outside that confrontation is considered profane. There is an implicit judgment attending words like 'pain', 'pleasure' and 'boredom'.
This sacred/profane distinction runs deep. Cioran talks about the Heights of despair, for example.
I once met a childhood trauma specialist who had become an alcoholic and sex addict. He didn't make the connection for a while. Traumatized in childhood, obsessed with trauma. It didn't click. But he was fucked up and he knew that. He wasn't just a sex addict. He had a specific fetish -married women. What got him going was knowing they were drawn to him (avatar of the abyss) in favor of their beau. There's a thesis to be written on the relation between violation and pessimism.
I wonder to what extent something like this subtends the whole pessimistic approach.
I don't see why experiencing meaningful existence isn't just experiencing meaningful existence. But when you add resentment to the mix, you can see how it might warp.
Melville treated the theme of 'retreat' very well. Jonah, furtive, getting as far away from an internalized judgment as humanly possible.
Well we all have our white whales and we all have our Babels-in-reaction-to-the-Flood. Mortared tightly and seeking to kill the one thing we cannot let live.
I often think about that guy and how he ended his relationships with the women whose lives he ruptured and how he made sense of that. David Foster Wallace did a story on this in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - maybe the presence of the destroying force was necessary to educate the destroyed. Who knows?
There are many things that can help, but what really helps depends on the situation. For some people it will be to feel loved. For some people it will be to feel that their life serves a meaningful purpose. For some people it will be to understand things that they didn’t understand, to identify a false belief they had. For some people it will be to take some medication. Or a combination of those.
I said it before and I’ll say it again, maybe the best tool to help with depression is psilocybin. It has worked for many people for which nothing else worked, studies have shown that. The thing is that it can help you feel loved, help you feel that your life has a purpose, and help you understand things you didn’t understand, all at once. That’s why it works so well. But obviously do it in a safe place, and don’t do things like driving after taking it, but that’s also true of other medications.
My feeling about suicide is that it's a response to an emergency that can be handled in various ways, but the person experiencing the emergency can't access any of those ways but one. I think the defining feature of a suicidal emergency is that it can't be understood and dealt with by outside sources. It's a breach in the space of reasons, if you like. I've noticed you've talked recently about how stoicism and many other approaches can't help. That sounds like the edge of a suicidal crisis - not fun.
I've spent a lot of time with the idea of suicide and feel very close to it. I've always lived with a shade of that idea, but there was a bad point where for a month it became pressing and unavoidable. I 'handled' it like so :
I went to the same bar every night. I got as drunk as I could and walked home. I would wake up and smoke cigarettes all day (2 packs or so). I checked myself into mental hospitals and then, checked-in, tried to find ways to get out, because it wasn't helping, and I needed to commit suicide.
I couldn't do it because I was too disorganized. and too fearful. I couldn't jump off the high places. I spent two weeks going to the high place every night. I could not live another minute, and I also could not jump. Maybe that's cowardice. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't think straight this whole time.
I was very much aware of the thing of 'it gets better' and I had nothing but contempt for it, but....
What happens before the crisis is you have certain ideas about how and why to live. The crisis burns them all away. Whatever is left after is what's valuable. The only thing that helps in my opinion is that it's necessary, and that it passes. You can't know why it's necessary or what it's doing until after, so no peptalk and positive talk will help. But it does pass. If it's really really really impossibly bad, you're getting close to the release, and you have to just hold on.
*Are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet?*
:lol:
Yeah, at some point in my life, out of utter desperation, I turned to drugs to help me cope with suicidal thoughts. Stimulant medications really helped me a lot in terms of creating a sense of "motivation: to keep on-going. But, that can only last so long as it's artificial.
Yes, that's it exactly! The difficulty is that, in ontophobia, you can't access the quality, for lack of a better word, of ontophilic space. You can only see it conceptually as something opposed to the ontophobic. So it has no fullness, or reality of its own. It seems to just be [non-ontophobia], a conceptual void defined in terms of its opposite.
I think, for those of us prone to severe mood swings, there's an art to figuring out how to leave conceptual 'anchors' that let us stay connected when you can't access that ok-ness. I find that I can 'know' that there is a kind of 'full' memory I can't access,that is presently barred from me. Knowing it's real, but for some reason barred, helps me realize that a limited depressive state is not as comprehensive as it pretends to be. That probably wouldn't have worked when I was younger but seems to work now that I've seen the depressive state run its course enough times.
It'll arrive. One of these days. Probably right when you forget to ask
Not so much facing suicide, as facing the suicidal thoughts and the emotions that come with them - that anxiety, for example. What that means for you in praxis I don't really know. I'm not even saying that medication is a bad idea. Just make sure not to enter into an unhealthy co-dependt relationship with the pharma industry, maybe? I don't know.
I'll probably be addressing what "facing suicidal thoughts" meant for me with some of your other questions.
Quoting Wallows
Not really darker than the underlying suffering, though. If it works it works, and if it doesn't it doesn't. There's probably no solution that works for everyone. Not even chocolate.
Quoting Wallows
When you think of doing something, some aspects draw you towards the action (incentives), and some push you away from it (disincentives). I call them psychological, because unlike real-life policy (such as, say, taxes), these (dis)incentives are just part of how you react to the world. Their basically your bundle of values.
Quoting Wallows
The difference between fear of dying and fear of death is actually a pretty good opportunity to demonstrate psychological incentives and disincentives:
So I have these unpleasant emotions: anxiety, disgust with myself and parts of the world, exhaustion... I don't want to feel them. The way I imagine death is this: no feelings at all. Those are gone, too. That's an incentive.
Now, logically I'd also get rid of good feelings. But back then that didn't function as a psychological disincentive. Rather than something I wanted to keep, that felt like an acceptable price to pay.
However, to get to the desired state of death I have to die, and dying is messy. I can't help but think of it as pain. The least painful method is probably overdosing on barbiturates of some sort, but - apart from being unreliable - I was imagining messing up and feeling really quesy or maybe having convulsions. None of this was based on research. I just had this association of dying with pain (or just undergoing an otherwise unpleasant process as queasiness).
So basically the state of death worked as an incentive, while the process of dying worked as a disincentive. It's not a cost/benefit calculation. Nothing that rational; it's a felt attraction existing alongside a felt repulsion.
To this day I'm not afraid of death. If I look forward a milennium, I realise I'll no longer be around. That doesn't affect me in any way, really. If I knew I had a fatal, incurable illness, I'd adapt pretty quickly to the new deadline. However, the illness itself? The process of dying? It sort of depends on the particulars, but in general this sounds like a rather unpleasant stretch of life. (Note that I don't have a shred of believe in any afterlife. Things might be different, if I thought death was just life v2.0.)
Quoting Wallows
Not really, no. You see, I always, even back then, thought I was being childish. It didn't help. If anything it just added a layer to my self-loathing. If anything, I'm less judgemental about my younger self now than I was back then.
Remember how I said near the start of this post that I'd adress the question of what "facing suicidal thoughts" meant for me with another question? Well, it fits here. As I said, I was pretty hard on myself for having suicidal thoughts. Why I can't I deal with life? Other people can live just fine, and I can't? What's with all those petty inner tantrums? Those anxieties of mine are so stupid! And so on.
Facing my suicidal thoughts for me meant suspending that sort of judgement. It wasn't easy, but it was easier than to - for example - just stop being anxious. So instead of berating myself, I just thought I'd dry indulging myself. To varying results. On bad days, that would lead to inner hysterics that were even harder to bear. But on good days?
I have the mind of a story teller. I dramatise everything. That's just how I work. But not all stories are realistic. On good days, allowing myself all those petty, nonsensical, negative feelings turned into a sort of game. If I'm going to be rediculous, I'm going to be really ridiculous. That's a hard-to-explain process. They way I'm writing about this now sounds a lot more deliberate than I was. It was a sort of emotional escalation. The self-judgemental part of me didn't go away, but it sort of transformed from judge to fiction audience. In a sense the process gradually estranged me from my suffering, until it felt like some absurd spectacle. It's a way to non-jeeringly laugh at myself, by ramping up the drama and making it less and less belivable.
It's not something I tried to do. I think the bad days that ended in hysteria would have put me off that methodology, if it wasn't something that... just happened. And I'm saying all of this now, looking back, so a lot of it will look neater in memory than it actually was while living through it. But that's roughly how I remember it playing out. I've been trying to think of an illustrative example, but I can't seem to get it right anymore. Maybe I should be thankful for that.
I like how you put it, it has interesting parallels with something else.
You talk of two distinct spaces that are opposed. In one space there is difficulty, suffering, things are not as comprehensive as they pretend to be, and you can’t access the quality of the other space, it is barred from you. In the other space this suffering isn’t there, you are OK, you see more clearly. In one space you feel disconnected from the ok-ness, in the other space you feel connected to it.
In order to remember that this other space exists, you say you need to figure out how to leave anchors so that you remain slightly connected to that space even when you aren’t in it.
Many people think like you, but they use different names to describe it. What you call ok-ness, they call love or light. What you call anchors, they call faith. What you call ‘full’ memory, they call truth.
You’re rediscovering what so many others have discovered, people that modern society tends to dismiss as believers of fairy tales, as irrational people, but they talk of profound things, not mere fantasy.
The latter terms are less problematic because they are explicitly about a state of mind, while “God” sounds like you’re talking about something outside your mind, which is causing those feelings, rather than just talking about the feelings.
There seems to be a lot of self-hatred in regard to suicidal thoughts in my view. Strength or the perception of having strength seems to be a theme of those suffering from suicidal thoughts in my view,
At least in my case, I've always perceived being as weak as something that prevented me from accepting myself.
And, as an American, I value strength.
I reckon it basically comes down to facing your fears and/or slipping over the edge. Stagnation, for whatever reason, is most likely a great player in turning little metaphorical ‘deaths’ into a literal suicidal episode.
I doubt it’s anywhere near that simplistic as there is ‘simple’ biochemistry involved too.
I'm a pessimist. Abandoned by my father as a young child but otherwise well loved and cared for by my mother et al till this day. Violated, I suppose; even violent in my teens & 20s via playing contact sports and brawling for a living as bar/club bouncer, but I've never violated a woman sexually or betrayed lovers or friends (except in self-defense) or beatdown anyone but assholes trying to do the same to me. Very much a pessimist, though not what's clinically referred to as 'depressive realist'. Softy for cats, dogs & kids - without any being mine. Booze & blues, books & bootycalls, hiking & flâneurie ... have kept my sense of the absurd, or despair, risably tragicomic. Cheerful - because the worst that I expect never happens - pessimist aka (reluctant) "happy warrior". If one's more extroverted, anti-social or PTSD'd by life, I suppose pessimism would thrive, so to speak, on violating ...
[quote=csalisbury]I often think about that guy and how he ended his relationships with the women whose lives he ruptured and how he made sense of that. David Foster Wallace did a story on this in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - maybe the presence of the destroying force was necessary to educate the destroyed. Who knows?[/quote]
Maybe ... echopraxia? To educate in how to destroy or how to stop destroying or how to stop being an accomplice to one's own self-destruction. :chin:
[quote=csalisbury]What happens before the crisis is you have certain ideas about how and why to live. The crisis burns them all away. Whatever is left after is what's valuable. The only thing that helps in my opinion is that it's necessary, and that it passes.[/quote]
Value of deep scars: they never lie.
[quote=csalisbury]You can't know why it's necessary or what it's doing until after, so no peptalk and positive talk will help. But it does pass. If it's really really really impossibly bad, you're getting close to the release, and you have to just hold on.[/quote]
Yeah, but a hand holds on to every thing except itself ...
[quote=csalisbury]The difficulty is that, in ontophobia, you can't access the quality, for lack of a better word, of ontophilic space. You can only see it conceptually as something opposed to the ontophobic. So it has no fullness, or reality of its own.[/quote]
Like a quasi-affective retrograde amnesia ... where memories & moods "encoded" with positive, affirming, self-serving emotions are blocked from cognitive access and conscious awareness, and ... a negative feedback loop reinforcing only the depressive episode (or condition)?
(Concept makes sense, will check "the literature" and report back ... or not )
I've kept company with a few depressives and survived more than my share of suicides and found myself helplessly without to access that inner vortex pulling him or her away and within. Bad trips and seizure-like drunken blackouts and concussive curb-stomps, and yet all i can imagine is something like
being confined to a skull that feels less & less your own like a horrified child running blindly through an ancient, creeking, ramshackled, winding maze of a sprawled-out structure 'full of sound and fury signifying nothing' but (the promise of more) pain, with no doors, no windows, no way up or outside, only steps down in the dark, wet slicked steps, further, deeper, pulled downward ... ?
Ok. Gotcha.
I'm not sure they are less problematic. For instance why wouldn't you say that objects are states of mind, instead of things outside mind that are causing their perception? It seems to me there is this widespread arbitrary assumption of interpreting feelings as internal states of mind, while interpreting other perceptions as showing us what's outside mind.
I would say a more coherent view would be to interpret feelings as perceptions too, as showing us something. And to not arbitrarily interpret some experiences as perceptions and some other experiences as states of mind, but to interpret all experiences as perceptions. All experiences would be the mind perceiving something. The mind wouldn't stem from the brain, rather the mind would act on the brain to control the body.
And then when you feel engulfed in love, you could interpret it as what's really happening, rather than seeing it as a mere state of mind, as an internal brain state. Love would be a real thing that we perceive, and when that thing passes through the body it is what would change the brain state, rather than the feeling being a manifestation of the brain state. The feeling could very well be telling you about something that the other senses do not see. There are plenty of things that the eyes see that other senses do not see, maybe feelings are senses too, ways of seeing things that other senses do not see.
I'm not claiming this is what truly is the case, but I'm thinking about it now, and for some reason it seems to make more sense to me than the usual conception.
fwiw, I was a baby-boy, too-nurtured. Might have been ok, but crisis (age ~14). If Mom & Dad didn't lose it, I probably would have been fine classwise- not full middleclass, exactly, but I would have been socioeconomically blanketed. They did lose it: divorce, roman catholic social snubbing. Family friends with a professional class who really did let us go, quicker and easier than you'd expect. Social equals to objects of occasional charity in a snap.
I was - am- the oldest of five. Safe six-figure family became mom of five on a ~30k teachers salary. Dad had a waspy background but no interfamilial respect and lawyered away financial support. Shitbag guy - became a lobbyist in DC for the motorcycle industry, of all things. Might as well have hit reset and started a new life, though he did offer to buy me a couch once.
Sob story, but everything is relative. It was very difficult to go from socially ensconced to persona non grata. It did suck. Cause, dude, it's hard to make that change at 14. Socially Situated Handsome Grandson to 'rumors are he's a heroin addict'. It's funny in retrospect, but it wasn't at the time. (Of course plenty of people are 'rumors are he's shitty' cradle-to-grave, and I lucked out of that. I realize my sob story isn't the sobbiest)
What this did is make me mad. I already was mad (on account of normal nerdy-kid social struggles and normal oedipal family dynamics) but I got real mad. Super mad. It's still there, and still irrational. I'm mad mostly all the time and I hate it. I don't think straight, almost ever.
Anyway, that's my story. And it's sort of a lie, because I'm packing it up too neatly, which... I mean the first part of your post is, in some ways, a dressed-up dating profile.Which is what all the preceding was too. So.
When I date, I'm smart, but shy, introverted but clever
I'm 'this seems right' for ~three months. Nice guy but when you try to get intimate....[being confined to a skull that feels less less your own like a horrified child running blindly through an ancient, creeking, ramshackled, winding maze of a sprawling structure 'full of sound and fury signifying nothing' but (the promise of more) pain, with no doors, no windows, no way up or outside, only down steps in the dark, wet slicked steps, down darker, further, deeper, pulled downward ... ]
yes, exactly. but how do you say that? you don't. You don't, you can't. You just pretend and get more distant and sadder and lonelier and madder. (big caveat here.There is a thing where you can do the identity of the guy who says the thing you said (the prose descent) as Tortured Hero. That might work, to some extent. But it only works in a limited way. The Tortured Hero is supposed to act like the Tortured Hero, and not like the actual torturing thing the tortured hero suffers from.)
Now nothing is less sympathetic than an ok-appearing white guy BUT (counterpoint) fuck you, i've spent my last fifteen years feeling like teeth dragged five miles down shitty backroad pavemet. I've clung with all my might to schopenhauer and cioran and beckett and Krasznahorkai and so forth. But what are they doing? ( I have a theory here. )
Is it safe to say in a completely deterministic universe that there is even 'self' in which one can choose to harm? If the the thinking thing or "I" as defined in "I think therefore I am", isn't even real as we define it but instead merely part of the plethora of other things that exists outside which simultaneously die and come to life every day of our lives, then one's own death is pretty much moot in a deterministic universe other than the moral, social, and psychological ramifications we give it. And if someone finds out that that they are merely one of many redundant cogs in a very large machine that it can be difficult to justify such beliefs or illusions depending on how they view it.
The odd thing is suicide and certain similar behavior seems pretty predictable yet nobody really cares most of the time when someone offs themselves since there are often obvious underlining reasons for them doing so and/or that they a really didn't play that much of a role in society any longer (which I believe has been a common reason for people to commit suicide through out history),