Tips on reaching the proper mood for suicide?

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There are times when it's very logical. An instance of that would be if someone had a terminal disease and they were in such severe physical pain that no safe amount of morphine/painkiller would even begin to help and there is no treatment available to stop or lessen the pain, then suicide would be logical, rather than living another few days/weeks/months in severe and constant pain. In that instance, it's very logical. However I do think it would be illogical if the person didn't try all available methods to control the pain before they decided on suicide.

My grandfather suffers emmence back pain and can barely walk but he insists on fighting till he can't walk on his own free will. He is in his late 80s. It isn't terminal no but it is painful.

Edit: but I did say that if he was in his 80s and terminal it would be more understandable.

I'm assuming you mean something like osteoperosis or arthritis or some such problem where it's not a constant agonizing pain, and can be somewhat relieved by being in one position and not moving, or by medication. I am talking about constant agonizing unrelenting pain that is more than the person has ever felt. I do not mean severe pain when walking or moving, or constant mild to moderate pain. If he is still able to walk, I'd imagine that he's not in severe constant agonizing pain, although it may hurt very badly.

I'm talking about a situation where someone is in constant unbearable pain where no treatment even lessens it to a bearable level. Pain that has no chance of going away, only getting worse with time.

yeah, i understand that. i get almost-daily migraines, and have had migraines that lasted for days at a time. more than once i wanted to die to stop the agony. nothing emotional about that, i just didn't know how else to kill the pain.

^^ I feel you about the migraines! I get them too sometimes and I know exactly what you mean. I have them a lot worse now that I'm in perimenopause though. So that's always something to look forward too, huh?

Pain is horrible when you fear it. But pain is just an information. If you know that you're pain doesn't mean any danger, you need not fear it. And if you do not fear your pain, it is ok. Of course it is not confortable, better not to have pain, but still it is ok.

So pain in itself is not a reason for suicide. So just relax !

i guess you haven't had severe intractable pain. relief from the pain becomes the primary goal above all else.

Logic has everything to do with it. Suicide is a permanent solution to a problem. The problem may be temporary or permanent.
For example, if you know that you have health problems that are unrepairable (diabetic complications, glaucoma, kidney problems, etc...) or extremely painful (chronic arthritis, gout, migraines, etc...) and make your life not worth living in your opinion, logically suicide makes sense if you don't want to continue. You aren't going to get better although life may suck less in the future due to medical advances. It makes even more sense if you don't have any dependents.

Everyone dies.

Well I think avoiding pain is the primary goal in life in any case, whatever the level of pain. If you can do something to have some relief, of course it is a good thing to do it, but if you can't, you can just accept it. It's not a reason to commit suicide.

When people at a terminal state commits suicide, it is not because of the pain I believe, but because he has no interesting future. Are you interested in suffering so hard for the next 6 month then die ? Well, no, let's die now. But even if you suffer, if there is some possibility that you enjoy the future, then there is no way you suicide.

Problem is, when we are in trouble, we can have the illusion that we have no future. If we remind of some time when we thought we were just going to die, and think about the fact that now it's past, we can understand that the feeling that there is no future is not to be taken seriously.

Well, in this case, it is not really suicide but rather euthanasy.

Most of the time, when people commit suicide on their own, they are just doing a big mistake. This not a judgement, but a fact : we human do errors, and suicide is generally one big error.

Ever seen someone with a tumor on their spine that hurt so bad that the only way they can not lay there and scream is to be completely knocked out? That pain isn't going away. They will eventually develop a tolerance to the meds that knock them out and they won't be able to be knocked out, so they just.....scream. They probably don't care at all about an interesting future. They just want it to stop. You can't really just accept that level of pain, and that's what I'm talking about. It's not like a headache, it's not like a kidney stone, it's not like giving birth with no pain meds. I'm talking about ongoing, unrelenting, unbearable agony. If you think that's so easy to accept, well good luck if you ever had to, but I think you would change your tune on that one. I don't want to die at all, I want to live as long as I possibly can, but if I were in that kind of pain, with no end in sight, I'd go for it.

you're mistaken in thinking that people do not commit suicide because of pain. i know this because i've personally been suicidal... because of pain (andf you clearly have not). when i have gotten into that state, i don't care about the future - i just want the pain to stop. end of.

I have been suicidal, until I realized I was wrong about my approach.

Ok. I was not talking about such extreme cases. The vast majority of suicides has nothing to do with such medical issues.

And this does not contradict what I was saying. In this case, these people cannot do anything because of pain, so basically they have no interesting future. By future, I mean have a subjective experience. If your brain is completely overloaded by pain, you can't have any experience but pain. See what I mean ?

But I really think it should be investigated methods to control pain, to live with it, to understand it etc. It's too easy to say well too much pain so bye bye. It should not be just the person that suffers alone, but a collective effort to find mental methods. There are some people that live with great pain and don't want to suicide. This should inspire us.

Not really. The health problems aren't necessarily terminal, you're just living a bad life physcially. Suicide is an acknowledgement that it isn't going to get better. Suicide also does the least damage compared to dying other ways as well (ie, suicide by cop or jumping in front of a bus).

What you are talking about is also in the range euthanasy. Except that if you decide on your own to commit suicide, there are chances that you've been missing something, and so it is likely that you are doing a mistake. But if you go to a euthanasy association, and you explain what's going on, and that there is genuinely no solution, then, you can be accepted for it.

Many people who come to have an euthanasy, with the help of such assocations, finally find solutions to their problems... and find a future.

Last edited by circular on 13 Feb 2012, 5:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Chronic pain is medically known to lead to depression and other problems which reduce quality of life.

Also, high doses of pain killers can cause you to hallucinate. My grandfather died of cancer (I was a kid then, and I don't remember what kind it was). When he was dying he was stuck between severe pain or being disoriented and hallucinating. So, pain control isn't absolute.

I also recall a story about a guy who had severe neuropathic pain. His doctor was targeted by the DEA because he prescribed more pain killers than any other doctor in the community. (The doctor was the only pain specialist in the area, so of course he did. Duh.) Anyway, the DEA tried to bust him, but couldn't actually find anything that he'd actually done wrong. So, they resorted to harassing him every day for a year until he made a small bureaucratic error, and then they jumped on him. The doctor was so fed up that he dumped all of his pain patients. And since other doctors in the community heard what had happened they refused to take those patients.

So, the guy with the neuropathic pain eventually ended up in the ER begging for his feet to be amputated to stop the pain. He said it felt like his feet had been dipped in gasoline and set on fire. But they doctors wouldn't do that (and it wouldn't have stopped his pain, anyway). So, he went home and made a video tape explaining his plight and then blew his brains out with a shotgun. I think he was only in his 30's.

Anyway, the point is that people can't always simply "ignore" pain. Some will choose death over 20-40 more years of life, and I have a hard time judging someone for that.