Alternatives to Suicide

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I just saw a movie with a great line on suicide.

it goes something like this. Suicide not only affects the people you have met and know in your every day life, but those you have not met yet. It is those people you have not met yet, the potential for something good to come of it, that you should not commit suicide.

The movie is called Franklin. Good movie, great observation.

I think a better line is 'Show me the money!' Because if all people can do for you is tell you not to kill yourself then they aren't being very useful! Think about it! They aren't helping you find work or make friends or enter relationships ... all they're doing is sitting down, probably stuffing their face with nice food, and telling you not to die, and that's it!

The other thing I would say is that, if you have your own flat/apartment or house, clean it up first before you 'go'. And let somebody know that you'll be dead so that your body won't be left to rot for too long (which may happen if you don't have any friends). Even if you just post a letter to the local police station, it will get there in a day or two, and your dead corpse won't stink too much by then.

Suicide can be a perfectly rational option.

Suicide is counter to our cultural, humanistic and religious morals. As a supporter of human rights, one of the finest documents there is, you can never wish for people killing themselves. The problem is that good values really don't apply anymore. People say they do, but act the opposite. Today we are in a place where noone really has to starve, there is surplus, but what happens? Community dissolves into a parade of individuality and egoism. Every extra cost and adaption is a strain when it's all about cutting corners, downsizing and maximizing. Nobody has time, nobody has marigins and all "deviants" are annoyances.
This is what faces an aspie. Nobody cares to help her. Teachers are too stressed to help out. Friends and family don't have the patience and most importantly, society does everything it can to get out of paying.
Regardless that a few years of costly support might turn the aspie into a happy productive and competent person instead of a medicated suicidal wreck.

In the social limelight nobody wants surprises. You are complicating things and they don't like you. The reason is that solidarity is dead and it's up to everybody to promote themselves. Colgate smiles are more important than academical knowledge. The brilliant yet socially incompetent professor must take a step back for some halfway competent guy who is good at cracking jokes.

This society doesn't like us. It doesn't even want us here. If an aspie doesn't have people who help them fight it's all over but it's not their own fault even in the slightest. Suicide claims them as surely as cancer would. The assesment that made them take this terrible decision is actually correct on all counts, almost...

The issue here is that it isn't your fault, it's their fault, society's fault. By killing yourself you affirm this very sick world. Your suicide is a compliment to the morally depraved. They see you as garbage and you throw yourself away like you were. I say we stand and fight. Get louder, claim our rights and show them who we are, that we have every right to do things our own way (which actually isn't a very great demand). When they know us, and when we've claimed our spot, we can all coexist, and society will be better and even wealthier. Pluralism is the key to societal growth.

Aspies are needed in the same way as immigrants are needed. Societies that went racist and denied them declined and died. You are needed! You're differences and peculiarities are needed. It should be our sworn duty to help you find your place when you are down and risk falling out.

Needed? Not even wanted.

~Kate

I see a lot of very observant details here but I think I should inform you, most of what you're seeing - lower eschalon NT's deal with this as well. Really this is nothing new, nothing late 20th century or early 21st, if anything this is the best the world has ever been - at all - culturally, and when I look around I'm amazed that anything works at all. The main reason, I believe what your seeing - the narcissism, the unbridled self-intrestest and sheistiness, that's not just a human characteristic, its animal, its characteristic of anything living. Its genetics, the favoritism is eugenics, its our genes and the fragile structure that we're built upon having its way with us.

Ultimately the world being the way it is is no ones fault and there's no government system that could ever fix this, you could perhaps get a strong global leader with the power to 'make the trains run on time' but while I think you like expediency in helping the suffering I don't think you'd want the reality of it, ie. brown-shirts gone wild. Our best hope for helping the suffering, the starving - technology and the spread of education, spread of strong capitalism to these countries who have been suffering. As they get better economies and of course will have much more drive than the U.S. who's pretty much - as ruveyn (PPR) likes to say of all advanced societies, turns to squash-rot, the rest of the world is ready to get their piece of the pie. Also, I can say that having a lot of Giant Eagle grocery stores in the area; one of their major acts of philanthropy is, on a regular basis, getting rid of the expired produce but not throwing it away - sending it to homeless shelters. The homeless get to eat food that's perfectly fine, just can't sit another two weeks, Giant Eagle gets to write off a loss - everyone wins. The technology of course will always improve agriculture, improve our productivity in terms of farmable land or ability to utilize land.

In short, I don't think we'll ever be able to resolve social injustice via government - innovation yes, government, you have to really be ready to give up a lot. I remember there was a prominant black panther who was a big aggitator for communism (Irving something, can't remember the last name), was exiled from the US, moved from communist country to communist country, and came back a republican - said he'd rather be in jail in the United States than free in a totalitarian state.

Of course I don't know you, I don't know you're political inklings for certain, just that I'd really want to get this across to you - human stupidity doesn't exist in a vaccuum, it exists because its easy, and its easy because of our nature but - our nature comes from somewhere, its not something that just materialized out of laziness but rather the reality of what we're made of. IMO if we're to solve two things as a race - eugenics and hunger/poverty - that'll be more than enough, we'll change our course of history forever because, IMO, natural eugenics is the true root of all evil - its what makes greed mean something, it's what makes the vulgarity of cut-throat rather than constructive competition mean something, the list goes on - its pretty much all mating tools and these tools are in place because the gene pool loves the strong/the haves and hates the weak/have-nots, its quite revolting but I think that's the synopsis of it.

DNR stands for Do Not Resuscitate.
I would rather escape somehow.
I do not want either of these things.
Life has very little to offer me and death is unknown, which is scary.
The worst thing is that I do not know what I want.
My preference is now tilted towards death rather than life because life is too short and too empty.
And I hate that I will inevitably forget emotions by sleeping and go through another week, only to arrive at the exact same spot next week.
But I hope it will not drag along for long.

The best alternative to suicide is removing yourself from society for a while and becoming a hermit. Then finding motivation, however fragile, to live on. It worked for me.

Same diff, tho? I don't have to redo it?

Thing is, the burden of a death wish is bad enough, but I draw the line at dying in some kind of natural or accidental way, and then being revived and/or resuscitated.

Ursaminor, how can we measure suffering?

You could move to a different country that speaks a different language and be reborn with a new life, new culture, new people, etc.

Last edited by sefer on 13 Mar 2010, 10:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

'sigh'

I'm thinking that's a temporary state, as in I'm pretty sure that you'll find your way out of going board. I have a favorite radio show host, won't say who, but he had a psychologist on who was one of the heads at UCLA. He indicated that, while this is something of a layman's version of the current theory, it's still a good synopsis.

Humanity, in total, every person alive, goes through a series of crisis that go in a certain clockwise order, many times in their lives. The crisis are 1) helplessness 2) mastery 3) pride in your accomplishments 4) feeling small and alone in a big world, and from there it repeats 1-4, 1-4, all the way through life. As this process continues and every time you deal with one of these crisis, again, you get more and more adept at dealing with it. Helplessness is the point where an old mode of operation isn't enough anymore, mastery is the stage where you're riding high on hope - gaining new skill sets, fertilizing new talents, and in a state of becoming. Pride in your accomplishments is what happens once that state of mastery or becoming runs its course, after which feeling alone in a big world is the point at which you realize the limit of those accomplishments, you find a new 'place', after which point helplessness comes up again - the sense of needing to go back into the 'mastery' phase of things again - though helplessness is the stage where you just haven't found out what it is, ie. what skills your after enhancing.

I've had I think about three strong cycles in my life, I'm currently in a mastery stage, and I find that mastery is typically the longest lived, the other three go by rather quickly - other than helplessness, that typically lasts until life presents new means of mastery.

I guess what I'm getting at - feeling like you are right now - this is the time to keep your eyes on the horizon and figure out what you wish to add to your life. It will come along, its just a matter of keeping your eyes open and knowing what it is when you see it . My last stage of mastery was attaining NT-level social skills and compatability as well as obtaining a BBA in Accounting and even graduating highest honors, though I realized that neurologically there were still holes where my social knowledge still couldn't fully translate into social skills, in an immediate sense yes but in an ongoing sense - perhaps not. My current mastery stage has been languages, martial arts, really continuing to pound the music.

IMO your 20, life's far from over, and it will only be over when you say its over. If you don't like current outcomes or the current state of things, like I said before keep your eyes peeled.

Measure brain activity in specific regions of the brain
A way to measure suffering

Wow. Thank you so much for that answer. However I think I'm pretty much doomed. I exist mainly through surviving, not really living. Not much can be done for a person who firmly believes they're worthless

I'm glad you are in a good stage in your life. What languages have you learnt/been learning?

David, other people are not responsible for helping you find work, friends or a relationship. That is your job and is called 'living.

People have their own worries and problems to solve. They cannot micromanage your life for you.

Part of the reason I wrote that much is that I personally was at rock bottom somewhere between 19 and 20, I'd tried a half dozen times to kill myself, was in a position where I had been on medications for eight years and my mind was practically gone from it, I was 19 and functioning something more like a 9 year old, terrible akasthesia, I could hold a job perhaps but with regard to Taco Bell that wasn't saying much. I really thought after high school that I'd be in assisted living, I really saw no future.

What happened though was I realized that I couldn't kill myself. With that in turn I realized that, having to live another 60 or 70 years, that I was laying the foundation of what those years would be like with my every move in the present (back then). From that perspective I literally stopped caring about any degree of pain or discomfort on most levels and really ran myself full stop at resolving everything that I possibly could have. At that point my life was only worth something if I could bring myself forward and shatter my obstacles, and thinking from that paradigm meant that creature comfort no longer meant anything, if anything it felt a lot like backsliding, which, to this day, I still can't sit around by myself and watch TV or do anything like that without feeling quite immediately depressed and needing to do something productive with the time. I think this is a realization that can hit a lot of people though, but more importantly I think it shows that even if at 20, maybe even 25, that a person thinks that their odds of having anything close to a satisfactory life is in the crematory, there are a lot of things that can light a fire under you or inside of you which, essentially, can entirely change the way you evaluate life, evaluate its meaning or evaluate what certain things are worth, that kind of paradigm change is what can move people out of a slump. At 20 - you still have a lot of possibility for it.


Spanish, I want to get that fluent, add Brazillian Portuguese next, and perhaps Turkish as a third. I want to take that into international business, I'm holding myself off from getting a masters degree because IMO in this economy its a great way to price yourself out of a job - languages and things like that though are a lot of value added on a resume.

Also I realize that through Latin America there have to be many great minds, thinkers, philosophers, authors, I'd like to be able to break beyond the English speaking world in that regard and really get a sense of what and who is out there.

Phoning a crisis line is a good alternative.