Why suicide prevention fails.
If I did not believe suicide to just basically the wrong thing to do I expect I would have done it by now. It's amazing how easy it is not to do something when ou've already made up your mind that it's not an option. That in no way is meant to say that living is easy... Not dying is easy. There's a difference. I've realized y'see that if you feel you can't go on living you pretty much have nothing to lose not dying, far as I can see it... You think you can't go on living... well, sounds like a challenge, dare you to see if you're right. Go on living and you'll find that you are. It's amazing how much you'd never find out if you quit the thing early.
For my part, I'd be a champion fool to toss away what I have that way. I often just feel frustrated with life and do sometimes bite myself or smack my own head. I try not to, but it beats smacking the kids.
Suicide takes the mystery out of death. I don't skip to the last chapter of mysteries. I off myself and I'll never find out how I'm going to die. I choose my own. It's like writing my own fortune cookie. Boring. Where's the fun in that? Thing is, I don't fear death, but pain. So why ruin the surprise? The beauty is, when I die, it'll be welcome. But I'm not done here. I need to fill my brain first.
Life on the steets has quite a few downsides as well, calandale. I probably should not make this pronouncement until I try it, but if one has issues with life in one place there is a fair chance one will have other, equally trying issues with another place.
No doubt. But 'tis better than surrender.
It's also possible to use Skype, a internet telephony program on a computer. Either a special USB phone or a set of speakers and microphone can use used to talk via Skype. This program has the capability of calling regular phone numbers, including 800 numbers. When calling from it, the phone number is displayed as a meaningless string of digits. Now this advice is in no way, shape, or form an advocation or assistance of suicide; it is simply a description of a particular telephony method that can be used to get help. However, obscuring the phone number of sometimes necessary to prevent people from being penalized for seeking help. The worst thing for a suicidal person to be seeing is a padded room and a bunch of people in lab coats with syringes in their hands. They need a sympathetic listener with good negotiation skills to talk them out of it, and maybe a pharmacist to give them antidepressants. Sadly, our medical system won't always give them that.
If there was life to live for, suicide prevention would fail less often or be redundant. Whether it's in the back of the mind or in the forefront like it is, the sense that humanity is killing off its own world, destroying its own nest, and forcing its best people to suffer the most pain, that sense is there. I get the strong sense that I am only being kept here to feel more pain as I watch more humans, more animals, and more dreams die. Whatever moral authority there might have been has been usurped by regulatory commissions and vaguely defined authorities and just plain crapheads and it's like my world turns to dust and runs between my fingers.
I am supposed to live because it would hurt someone else if I die? This someone else respects my opinions and feelings about as much as she respects the dirt under her feet, if that much. Like hell.
I don't have "so much to live for." People keep chipping it away with no regard for what it does to me.
One thing is for sure. I have the feeling that I am somehow being kept alive, and my physical condition is such that I should be dead but I can't die. Whoever and whatever it is, they owe me big time. A lot of my life has been torment using the false promise of reward.
It's also possible to use Skype, a internet telephony program on a computer. Either a special USB phone or a set of speakers and microphone can use used to talk via Skype. This program has the capability of calling regular phone numbers, including 800 numbers. When calling from it, the phone number is displayed as a meaningless string of digits. Now this advice is in no way, shape, or form an advocation or assistance of suicide; it is simply a description of a particular telephony method that can be used to get help. However, obscuring the phone number of sometimes necessary to prevent people from being penalized for seeking help. The worst thing for a suicidal person to be seeing is a padded room and a bunch of people in lab coats with syringes in their hands. They need a sympathetic listener with good negotiation skills to talk them out of it, and maybe a pharmacist to give them antidepressants. Sadly, our medical system won't always give them that.
They can have the same tracing system as the police, I doubt using Skype would block them.
I am supposed to live because it would hurt someone else if I die? This someone else respects my opinions and feelings about as much as she respects the dirt under her feet, if that much. Like hell.
I don't have "so much to live for." People keep chipping it away with no regard for what it does to me.
One thing is for sure. I have the feeling that I am somehow being kept alive, and my physical condition is such that I should be dead but I can't die. Whoever and whatever it is, they owe me big time. A lot of my life has been torment using the false promise of reward.
Except your death would probably not actually remedy any of the various grievous evils besetting this planet. Evidently you have much compassion; then there is there is at least the strong potential to change some things on this earth, particularly as you alos appear highly intelligent. If this other person truly has so little respect for you then it is quite possible that this may not be changed until that person themself is willing to change, but she is hardly the only person in the world. Who are we speaking of here? To be repeatedly promised reward and have one's hopes repeatedly crushed is - well frustration is a criminally dramatic understatement obviously, but would it not be the ultimate frustration to have let it end without seeing at least some further possibilities? My apologies if any of this is either insensitive to your suffering or just profoundly unhelpful.
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You are like children playing in the market-place saying, "We piped for you and you would not dance, we wailed a dirge for you and you would not weep."
You neglect that we suffer every minute that we are looking for those further possibilities. I'm content when I'm asleep. When I'm awake I always suffer, I want to never wake up again.
You neglect that we suffer every minute that we are looking for those further possibilities. I'm content when I'm asleep. When I'm awake I always suffer, I want to never wake up again.
I am unable to remember most of my dreams these days, and when this was different they were not unalloyed sources of contentment. If your suffering is as incessant as that then it is probably the height of presumption for me to offer further advice; I am conscious that my own sufferings are minuscule in the scheme of things, and many, even just within the confines of Wrong Planet, let alone the world beyond, are considerably worse off than me. Perhaps I should just stop pontificating on this subject. Maybe don't look for improvement if this is only an addition to torment. This does not necessarily address anything. Sorry if this sounds a little angry; actually I am not so at all at the moment.
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You are like children playing in the market-place saying, "We piped for you and you would not dance, we wailed a dirge for you and you would not weep."
I am supposed to live because it would hurt someone else if I die? This someone else respects my opinions and feelings about as much as she respects the dirt under her feet, if that much. Like hell.
I don't have "so much to live for." People keep chipping it away with no regard for what it does to me.
One thing is for sure. I have the feeling that I am somehow being kept alive, and my physical condition is such that I should be dead but I can't die. Whoever and whatever it is, they owe me big time. A lot of my life has been torment using the false promise of reward.
Except your death would probably not actually remedy any of the various grievous evils besetting this planet. Evidently you have much compassion; then there is there is at least the strong potential to change some things on this earth, particularly as you alos appear highly intelligent. If this other person truly has so little respect for you then it is quite possible that this may not be changed until that person themself is willing to change, but she is hardly the only person in the world. Who are we speaking of here? To be repeatedly promised reward and have one's hopes repeatedly crushed is - well frustration is a criminally dramatic understatement obviously, but would it not be the ultimate frustration to have let it end without seeing at least some further possibilities? My apologies if any of this is either insensitive to your suffering or just profoundly unhelpful.
Sometimes it's hard for me to work out what I mean.
If a child is suicidal he is usually treated by the same system that drove him to attempt suicide. This is a setup that is guaranteed to make it likely that he will be in and out of trouble for the rest of his life, and the "out of trouble" state will be precarious and unstable. There are no positive steps forward for this person, not really. He is placed in a state where his reasoning is automatically considered false and someone else's is true, and the one thing that rings truest is despair, while hope rings false. Right feels wrong. Wrong feels right. Others survive by sinking their angry fangs into his soul and tearing at it.
Even at the risk of driving some people to suicide, I feel compelled to tell this story this way. To me suicide is often the result of being repeatedly parasitized by other humans. It's indicative of this parasitism to tell them "but think of all the people you will hurt if you kill yourself." What if they have spent a lot of time hurting you, negating your personhood, driving you away from yourself? What then? What about when society insists on demanding from you what you don't have then punishing you for not having it, making your life a perpetual debtor's prison? When you owe society and your parents your life, what exactly do you owe them for, a positive or a negative?
The positive value of a person's life is in his or her ability to live it. This is mostly characterized by making your own decisions, for better or for worse. I know that the worst kind of suffering is being kept away from your own personal growth. My mother, once I was "rescued" would have put me back on the same diet of pure hell, and she could only understand negative reasons for backing off, like a gun pointed at her head. NEVER could she, and rarely does my sister, understand when it's time to make a positive contribution to the program. They sure as hell don't understand how things work except in a vague "intellectual" way like, "you don't have to read it out loud to me" but they do not internalize the ideas and they act as a drag on me when I do. It's not just her, either. There are a lot of people like that. I know people who are fighting for good causes, myself included, who do a lot more flailing than accomplishing.
The person who is suicidal is looking for something and I know what that something is. It is what the parasites take away from people, and that is basically their own life. There are physical energy, emotional energy, self-respect, money, the quiet order of their lives, and their time. I have some specific problems at this time. I gave up everything that I had to get away from someone who was a far worse parasite, who essentially functioned to convert money to crack cocaine which she immediately burned. My mother was actually worse because her idea of a hobby was to "land" on me with all four cloven hooves or however many she had. Others have done other things. They seem to think of me as a rich source of everything except what I was really made for. It's too bad. If they respected me and respected themselves they would find everything a whole hell of a lot better.
This last statement is probably true of every person here.
I don't see any value in saving a life unless that person then has a life. The best that a person can do sometimes is to stand out of the way of a person saving his own life, but sometimes someone needs a hand up, but coercion restarts the cycle. I don't believe in social Darwinism. It sure as hell wouldn't work as population control because the same pressures that cause some people to die or fail to reproduce cause others to reproduce more often.
I have problems and at the same time I am trying to work out better solutions that other people can use. Maybe I'm not doing it right. Yes, when I go through some of these problems I feel like killing myself because even though the problems are quite a bit more benign lately, they still cycle short of me getting a car when the goal is to get me a car but she keeps sucking my money away. I have a concrete example of what she would have to do to keep me from feeling suicidal so often, and that is to get a job herself and then charge me what I actually cost, instead of being an open-ended expense for me. She needs to be ready for the next time that she needs to spend a few hundred dollars. It's not coming out of my pocket this time. I can't stop spending the money on food though. I am trapped but this is better than what I had before.
Parents who make a child suicidal actually say they don't care to change if the child will kill himself to try to make them change. The same kind of parenting inspires parents to accuse the child of forcing them to miss work and take them to the doctor by getting sick. The child has no choice about getting sick or about feeling the suicidal feelings. Those toxic parents falsely accuse the child to cover up their own incompetence.
I've been through times when my mother thoroughly resented any suggestion that she find some positive way to deal with me. Everything had to be a fight that she could win, I had to be constantly in the wrong to satisfy her wierd appetite, any gift had to be "earned" and the pleasures that I did have were weapons to be used against me. Nothing was used to build me. I still fear success because it feels like a setup for some kind of disaster or contrived punishment against me.
People who have a life don't commit suicide. Even a life that a parent can't possibly approve of is still a life. There are a lot of people who attack life itself to try to get rid of human error and they don't realize that making the mistakes and learning from them is a vital part of life.
Parents who make a child suicidal actually say they don't care to change if the child will kill himself to try to make them change. The same kind of parenting inspires parents to accuse the child of forcing them to miss work and take them to the doctor by getting sick. The child has no choice about getting sick or about feeling the suicidal feelings. Those toxic parents falsely accuse the child to cover up their own incompetence.
I've been through times when my mother thoroughly resented any suggestion that she find some positive way to deal with me. Everything had to be a fight that she could win, I had to be constantly in the wrong to satisfy her wierd appetite, any gift had to be "earned" and the pleasures that I did have were weapons to be used against me. Nothing was used to build me. I still fear success because it feels like a setup for some kind of disaster or contrived punishment against me.
People who have a life don't commit suicide. Even a life that a parent can't possibly approve of is still a life. There are a lot of people who attack life itself to try to get rid of human error and they don't realize that making the mistakes and learning from them is a vital part of life.
Having this post reinforces the impression that you probably have far greater justification for your depression than I, as I cannot justly accuse either of my parents of being like that. That said, is there nothing that will persuade her to take any useful steps like seeking employment (rich from a perenial student like me who has only had voluntary unpaid employment!) or indeed therapy (if those therapists gave a perfectly or reasonably sound person like you a hard time, surely they would acknowledge that she has issues)? Can she really be so self-absorbed and manipulative? In the long run she must take steps; it is unreasonable for the whole burden of resisting the temptation of release from life on your own. Sorry if this comes across as rather arrogant and preachy. I really should have more experience of more facets of life before I pontificate in this fashion.
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You are like children playing in the market-place saying, "We piped for you and you would not dance, we wailed a dirge for you and you would not weep."
