Defend the Indefensible: Suicide

But what do I know I bailed on my philosophy major.

If you are out living in the woods like some kind of wildchild then go ahead and kill yourself if you please. (Although if you were raised by wolves they might be saddened)

If you have loved ones who love you you are a selfish piece of shit.

And yes I have 'been there'. I have spent most of the last 8 or so years having ever present suicide fantasies.

I could see how it would be defensible, even sensible, if someone was suffering from a terminal illness. The rest of your life will be short and awful, so why not spare yourself and your loved ones the ordeal?

Assuming we're not talking about, you know, children who are dependant on you: Is the fate of your life really up to the people who love you? That seems like a parallel attitude to "how can you break up with him, he loves you!"

I visit an old people's home most Sundays to see my mum. A rather depressing place, with some people immobile through strokes and advanced Parkinsons etc.

I think a lot of the 'loved ones' would be surprisingly understanding if you decided to take take an early exit in these circumstances.

I think this is an area on which public opinion is changing fairly fast.

And in other circumstances, it's simply not my place to pass judgement on those who would choose to commit suicide (ie 'selfish piece of shit').

Otherwise I have never been able to countenance suicide. I am sure many who have come close to losing their lives involuntarily, like me, also feel this way.

Whoops! The empty reassurance thread is over here.

Still, none of this will keep me from passing judgement on those who do it. I'll allow for euthanasia for those who are very sick and suffering (which was intended to be part of the discussion if you read the original post). The question then is, do people who suffer from say, severe depression fall under the chronically ill umbrella? And my answer is no. They may suffer greatly, just as much as someone who has a v. bad physical disease I'd argue. But it is not hopeless.

And obviously nothing is so black and white. There are some people w/such severe mental problems that it might be better for everyone if they'd end it, etc.

i'm trying to imagine a future where euthanasia is legal. where it is simply a matter of you, a loved one or legal representative having to apply. fill out the forms, go through some steps and, pending approval, go to a hospital or clinic and get it over with.

with a process like this in place people who are suffering from depression or addiction but are otherwise sound of body can be forced into conceling before doing anything drastic. i'd like to think i'd have 1 more friend around today if steps like these were in place.

but in the case of mentally sick folk like this this man, i'm all for it. he had obvious problems - prison just wasn't doing the trick - he knew the solution. kind of a voluntary death sentence i suppose.

i always think of my great uncle when questions like this are posed. he attempted suicide in his teens, unsuccessfully. he was schizophrenic. he went on to live an incredibly miserable, solitary life. he successfully attempted suicide in his 60's - self-inflicted stab-wound to the chest. people would have said that his first attempt was irrational at the time - but if it had been successful, it would have saved him a lifetime of misery. he couldn't see a way out - and he was right. he still felt the same way several decades later. i understand that people want to discourage the waste of young life, but sometimes it is the only way to escape mental/physical pain.

anyway, defending suicide based on the pain or depression others may suffer, while perfectly understandable, is a rather pitiful view of life. is happiness and health the only reason to live? (the absence of these two factors from life, in an absolute or permanent sense, seems to suggest that life is a priori not worth living! only my opinion of course.)

the suicide of a perfectly happy, perfectly healthy person, on the other hand, seems like a pretty defensible act.

"Is suicide always a priori a bad thing? Can there be a rational choice towards it for some internal choice"

my great-uncle unsuccessfully attempted suicide in his teens: he was schizophrenic. he went on to lead a miserable, solitary life. he successfully attempted suicide in his sixties - a self-inflicted stab-wound to the chest. if his first attempt had been successful, it would have saved him from years of misery. it doesn't seem irrational to me: he correctly foresaw a lifetime of pain, and acted upon that feeling. of course, if the 1st attempt had been successful we wouldn't have known this, and people would have said what a waste it was. i don't know. but he still felt the same way 40+ years later.

My closest friends know about most of this. They ask me how I'm doing, occasionally, and try to keep an eye on me. One has said: "don't try to commit suicide. If you do, I'll kill y... um, bad choice of words." They keep reminding me that suicide is the worst way to hurt the people that love you. Even so, when I'm at my lowest, I can't see any of this. All I can think is that it would be the best thing for me and all my friends in the long run, because they'll no longer have to worry about me, or lend me money, or listen to me whine, or help me try to pick up all the fragments of my not-going-anywhere life.

So. Um. I'm not sure at the moment if killing yourself is a Good Thing. But I often think it is.

I think this is a very important point. Most people readily accept the idea that suicide is "selfish" (well I wouldn't choose that exact word) b/c of how it affects loved ones. But when someone is so desparate to possibly carry it out, they can't see/understand this.

Views on suicide have varied widely, both historically and culturally. Certain Asian societies not only haven't condemned suicide but have sometimes expected or even rewarded it--Japan is the obvious example, with its tradition of hara-kiri, but by no means the only one. Consider the Indian practice of suttee--before the British outlawed it in 1829, an average of 500 widows immolated themselves in their husbands' funeral pyres each year, and were often regarded as nearly divine for doing so.

The ancient Greeks and Romans tended to take a practical view of suicide. Most philosophers accepted that there were circumstances in which it was honorable--for example, to save the lives of others, or as a protest against tyranny. Judaism traditionally forbids self-destruction, but nonetheless many Jews continue to mythologize the mass suicide at Masada, where 960 are believed to have killed themselves rather than surrender to the Romans. Early Christians were even more ambivalent about suicide, as you might expect from followers of a religion founded on martyrdom. Virgins who preferred suicide to dishonor were also celebrated, and at least one, Saint Pelagia, was canonized. Islam alone among these three faiths has a clear scriptural ban on suicide, but as recent events have made plain, that hasn't prevented certain zealots from arriving at permissive interpretations thereof.

The Christian opposition to suicide hardened starting with fifth-century theologian Augustine of Hippo, who argued that offing yourself is never justifiable because it violates God's injunction "thou shalt not kill." Suicides were deemed to have committed a mortal sin and denied Christian burial. Church law influenced civil law, and by the tenth century suicide in England was considered not just a crime but a felony. English common law distinguished a suicide, who was by definition of unsound mind, from a felo-de-se or "evildoer against himself," who had coolly decided to end it all and thereby perpetrated an infamous crime. Such a person forfeited his entire estate to the crown. Furthermore his corpse was subjected to public indignities, such as being dragged through the streets and hung from the gallows, and was finally consigned to "ignominious burial," as the legal scholars put it--the favored method was beneath a crossroads with a stake driven through the body. Other European states established similar laws, apparently hoping they would serve as deterrents. As time went on the punishments lessened. By the 17th century an English suicide forfeited only personal property; his heirs could still get his real estate. But the basic notion of suicide as a crime wasn't swept away in France till the revolution, and in England it took even longer: ignominious burial wasn't abolished until 1823 nor property forfeiture till 1870, and the deed itself remained a crime (albeit only a misdemeanor, and a rarely prosecuted one at that) until 1961. In many jurisdictions you can still be prosecuted for helping someone kill himself, and assisted suicide remains a hotly debated topic not just in the UK but in much of the world.

In the U.S. suicide has never been treated as a crime nor punished by property forfeiture or ignominious burial. (Some states listed it on the books as a felony but imposed no penalty.) Curiously, as of 1963, six states still considered attempted suicide a crime--North and South Dakota, Washington, New Jersey, Nevada, and Oklahoma. Of course they didn't take matters as seriously as the Roman emperor Hadrian, who in 117 AD declared attempted suicide by soldiers a form of desertion and made it--no joke this time--a capital offense.

Yeah, so, um...suicide in ancient Rome, or Japan, or India, or even terrorist-related suicide. Let's talk.

In the case of mental illness, there are very very strong arguments (with which I personally agree) that it's not a personal decision at all... Not any more than getting a fever is a personal decision for someone with a cold. Suicidal thoughts, ideations and acts are symptoms of quite a few different mental illnesses.

I have personally felt and know a decent number of people who have felt suicidal at one point or another in their lives. Of them, only one has misgivings about still being alive on a regular basis, and he is an untreated manic depressive. (By "untreated" I mean neither medicated nor counselled... absolutely no form of treatment at all despite his very obviously having a severe mental illness.)

this is an interesting perspective, martin. I never thought of it this way.

so this guy i've known for about three years killed himself a couple of weeks ago and he was the one person i know who if you were to ask me - hey, you think he could... - i would have said yes definitely. in fact i had mentioned more than once that he could or would probably kill himself. i know the type. and he had all the signs. he could be very frustrating and hard to deal with and i felt bad and did my best and tried to be lighthearted and offer encouragement...i did what i could. he had been selling stuff to me little by little and i often wondered if he would do it after he sold all his stuff and that isn't that far from the truth. and i wondered if this was the reason why he dragged out the selling for a couple of years between me and another store. he was getting harder to deal with, more agitated, more easily angered, and i wonder too if this was because he knew his self-imposed deadline was coming up. it was strange to deal with someone for so long and have the feeling that he was in a sense a dead man walking. sorry if that sounds cruel. he never said or did anything that would incite me to call for help. i'm not a doctor. i tried to bond over a shared love for stuff like Deaf School and other music and stuff. i asked him more than once last year if there was ANYTHING that could make things better. anything at all. he said no. nothing. and he was in pain. and frustrated and agitated and deeply depressed. so there is definitely a part of me that thinks: well, now he isn't in pain. he isn't agitated. he can exhale, you know? i've been thinking about him a lot cuz i'm still going through his stuff and selling it and he was in here so much and he was such a presence. so intense. he had been an actor. one of the first things i said to him was you should be an actor! he did lots of stage stuff. great voice and a great face for t.v. i think he had tried to make a go of it at one point. but he would get so angry and dejected when selling his stuff. it could be a chore. and the last time i saw him he was so mad when he was leaving. just livid. slammed the door on his way out. four days later he was dead. two months ago he had rented out the local library for a night this week. for his memorial service. he also killed himself in the parking lot of the local funeral home. he was something. right after he slammed the door that last time i turned to maria and started talking about suicide. he had family and friends. i'm sure they talked to him. man, what an exit. freaked both maria and i out, to say the least. so, not really a defense here to get on-topic. but i certainly understand the impulse. they read the letter he left at the memorial. we didn't go.

beautiful post

^^

Can only echo that.

yeah that was really good, scott. I mean, good is a relative term but..you know

yeah great post. I have a friend - I wouldn't say we're close but we're at opposite ends of a very tight group if that makes sense? - and he keeps talking in this alarming way. He's obviously unhappy & messed up and keeps doing really reckless things with drvqs, and I think a lot of it is maybe to do with this stupid atavistic romanticising of destructive behaviour (he's a huge nick cave fan lol) but I also think he's genuinely in a bad place and it's hard to know what to do.

Recently on facebook he posted a song with the comment "my funeral song (soon)" which could just be a dumb emo move but I'm not sure. I posted the My Dick bandcamp and said "I'm not sure what mine will be but I'm leaning towards orinoco dick". I hope it cheered him up but even as I posted it I thought "oh christ what if...?"

I know it might be hard to put into words, but why didn't you attend his memorial?

Martin Manley: Man Commits Suicide, Posts Website Treasure Map To His Fortune
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/907295/martin-manley-man-commits-suicide-posts-website-treasure-map-to-his-fortune/#UvHvomulK3YLLP1B.99

that's the website:

http://www.martinmanleylifeanddeath.com/

you know, if he had actually gone ahead with the treasure hunt, that would've been awesome. but now he is merely an asshole.

If you want to kill yourself, why don’t you want to kill
yourself?
Now’s your chance! I, who greatly love both death and life,
Would kill myself too, if I dared kill myself…
If you dare, then be daring!
What good to you is the changing picture of outer images
We call the world?
What good is this cinema of hours played out
By actors with stock roles and gestures,
This colorful circus of our never-ending drive to keep going?
What good is your inner world which you don’t know?
Kill yourself, and maybe you’ll finally know it…
End it all, and maybe you’ll begin…
If you’re weary of existing, at least
Be noble in your weariness,
And don’t, like me, sing of life because you’re drunk,
Don’t, like me, salute death through literature!

You’re needed? O futile shadow called man!
No one is needed; you’re not needed by anyone…
Without you everything will keep going without you.
Perhaps it’s worse for others that you live than if you kill
yourself…
Perhaps your presence is more burdensome than your
absence…
Other people’s grief? You’re worried
About them crying over you?
Don’t worry: they won’t cry for long…
The impulse to live gradually stanches tears
When they’re not for our own sake,
When they’re because of what happened to someone else,
especially death,
Since after this happens to someone, nothing else will…

First there’s anxiety, the surprise of mystery’s arrival
And of your spoken life’s sudden absence…
Then there’s the horror of your visible and material coffin,
And the men in black whose profession is to be there.
Then the attending family, heartbroken and telling jokes,
Mourning between the latest news from the evening papers,
Mingling grief over your death with the latest crime…
And you merely the incidental cause of that lamentation,
You who will be truly dead, much deader than you
imagine…
Much deader down here than you imagine,
Even if in the beyond you may be much more alive…
Next comes the black procession of the vault or grave,
And finally the beginning of the death of your memory.
At first everyone feels relieved
That the slightly irksome tragedy of your death is over…
Then, with each passing day, the conversation lightens up
And life falls back into its old routine…

Then you are slowly forgotten.
You’re remembered only twice a year:
On your birthday and your death day.
That’s it. That’s all. That’s absolutely all.
Two times a year they think about you.
Two times a year those who loved you heave a sigh,
And they may sigh on the rare occasions someone mentions
your name
Look at yourself in the face and honestly face what we are…

If you want to kill yourself, then kill yourself…
Forget your moral scruples or intellectual fears!
What scruples or fears influence the workings of life?
What chemical scruples rule the driving impulse
Of sap, the blood’s circulation, and love?
What memory of others exists in the joyous rhythm of life?
Ah, vanity of flesh and blood called man,
Can’t you see that you’re utterly unimportant?
You’re important to yourself, because you’re what you feel.
You’re everything to yourself, because for you you’re the
universe,
The real universe and other people
Being mere satellites of your objective subjectivity.
You matter to yourself, because you’re all that matters to
you.
And if this is true for you, O myth, then won’t it be true for
others?

Do you, like Hamlet, dread the unknown?
But what is known? What do you really know
Such that you can call anything “unknown”?
Do you, like Falstaff, love life with all its fat?
If you love it so materially, then love it even more materially
By becoming a bodily part of the earth and of things!
Scatter yourself, O physicochemical system
Of nocturnally conscious cells,
Over the nocturnal consciousness of the unconsciousness of
bodies,
Over the huge blanket of appearances that blankets nothing,
Over the grass and weeds of proliferating beings,
Over the atomic fog of things,
Over the whirling walls
Of the dynamic void that’s the world…