Suicide

[UrvyZnapy]

Please remove this thread. Discussing suicide and methods of suicide encourages people to commit suicide.

I don't think this is true. Do you have evidence of this?

[RefluxSemantic]

Please remove this thread. Discussing suicide and methods of suicide encourages people to commit suicide.

I don't think this is true. Do you have evidence of this?

This doesn’t mean that all mention of suicide can be helpful. Talking about it is one thing; showing people how to do it is another. After a British hospital drama featured a man taking an overdose, and included details of the exact drug and amount that he took, data collected from 49 accident and emergency departments the following week showed a 17% increase in overdoses. In the four weeks following the suicide of a celebrity in Taiwan, where the method used had received a great deal of media coverage, once again suicide attempts rose. Within psychology this is referred to as modelling, where people copy a behaviour they see someone else doing. Many media organisations now follow guidelines to avoid detailing methods.

Not all discussion about suicide is bad, but this entire thread seems potentially harmful to me.

[QueenOfdestiny]

If you suicied or not
It is your decision when you do it and you will have a reason why.
Do you even know why people do suicide?
It is the same reason why people get addicted for example

[kami_ryu]

-- deleted post --

[Dolan]

Tbh, if you don't have cancer, have a place to stay and something to eat, be happy. You're fine.
Anything else is just 1st world problems. You can get to work and solve them.
Or you could continue to whine.

[kami_ryu]

-- deleted post --

[evilcheadar]

Never commit suicide. Its a form of liebing that ruins things for years to come.

[evilcheadar]

@deleted_user4 is right actually and everyone else is giving stupid answers

I prefer to see some people dead instead of alive and it doesn't matter if it's suicide or a car accident. Others have other people they like to see dead, it's subjective. If it's subjective and unique to most people it can't be wrong.

Murder is different

Who would you prefer to see dead by suicide or car accident

[Dolan]

Tbh, if you don't have cancer, have a place to stay and something to eat, be happy. You're fine.
Anything else is just 1st world problems. You can get to work and solve them.
Or you could continue to whine.

I don't agree with this. Having this sort of mentality of "it's fine don't worry", even in a first world country, is why people are unhappy to begin with. Prison literally fits the criteria you just described. There's more to it than just that.

Well, I mean, everything else can be solved with a bit of cognitive restructuring.

For example, if your negative affect comes from comparing yourself to others, you can learn to see things in different ways: you don't always know the whole story, everyone tries to project a successful image, you don't know how things will turn out for others later, etc.

Another issue that creates people's negative affect is how they relate to expectations. If you set your expectations too high and fail to reach them, you're going to feel negatively relative to your own self-imposed standards. Scaling back expectations could be a strategy to make things acceptable to you, if a situation worsens. Negative affect can really be caused by how you feel about your current situation relative to what you're projecting as a desirable situation.

So, with a bit of cognitive restructuring you can manage to build resilience, if there are no objective factors that threaten your life (like illness, lack of food or accommodation). Anything else that is not a direct, objective threat to your life is pretty much subjectively self-induced negative affect, that could be created by many things (comparison to others, high expectations, rejection, etc).

In prison there might be direct threats to your life, but if you're in a secure prison, you can live to very old age a relatively ok life. Some prison inmates learn trades, play the guitar, make music, read, or write to adjust to their situation. So prison is not really the worst place to be in, unless you committed some crimes that turn you into a target for other inmates. And ofc, prison might be worse in less developed countries, just because their system is badly organised and nobody cares. You can still come up with some strategies to survive even there, though.

[supahons]

Tbh, if you don't have cancer, have a place to stay and something to eat, be happy. You're fine.
Anything else is just 1st world problems. You can get to work and solve them.
Or you could continue to whine.

[Dolan]

Tbh, if you don't have cancer, have a place to stay and something to eat, be happy. You're fine.
Anything else is just 1st world problems. You can get to work and solve them.
Or you could continue to whine.

"mom, dad, you don't understand"

[kami_ryu]

-- deleted post --

[Amsel_]

I find the instinct people have against suicide, urging others not to commit suicide interesting. It makes me wonder if this instinct is natural, or if it is a derivative of modern sentiments. It's possible that it exists as a carry-over from the Christian Era. It could be done for social value because it gives the illusion that the person saying not to commit suicide is a caring person. There could be a pragmatic purpose behind it, giving anti-suicidism an evolutionary advantage, because it promotes a larger and better functioning societal unit; it would be selected for in the same way that the ability to work well with others would be selected for. But this presupposes that suicide for mental reasons has been around for a very long time, and I'm not in a position to say how advanced the consciousness was in prehistoric peoples; if they operated purely on unconscious impulses, it's unlikely that suicide would exist beyond some form of self-euthanasia.

I do not personally see suicide as something forbidden deontologically. Instead, I view suicide as an intrinsically amoral action that can still have moral significance. My reason for this is that there are many instances where self-destruction is seen as a virtuous activity. Isn't the largest religion on the planet centered around someone willingly putting himself in a position where he dies? Don't we break out bands, banners, crowds, and stories when a soldier dies? Did these soldiers not volunteer for their fate? Did we not sacrifice them for the war? With this in mind, I fail to see how the act of suicide in itself is an inherently wrong thing.

After reaching the conclusion that the act of suicide does not have any intrinsic moral quality, we are placed in a position where in order to continue this inquiry we have to look at the subject from other perspectives: Does the suicide accomplish something? What was the reason for the suicide? I'll start with the former. In the examples given above of Christ and soldiers, these men were accomplishing something clear. One was redeeming humanity; the other was fighting for good against evil. These are considered virtuous instances of self-sacrifice, and I do not intend to argue against that. One might argue that this sacrificial nature transcends the egocentricity of suicide, creating a whole new morally just action. That may be, but this new action would still contain the principle of ending one's own life (suicide). The glorious self-sacrifice for the sake of a higher cause could be its own action, but that action would also necessarily include suicide; in the same way that one who attempts the action of connecting a country by railroad must necessarily do the action of building railways. The danger of using suicide as an intrinsic part of a greater action, and then judging suicide itself based on that action's morality is that it speaks nothing as to the intrinsic morality of suicide; it merely ignores the topic all-together, and places the morality in suicide downstream from the morality of the other action. For example, if dying to stop an enemy army is good; and the only pilot on a plane killing himself - dooming the passengers to death - is bad, we see just how little value is placed within the act of self-killing itself. In this instance, rather than being a plus or a minus to ones character, suicide functions as a multiplier; it makes good things greater, and it makes bad things worse.

But what about the reasoning for suicide? Could we judge not the action itself, but why the action was undertaken, and then judge suicides individually based on that - or perhaps nullify the acceptability of all suicides, should we find that there is never a good reason for suicide? Self-sacrifice would be justified by looking at the reasoning for it. It would be a noble action there. The suicidal pilot could also be condemned, because there is no good reason to kill a plane full of innocent people. This creates the same bi-modal nature to the morality of suicide that caused our issue with the consequentialist approach discussed above. The prevailing attitude towards suicide seems to be that it is bad until proven good, but I have not seen a good argument for this sentiment.

Now let's imagine a very modern example of a suicide. There is a twenty-six year old male. He lives in a country that, while not perfect, is able to sustain first-world living standards. He did not have a good relationship with his parents, and was never sociable enough to make good friends in school. Nowadays, he drinks too much. He uses drugs occasionally. His career is a complete mess, and he bounces from one low-paying, entry-level job to the next. He's been able to get a few girlfriends, but was never able to form a deep-relationship with one. They never seemed to intimately care about him, many of them only seemed to care about themselves; these relationships naturally fell apart after some drama, and it became clear that sexual desires were the only reason he was willing to put so much time into a person who was essentially a stranger. This person has also never been able to form adult-friendships; despite having some acquaintances, he has no one to talk to about serious topics, and if such a topic is ever brought up in conversation, it leads to nowhere; his friends are simply people to do things with, and their bond is primarily one of familiarity.

Inside this man there is a stream of emotion, discontent with life. He's striving for something, but he does not know what. He can't put it into words. If asked about his life, or the state of the world, he can give some sort of rational response defending the status quo; though, perhaps he suggests that he shouldn't be so lazy, or he recommends the implementation of some government policy that could ease material issues. But betraying all of that is this underlying longing for something different. He doesn't quite know what it is, but it's a whole different world. Because of this, he enjoys escapist hobbies, especially ones that are about fantasy worlds or science-fiction; though, he never considers how odd it is to love an imaginary world, not care for his current one, and not attempt to reconcile the two. One day, this man fails to maintain the contradiction any longer. He sees no hope for finding whatever it is that will make him happy not just in the moment, but will bring long-lasting peace to his soul. He locks himself up in his apartment. He spends some time drinking cheap alcohol and crying. Finally, the man takes his own life.

What is there to say about this man's death? Was it wrong of him to take his own life? I don't think so. Why should a man be forced to live in misery for decades on end? Isn't forcing pain upon someone worse than someone simply alleviating their own pain? Has he wronged someone in the process? It could be argued that the sadness of his family members and his friends is caused by him, and is therefore a valid reason to condemn his suicide. To this, I would first say that the judging of suicides based on its consequences has already been addressed. Second, I would point out that most of this man's problems were the result of other people to begin with. He was not given a place in society where he could do dignified work to keep the whole machine running, something respectable even if this position was relatively low on the hierarchy; instead, he was told that he needed to become a lawyer, or an engineer, or a hedge fund manager, or a doctor - jobs that are incredibly demanding, and only a small percentage of humans could ever do. It was also the rest of humanity that deprived him of love and companionship. These people are the root of a lifetime of his suffering, yet now they demand he refrain from suicide because it might make them upset? None of them will actually question what drives people to suicide, and try to fix things. They will simply cry a bit, spread a suicide hotline number around, and most of them will forget about it within a week. This is evil; they are evil; they are causing suffering, and making people live a whole lifetime of it. He is the victim. He is the one who was murdered. Rather than casting blame upon a man for committing suicide, blame should be given to those who drove him to suicide.

Having written all this out, I think we can answer the question that we started off with: Why are people so instinctively against suicide? It's because they are reactionaries, unable to even entertain a restructuring of society towards something grander. They know that if they seriously discussed what drove tens of thousands of people to commit suicide every year, it would be tens of thousands of daggers piercing their worldview. The implications of all of this are too great, so they simply insist on ignorance. They ask "Why?" so much, but don't dare seek an answer. If someone - by intelligence or stupidity - suggests something that might have prevented someone's suicide, they are attacked. They're told that they're taking advantage of that person's death to push their own beliefs.

[Riotcoke]

People basically never blame the person for taking their life so I don't know what you're on about

[Dolan]

@Amsel_ In Orthodox countries, priests refuse to officiate at someone's burial if they committed suicide. They consider that suicide is tantamount to someone slapping god's wrists, refusing the gift of life, etc.

There are also people who kill themselves because they end up in a hopeless situation from which they see no way out. Like, a few months ago, I heard about this guy who killed himself because he had lots of debts, his wife just left him and he felt he was too old to find someone else. So he must have imagined that his life thence would be completely empty: his kids wouldn't visit him anymore, he'd have to work until the end of his days to pay back debts, he'd live in complete loneliness, etc. But then, other people would react differently, they'd try to reinvent themselves, rekindle older relations with older friends, get a better job, etc.

Humans' ability to anticipate things through imagination is a really double-edged sword. They can imagine the most distorted things about their future, in either a negative or positive light.

[deleted_user]

I find the instinct people have against suicide, urging others not to commit suicide interesting. It makes me wonder if this instinct is natural, or if it is a derivative of modern sentiments. It's possible that it exists as a carry-over from the Christian Era. It could be done for social value because it gives the illusion that the person saying not to commit suicide is a caring person. There could be a pragmatic purpose behind it, giving anti-suicidism an evolutionary advantage, because it promotes a larger and better functioning societal unit; it would be selected for in the same way that the ability to work well with others would be selected for. But this presupposes that suicide for mental reasons has been around for a very long time, and I'm not in a position to say how advanced the consciousness was in prehistoric peoples; if they operated purely on unconscious impulses, it's unlikely that suicide would exist beyond some form of self-euthanasia.

I do not personally see suicide as something forbidden deontologically. Instead, I view suicide as an intrinsically amoral action that can still have moral significance. My reason for this is that there are many instances where self-destruction is seen as a virtuous activity. Isn't the largest religion on the planet centered around someone willingly putting himself in a position where he dies? Don't we break out bands, banners, crowds, and stories when a soldier dies? Did these soldiers not volunteer for their fate? Did we not sacrifice them for the war? With this in mind, I fail to see how the act of suicide in itself is an inherently wrong thing.

After reaching the conclusion that the act of suicide does not have any intrinsic moral quality, we are placed in a position where in order to continue this inquiry we have to look at the subject from other perspectives: Does the suicide accomplish something? What was the reason for the suicide? I'll start with the former. In the examples given above of Christ and soldiers, these men were accomplishing something clear. One was redeeming humanity; the other was fighting for good against evil. These are considered virtuous instances of self-sacrifice, and I do not intend to argue against that. One might argue that this sacrificial nature transcends the egocentricity of suicide, creating a whole new morally just action. That may be, but this new action would still contain the principle of ending one's own life (suicide). The glorious self-sacrifice for the sake of a higher cause could be its own action, but that action would also necessarily include suicide; in the same way that one who attempts the action of connecting a country by railroad must necessarily do the action of building railways. The danger of using suicide as an intrinsic part of a greater action, and then judging suicide itself based on that action's morality is that it speaks nothing as to the intrinsic morality of suicide; it merely ignores the topic all-together, and places the morality in suicide downstream from the morality of the other action. For example, if dying to stop an enemy army is good; and the only pilot on a plane killing himself - dooming the passengers to death - is bad, we see just how little value is placed within the act of self-killing itself. In this instance, rather than being a plus or a minus to ones character, suicide functions as a multiplier; it makes good things greater, and it makes bad things worse.

But what about the reasoning for suicide? Could we judge not the action itself, but why the action was undertaken, and then judge suicides individually based on that - or perhaps nullify the acceptability of all suicides, should we find that there is never a good reason for suicide? Self-sacrifice would be justified by looking at the reasoning for it. It would be a noble action there. The suicidal pilot could also be condemned, because there is no good reason to kill a plane full of innocent people. This creates the same bi-modal nature to the morality of suicide that caused our issue with the consequentialist approach discussed above. The prevailing attitude towards suicide seems to be that it is bad until proven good, but I have not seen a good argument for this sentiment.

Now let's imagine a very modern example of a suicide. There is a twenty-six year old male. He lives in a country that, while not perfect, is able to sustain first-world living standards. He did not have a good relationship with his parents, and was never sociable enough to make good friends in school. Nowadays, he drinks too much. He uses drugs occasionally. His career is a complete mess, and he bounces from one low-paying, entry-level job to the next. He's been able to get a few girlfriends, but was never able to form a deep-relationship with one. They never seemed to intimately care about him, many of them only seemed to care about themselves; these relationships naturally fell apart after some drama, and it became clear that sexual desires were the only reason he was willing to put so much time into a person who was essentially a stranger. This person has also never been able to form adult-friendships; despite having some acquaintances, he has no one to talk to about serious topics, and if such a topic is ever brought up in conversation, it leads to nowhere; his friends are simply people to do things with, and their bond is primarily one of familiarity.

Inside this man there is a stream of emotion, discontent with life. He's striving for something, but he does not know what. He can't put it into words. If asked about his life, or the state of the world, he can give some sort of rational response defending the status quo; though, perhaps he suggests that he shouldn't be so lazy, or he recommends the implementation of some government policy that could ease material issues. But betraying all of that is this underlying longing for something different. He doesn't quite know what it is, but it's a whole different world. Because of this, he enjoys escapist hobbies, especially ones that are about fantasy worlds or science-fiction; though, he never considers how odd it is to love an imaginary world, not care for his current one, and not attempt to reconcile the two. One day, this man fails to maintain the contradiction any longer. He sees no hope for finding whatever it is that will make him happy not just in the moment, but will bring long-lasting peace to his soul. He locks himself up in his apartment. He spends some time drinking cheap alcohol and crying. Finally, the man takes his own life.

What is there to say about this man's death? Was it wrong of him to take his own life? I don't think so. Why should a man be forced to live in misery for decades on end? Isn't forcing pain upon someone worse than someone simply alleviating their own pain? Has he wronged someone in the process? It could be argued that the sadness of his family members and his friends is caused by him, and is therefore a valid reason to condemn his suicide. To this, I would first say that the judging of suicides based on its consequences has already been addressed. Second, I would point out that most of this man's problems were the result of other people to begin with. He was not given a place in society where he could do dignified work to keep the whole machine running, something respectable even if this position was relatively low on the hierarchy; instead, he was told that he needed to become a lawyer, or an engineer, or a hedge fund manager, or a doctor - jobs that are incredibly demanding, and only a small percentage of humans could ever do. It was also the rest of humanity that deprived him of love and companionship. These people are the root of a lifetime of his suffering, yet now they demand he refrain from suicide because it might make them upset? None of them will actually question what drives people to suicide, and try to fix things. They will simply cry a bit, spread a suicide hotline number around, and most of them will forget about it within a week. This is evil; they are evil; they are causing suffering, and making people live a whole lifetime of it. He is the victim. He is the one who was murdered. Rather than casting blame upon a man for committing suicide, blame should be given to those who drove him to suicide.

Having written all this out, I think we can answer the question that we started off with: Why are people so instinctively against suicide? It's because they are reactionaries, unable to even entertain a restructuring of society towards something grander. They know that if they seriously discussed what drove tens of thousands of people to commit suicide every year, it would be tens of thousands of daggers piercing their worldview. The implications of all of this are too great, so they simply insist on ignorance. They ask "Why?" so much, but don't dare seek an answer. If someone - by intelligence or stupidity - suggests something that might have prevented someone's suicide, they are attacked. They're told that they're taking advantage of that person's death to push their own beliefs.

Good post, probably wrong.

[Goodspeed]

The thing is, depressed people fool themselves into thinking their situation is hopeless. There are hopeless situations, mostly for old people, severely handicapped people, people with life sentences etc, but the life of your average physically healthy depressed 25 year old is not hopeless by a long shot. Jam's post elaborates on that a little.

[lejend]

Why is it bad? Please place arguments below

Not all suicides are equal; some are born of acts of severe distress or illness, and as such are not judged the same as a consciously and willfully planned suicide. Assuming you're asking about the second type, suicide is wrong for the same reason that anything is wrong: it's contrary to God's will. Suicide is murder of the self, which is one of the worst kinds of murder, because there may be no opportunity for repentance afterwards. Suicide is also a form of hatred against others, because to kill yourself is to inflict sadness and pain on those who care about you, be they family, friends, or even strangers who may need your help in the future (a potentially infinite number). Sometimes people think suicide will deliver them from suffering, but in reality suicide is a movement from suffering to even greater suffering. In brief, suicide is wrong because it's hatred against the self, against other people, and ultimately against God.

[deleted_user]

Fuck God

[Sargsyan]

Fuck God

wow such blasphemy, absolutely haram @Gendarme

[RefluxSemantic]

The thing is, depressed people fool themselves into thinking their situation is hopeless. There are hopeless situations, mostly for old people, severely handicapped people, people with life sentences etc, but the life of your average physically healthy depressed 25 year old is not hopeless by a long shot. Jam's post elaborates on that a little.

Depression can be hopeless too though. It almost never is, but there are cases where it is equivaleng to hopeless suffering.

[Amsel_]

The thing is, depressed people fool themselves into thinking their situation is hopeless. There are hopeless situations, mostly for old people, severely handicapped people, people with life sentences etc, but the life of your average physically healthy depressed 25 year old is not hopeless by a long shot. Jam's post elaborates on that a little.

But do you think there's anything wrong with the act of suicide itself?

[Riotcoke]

The thing is, depressed people fool themselves into thinking their situation is hopeless. There are hopeless situations, mostly for old people, severely handicapped people, people with life sentences etc, but the life of your average physically healthy depressed 25 year old is not hopeless by a long shot. Jam's post elaborates on that a little.

This is a key tennant of basically all anxiety based disorders, the thought of the cycle being continuous makes the anxiety and depression worse. There are also disorders that make people think they're going crazy, such a depersonalisation and derealisation disorder. It all ends up with people unfortunately thinking they can tell the future, which is of course impossible.

[Goodspeed]

The thing is, depressed people fool themselves into thinking their situation is hopeless. There are hopeless situations, mostly for old people, severely handicapped people, people with life sentences etc, but the life of your average physically healthy depressed 25 year old is not hopeless by a long shot. Jam's post elaborates on that a little.

But do you think there's anything wrong with the act of suicide itself?

Define wrong?

[Amsel_]

The thing is, depressed people fool themselves into thinking their situation is hopeless. There are hopeless situations, mostly for old people, severely handicapped people, people with life sentences etc, but the life of your average physically healthy depressed 25 year old is not hopeless by a long shot. Jam's post elaborates on that a little.

But do you think there's anything wrong with the act of suicide itself?

Define wrong?

Morally unacceptable