*SENSITIVE* AIBU to think some people come across as ignorant nobs about suicide? *TRIGGERS*

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FB (sorry!) friend posted a status update complaining about being late home last night because someone threw themselves under their train. She and one of her FB friends (who I don't know) swapped several comments which included the phrases "selfish", "inconsiderate", "I would quite like to get home and enjoy my life thank you very much" etc.

I posted fairly mildly saying that it must have been frustrating but at least it was a minor inconvenience for her in the scheme of things and it was safe to say the other person, not to mention the driver, had had a far worse day. FB friend then claimed it was "light-hearted" and said they could post what they liked on their own news feed. I said that for some people, there is nothing "light-hearted" about suicide and they couldn't guarantee some of those people wouldn't be using social media; if they chose to post about a sensitive subject they could expect to get pulled up on it.

It wasn't long before I was accused (by FB friend's friend IYSWIM) of being "PC" (oh, how original) and of "attacking" my friend. I reiterated that this was an emotive subject and that maybe they should step back, re-read with an open mind and see that they weren't coming across as very empathic. And then I left it as it was starting to get to me.

AIBU to think that a woman in her 30s should have a bit more compassion about someone in the absolute depths of despair? Or am I being a sanctimonious old trout and "dictating" (that word was used too) what people can and can't say on their FB timeline?

I think if she'd said "sorry, I know I came across as a bit me me me - I was just letting off steam" it wouldn't have bothered me, but to use the word "light-hearted" as self-justification (there was nothing inherently humorous, OTT-for-effect or anything else to suggest light-heartedness about her OP - just a straight rant at have her evening plans disrupted) seemed totally inappropriate.

I too am glad you blocked that person, OP. Unfortunately there will always be people out there who refuse to even try and understand other people's suffering.

To those who are suffering now - please get help, for your sake. As someone else said, the world will not be a better place without you - and it will be an infinitely worse place for those who love you if you leave it.

Even if you truly believe that nobody cares if you live or die, to assert that the World will not notice your absence is to deny the absolute laws of nature.

Every contact leaves a trace. Your absence will be missed. Your life has intrinsic value in itself.

Your presence will be missed. It's late.

I don't believe I have powers, I don't think I'm Lucifer or anything. Just being me is enough to make people do terrible things. Mostly I make people do things to me, but the people that do these things to me probably do them to other people too. If I didn't exist they wouldn't.

I'm not making myself terribly clear, I do apologise. I'm normally fairly literate but it is really hard to describe what I am.

Anyway, I apologise for hijacking a thread where people have posted some very personal and moving stories. I just wanted to share a different perspective but I fear I have made the usual balls up once again.

Ignaz you haven't ballsed up or hijacked anything. Your experiences and feelings are as important and valid as anyone else's. People are worried for you, you've aroused compassion and concern. You are here, you exist, you are important. People will be going to bed tonight thinking of you and hoping you seek help. You have touched people's lives.

You aren't hijacking and you haven' messed anything up. What we say has all kinds of hidden and surface meanings and an online forum is not the best place to try to work them out - I have misunderstood you.

I believe that you are in the centre of feelings and happenings that you explain in a way that makes the most sense to you. Can I make a kind of crude comparison?

You know that very British habit when we are walking down the street and somebody bangs into us and we are the ones who apologise to them even though it was them who banged us? Well sometimes this gets exaggerated and we start psychologically taking responsibility for things that happen even when it wasn't us. The more we feel it is us, the more it feels like it is us if you see what I mean?

You start seeing evidence for what you believe in- that you make bad things happen- everywhere. Because your mind stops looking for any evidence that you don't make bad things happen. You discount anything that seems to indicate that you are not this bad person doing/causing/attracting the bad stuff.

Please go to your GP - tell him everything.

I've spoken to my GP lots about this, and the CPN at the CMHT and a psychologist through my job. The CMHT and psychologist have discharged me from their services as they agree I'm not ill. I do cause things to happen to me and to others that wouldn't happen if I wasn't here. I keep detailed lists of it all, plus the ways in which I am a failure. I showed these to the CPN and the psychologist and they could see I was right.

Please don't give me anymore thought, there are people out there that need your compassion.

I say this with the best of intent -

it is my decision as to whether I give you thought and I am making the decision that I wish to.

People are discharged from the CMHT all the time. They are then re-referred because they have become unwell again or their needs or symptoms have changed. Just because you have been discharged once doesn't mean you can never use the service again.

To make a comparison, if you had cancer once and were treated, would you then say 'Oh I mustn't go back because they said I was cured' if you felt your symptoms were coming back?

Regardless of what you think they are going to say, you can not be totally sure of this. Nobody can. The staff may even be different too. Keeping these lists is not 'well behaviour'.

I realise that going back to ask for help may not be easy but unless you are totally honest with the GP you won't get the help you need. You could also call MIND.

I also realise that when you spend a long time finding evidence for the way you feel and think, putting yourself in the position where somebody might challenge those beliefs can be daunting and even unwelcome. However a vital part of being human is to share our thoughts and feelings because in this way we test their reality and validity. By keeping them to yourself they grow unrestrained and can become divorced from reality.

I've shared these lists and they've said that they do indeed prove my points. At one point I did think I was unwell, but I've always been honest with the professionals and they don't think I am.

We are all different and it stands to reason that some of us will trigger off unpleasant (if you don't like the concept of evil) actions in others. I'm one of those people. One less of those people if good for those I provoke into these actions and for those who may become their innocent victims.

We are all responsible for our own actions. If I act in an unpleasant manner it is my own responsibility and nobody elses. However if I was mentally unwell, then I would not be responsible.

So unless everybody around you is mentally ill to the point of being sectionable, then their bad behaviour is not your responsibility, nor your fault.

To blame yourself for triggering it is a profound distortion of what you are seeing.

I am not going to go into your lists because I haven't seen them and i am not your therapists. What I will say is that as a MH professional, the very act of making lists like this would set off alarm bells in my head about the wellness of the list maker.

I have PMed you Ignaz

And one last thought before i have to sleep for you to be considering-

You came onto this thread because you wanted to offer another perspective to the debate; you wanted to contribute and maybe help people understand better, a different point of view.

That is the act of a good and worthwhile person. A person who despite the awful things she thinks she triggers (making her believe she is bad) is actually thoughtful of others.

It also shows a need in you to reach out and exert a good positive efect upon life. And you have.

You wouldn't have come onto this thread if there wasn't a tiny part of you that wasn't hoping for something to change for the better. I don't believe that you don't want things to change for the better and I don't believe you think suicide is the only option. It just feels that way for now because the other way may appear more trouble than its worth and perhaps risking of being letdown.

Call your GP

My dad seemed happier than he'd been for years for a short time before he killed himself. I thought he was just trying to put a brave face on it because he was being a grown up and trying yo make my birthday go ok. Now it seems that it may not have been as much of a 'brave face'.

Maybe my ideas on suicide are as strident as they are because my Dad's original chosen method was trying to burn down the house, just two nights before he hung himself. The thing is, he tried to burn down the house with his girlfriend, my two stepsisters and me still in it. His girlfriend didn't call the fire brigade, she put the fire out herself.

I do have my own views on my own experience of suicide, and they may seem very strident and harsh, but those views are a product of my experience.

Ignaz. You are not evil. Please seek some help.

couthy

What your Father tried to do was murder-suicide. The ramifications of that are always going to be much worse in many ways and I do sympathise, I really do.

I think it is when a person applies their own feelings and motivations to everybody else that people get understandably upset. If I said to you that your Father wasn't selfish you'd rightfully be pretty ticked off at me because his actions when he set that fire weren't thinking of others.

You are absolutely right that the clam before the storm is a danger sign. In MH we are know to watch clients VERY carefully in the days and weeks after treatment starts especially when they have been clinically depressed. When a depression is very severe a person may have extremely strong suicidal ideation but lack the volition to enact it. When treatment kicks in they regain the volition but the cessation of suicidal ideation often lags behind and that is when they do it.

couthy apologies if I am speaking out of turn and I don't mean to speak for you but I think I know where you are coming from.

You have had a terrible time of things and the bad things that have happened to you extend way beyond the loss of your father. It must be very, very difficult to disentangle all the different emotions and reactions that you feel. I know what it's like growing up with a mentally ill single parent although my childhood was much more stable than yours. I don't see my mum as selfish for what she did because she had long periods when she was well and I was able to distinguish the "ill" her from the "well" her (who was a wonderful, lovely person). The situation with your father sounds very different.

Now my feelings are "downright nasty". I give up. Maybe I AM downright nasty to think and feel the way I do about what my Dad did. Maybe I should think differently about it. I've tried. Do you think it feels good to think like that about the only person in my life I thought actually gave a shiny shit about me? Do you think it feels good to realise that everyone in my life has seemed to hate me and not want to be around me since the day I was born. Christ, my own father would rather have been dead than be near me. Is it any wonder I don't get close to anyone in RL and MN is the only source of interaction I get other than with my DC's? I'm sorry if I'm downright nasty, it seems like just more people who think like that. Probably right. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then chances are it's a duck. Even my own mother told me on the phone just yesterday that I fuck up the life of everyone I go near, from the day I was born. I can't change the way I feel. I've tried. So if I'm nasty and wring about that, it's just one more thing I've done wrong. Even being born was wrong, and messed up the lives of those around me. So yet again, I'm sorry for my posts on this thread. I'll keep my thoughts on this to myself in future, as always.

Couthy you have had a terrible time of it and no one is disputing that. It also seems as if you are still working your way through these very complex emotions you have had since being a child.

The issue is you are projecting this onto others' experiences which isn't going to work as they are so different from your own. Whether one receive treatment or not, the risk of suicide is still there. It isn't something that can always be controlled. The problem with mental illness is that it is so unique to that person. There is no one size fits all, or an easy explanation for it.

I hope you continue to receive care and treatment for all you have been through.

Couthy' it's not all about you.

My own parents were appalling. Granted they didn't try to actually kill me but they destroyed my spirit for a long time and it has taken even longer to recover.

Fact is parents are meant to love their kids and the ones that don't are flawed in some profound way. They subvert the natural order of things.

In this respect i have learned to disregard the hurtful things they said because if they are so flawed and wrong, then what they think and feel about me is wrong too.

When you state that people who do not accept unpleasant cancer treatments are being selfish then people will see this as an unpleasant POV I'm afraid and you need to take responsibility for that. I had a sixteen year old relative who refused further treatment because it was ruining what time she had left and making it harder for her family. Were they selfish? I think not.

Roundly declaring, 'I would do X,' when you yourself have never been in those shoes, and then, 'If you do Y, you are selfish,' is quite an ignorant, self-centred thing to assert.

I used to get angry about the selfish thing until i was VERY closely involved with one

i now think they are the MOST selfish act ever. The legacy of sadness and devastation they leave is unbelievable.

I have very little sympathy for the victim when I see what has happened to the person I know as a result of it.

greta ever heard the expression don't judge until you've been there?

We don't ask to be like this. You can have no idea of the pain and torture we are in to say something like that. None. Because you can't empathise.

In my normal days which is the majority of the time I can easily say I'd never do it to my dh as it would hurt him too much. On the days when my world is black tinged with grey all I am consuued with is how to put an end to it all.

Funnily enough I'd really prefer not to be like that but we don't all have that luxury of choice.

Greta that is very sad.

I don't think it has to be either/or. I think it's possible to be entirely supportive and have heartfelt sorrow and sympathy for those left behind, to wish that what has happened to them never had to happen and even be angry that it has, but still have compassion and understanding for the desperate state the victim must have been in to do something so unnatural as to overcome the survival imperative.

Sort of 'hate the sin, love the sinner' (not that I think suicide is a sin - I'm not religious). I think it is possible to hate the effects of what the person has done but not the person themselves.

supportive of