To think it's actually a lie when argue that suicide is always a selfish act, that others get hurt by it?

[ChristmasFuckOff]

Firstly, MNHQ as you always comment on these threads - this isn't somebody making a post about being suicidal. I'm not. Dunno why not because I probably should be and maybe I will be later this week but right now...no.

I'm sick of all the stuff out there saying how if somebody commits suicide, there will be people devastated. That it's always selfish. Often people who are suicidal say they don't want to be a burden, is that not actually a reasonable argument?

I think a lot of people out there, with friends and family, can't seem to understand there are others out there who literally don't have good relationships. So it doesn't affect anyone else.

I once contemplated committing suicide. I couldn't because I was worried about how it would affect my mum. I had a young daughter and husband at the time but actually didn't think about them, just my mum. I think when you are that low in your life your brain doesn't consider things equally/normally/effectively. Hence it didn't even cross my mind as to how my husband and daughter would feel.

I didn't go ahead with it because of the thoughts of my mum. I was so so so close. Last minute I didn't. Would it have been selfish? No, I wasn't doing it for me- I didn't want to be me or for me to be anybody or alive. It probably would have been selfish.

Hazell's reply: this was completely selfish and we will never forgive you

But, I think this is entirely understandable Bill

Suicide is an consumately selfish act... I understand why and can see why, for many, it becomes a viable choice. But I also think that the devastation it leaves behind is, for many, an unforgivable act. For some this is how they always feel about it, others manage to rationlaise it and 'forgive' it. But those left behind have no easy way of fully understanding or rationalising their own normal responses.

17 years after the fact we are still living with the repercussions. There is no area of our lives it cannot intrude upon. And that is with compassion, understanding and a lot of talk.

To say it is a selfish act does not have to negate the very real feelings and decisions that led to it. It reflects the feelings of those left to deal with the aftermath. That conflict is very real... and doesn't need to be negated.

Bill - I honestly do not know if she was serious or not. It has really confused me and my head just spins trying to rationalise what she did. The way she acted before and after do suggest manipulation, but she was also in a lot of pain. But did not allude to how much and avoided any help, and lied about seeing the doctor. She has bad osteoporosis.

I have thought that she has been depressed for many years, but she vehemently denies this, and also managed to convince the crisis team that she was in perfect mental health. So, that would mean that she considered any impact it would have on her family and did it anyway. If she was hoping for more attention, it has had the opposite effect and I find myself withdrawing from her to protect myself. Its a mess.

I always did think it was selfish. God knows as a teenager , finding my sister after an attempt and having to deal with that, I blamed her intensely and called her selfish. Twenty years on and I still am affected by that day, and the surrounding months. But as an adult I can look back and see what pressure and how ill she was. But 14 year old me is still kicking and screaming about how it affected me. So maybe suicide is a selfish act, for those left behind as well as those who go?

As an adult I've seen the incredible way a friend has gone through her husband's suicide. It was always as someone said upthread - the mental health winning after him battling for so long. Seeing that view also changed my opinion.

Death is shit for those left behind. But I'm not convinced now suicide is selfish. It has no reasoning tbh.

I think the people who had an acquaintance who suicided and wish they could have helped are, sadly, overestimating their own powers. If someone is sufficiently desperate to be contemplating taking their own life, a kind word from someone they don't really know is unlikely to fundamentally change their situation or mental state. Although I guess there may be exceptions.

Thanks to all of you who have written your thoughts. The conversation has been very valuable to me. Incidentally, far more valuable to be able to have something of a frank discussion about it.

MNHQ, I understand completely that it is appropriate to put a link to the Samaritans in case people are struggling. However I did grin with a black sort of humour when I had posted I was not suicidal...and the MNHQ message opened with the line "We're sorry to hear that" or somesuch similar

I think there is a MASSIVE value though in being able to discuss thoughts about suicide without immediately leaping to the conclusion that a suicide attempt is the next assured step. Of course I can only speak personally, but for me, say last night having those abstract thoughts, and following the logic of why I was having those thoughts (basically because I am stumped at how to navigate my way out of my problems, and I think my emotions have shut off temporarily to protect myself) it was so helpful to post and read what other people think and feel. Even knowing, as I say, that I was not going to do anything, I wasn't lying when I said I was looking forward to a nice dinner which I then had - the thread helped shift my thoughts a bit.

I felt a flicker of connection back to the human race, I can't explain it - I think possibly I felt listened to and heard about something very private and serious that I can't really discuss with anyone else.

I felt less alone. The Samaritans, I am sorry to say, always compound my feelings of loneliness. I really respect the work they do and am glad they work for others, but we are all different and different help works for us all.

There is no help. I'm fine. I'm not in extreme pain, right now. I'm just very tired and feel like a rat in a wheel. I have no interest, and nobody would be affected - if I did anything, which I'm not going to do.

Could you do me a big favour. Go to your GP and ask for a full blood work up. A few years ago I was severely depressed and having near constant suicidal ideation. I went to the doctor about a different matter and he did a full blood work up which showed up a particular deficiency in my blood. I took steps to rectify it and quite literally within 20 minutes my depression had improved, within 3 days it was gone completely. Sometimes depression and anxiety can have a physical root cause so it's always worth checking if there is a physical reason you are feeling as bad as you are right now. I had external issues in my life that were making me very, very unhappy but after I treated the physical deficiency I was back to feeling capable of dealing with them.

This week I've had growing feelings of anxiety and panic. Feelings that I don't honestly think I could have lived my life going through because they were overwhelming me. And again, a trip to the doctor showed the root cause as a physical deficiency. I'm treating that and am back to mostly feeling fine again and I know I'll be entirely better in a day or two. So please get yourself checked out. You never know, you could be mentally much stronger in a week or two, and much more able to deal with the other challenges in your life.

I don't think it's selfish I've been there myself.

But:

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

I believe it that much I bolded it.

Hope your ok it might not feel it but things can always get better.

If you fight cancer for 5 years and it eventually kills you people will say how brave you were and that it is good you are no longer suffering.

Why can't they say that for mental health issues?

Sashh that's a really good question.

I suspect it will take another 50 years for mental illness to be likened to physical illness.

My close friend killed himself when we were 18.

For years I considered it to be a very selfish act. I saw the devastation in particulier for his family.

However, after many years of thinking about it, I now see that it wasn't his fault. He was ill. I like that comparison made upthread about not blaming someone for dying from cancer. We are biologically programmed to live and to want to live and survive. Wanting to die goes against every instinct, therefore he must have been ill.

I am now just glad that he is no longer suffering. That is what hurt me most, the idea that he was in so much pain and suffering that he wanted to die. Now he is at peace.

We still hurt, every day, but I'm glad he no longer does.

Of course in an ideal world he would still be with us and wouldn't be in pain but life isn't like that.

Between the ages of 10 (when my mother died - well actually mummy died when I was 10y5m8d old but if you say something like that people look at you sideways...) and around 20 I was desperate to die, with patches of being actively suicidal. I was held back mostly feeling it would be selfish for me to kill myself. There were people foolish enough to think I was a good/nice person & to love/like/care about me - however wrong they were to do that, I would hurt them by killing myself. I had my sister (3 years my junior) to look after & the house to help run & couldn't simply abdicate that responsibility. Discovery of my corpse (or witnessing my death) even by/for a total stranger, would be deeply traumatic & distressing for them: it would be cruel to do that to another person. Were any medical staff to be involved in things, the deaths of children & adolescents are particularly difficult to deal with - and again, they wouldn't know that I deserved to die - it would be wrong to upset people like that. Our GP was a family friend & I knew he would blame himself for not realising & getting me help: how could I place such a burden on a kind & gentle man who didn't realise because I was a bad person & lying all the time about how I was? From 12 I had a volunteer role with children - they were wrong to look up to me, wrong to like me, & INCREDIBLY wrong to want to be like me, but they did, and I would not only devastate them with my suicide, it would be setting a bad example.

I was also scared that Death Would Be Worse. That either there would be nothing; or mummy & granny would - as I did at that point - blame me for mummy's death & refuse to have anything to do with me as a result.

I knew everyone would be better off without me & I was desperate for the pain to end & to be with mummy again. I had the fears mentioned above, but also the awareness others would, mistakenly, believe that the world had been better with me in it & choosing to cause them pain to end my own would be a selfish thing to do.

I have been told since that what I think of as being happy is, in actual fact, severely depressed. When I feel depressed, I'm off-the-scale shouldn't-be-able-to-function depressed. I'm still going to count it as happy, because it feels so SO much a million miles immeasurably better. If I reached Real World Happy my head might explode. (So my depression goes untreated & I bimble on.)

In the most basic-literal sense, I do still think suicide [& I'm not talking about assisted suicide/Dignitas etc here] is selfish, but not intentionally so. Often people intend the opposite - they think continuing to live is selfish & they are setting their loved ones free. There is so much pain involved, so much stigma, so often no treatment or support is available because MH services are so overstretched.

Suicide leaves a trail of devastation in its wake, as so many PPs have noted. My father's best friend committed suicide when I was wee. I wiped all memories of him from my mind, unlike with people who died when I was a similar age - or younger - from natural causes. I have a weirdy-eidetic memory (though I don't remember my entire life, mercifully...) that starts v patchily from 9-18m & then kicks in properly. And he is nowhere to be seen, despite plentiful stories about him & a childhood fondness for looking at my parents' wedding album (he was best man). My father still questions whether he could have Done Something, Stopped Him; as does my aunt. Their friendship group drifted apart because it was too difficult to deal with the empty space & silences he should have been filling.

On average, a train driver can expect to kill someone every 10 years they are in the job. Which causes huge amounts of trauma & many (I'm afraid I've not been able to find exact stats) are unable to return to work even after counselling - oh & they no longer get any compensation to allow them some breathing space/to retrain.

This summer I had to call The coastguard out when a man jumped off Hungerford Bridge. I only caught the jump out of the corner of my eye, but I heard the splash. I then had to watch him in the water so I could tell the emergency services where he was. Thankfully, there is a lifeboat station close to the bridge & either on the way down or when he hit the water, he changed his mind AND he was a strong swimmer, so they were able to effect a rescue rather than a recovery. But I can't look into the water towards the railway bridge because it causes a flashback; I get anxious when I see anyone doing anything other than walking straight across the bridge or taking a quick photo; and I still have the occasional nightmare where they don't reach him in time. (Much to my disgust, a load of people FILMED him in the water. No attempt to call for help, their first thought was to get a video of a man drowning. They were happy to film a man dying in a truly horrible way - and he was so scared, too, it was really awful - I can understand if you caught a tiny bit because you were taking a video of you & your mates & he was in the background, but people were whipping out their phones & crouching down to get the best shot... I really REALLY do NOT like humans sometimes.)

Last summer I was on the verge of calling 999 for someone on Westminster Bridge. I could see them from my hospital bed & their behaviour made me concerned they were thinking of jumping. Just as I was about to call somebody walking over the bridge obviously decided the same thing as me & came back to talk to them & I think brought them along to A&E in the end (they came over the bridge towards Tommy's, the passer-by sort of steering them very gently). It was an absolutely awful feeling to be watching someone, terrified they might jump, but too far away to help them. I even had a mad moment of considering disconnecting my various lines & trying to struggle down there to get to them - I didn't mostly because if they weren't there when I reached the Bridge I'd have to guess if they'd walked away or if they HAD jumped... (I do not make the best choices when it comes to self-care, what can I say...)

Selfish maybe isn't quite the right word, but I don't think there is a word that expresses-explains it properly, and selfish is about as close as it gets in terms of "suicide has a devastating & lasting impact on people left behind/drawn into its orbit".

I think the people who had an acquaintance who suicided and wish they could have helped are, sadly, overestimating their own powers. And, of coure, that understandning come immediately afterwards, doesn't it?

It is one of the natural, normal stages of grief... self blame, wondering "What if...". Having rationalised it many people are still left with flashbacks and nightmares of "If only". Something said, something seen, any occasion, happy or sad, can bring back those feelings.

It matters not what logic tells you, the thought always lingers... "What if I had..."

Christmas I hope you find a real life help too. Nice as it is to have MN I wish you more!

"The so-called psychotically depressed person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.

The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise.

Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant.

The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.

And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really.

You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

• David Foster Wallace

As a 16 year old, the suicide of my family member was the single most influential, life changing situation I have experienced in my life time.
I had never and have never felt grief, pain and loss like it and I have had some desperately shit situations to deal with over the years.

30 years on, when I think of him, that knot returns to my stomach and the utter utter black sadness descends over me like a switch has been flicked. It takes me back to that time.
It killed his mother, she died 10 years later having never lived a normal life from that day onward.
My mum found him, she can now be described as mentally ill because of it.
His children who were 3 at the time have had a difficult life because of it. Not just from the loss but things you don't think of, the legal aspects of the will, Trust funds, finances. So for his kids, aged 18, the whole thing reared up again when correspondence with his name began to arrive through the post telling them of money he had left them. Discussions about why they had money with their friends who knew nothing just raked it up for us all.

I don't know, for the years following the death, I was angry & firmly believed it was selfish, however, I don't think it was. Turns out he was probably very ill, although you would never have known it. If you met him, you would say that never in a million years was he suicidal, had never suffered depression, life was good.
How wrong, how stupid of us, how could he? We will never get answers.

Thanks, Pete. I'd heard the burning building analogy before, and I was trying to recall it last night.

I feel I'd like to add to this discussion as it's something our family are thinking about a lot again at the moment. A year ago tomorrow, 21st December, my uncle was found having committed suicide over the preceeding weekend.

He was found having had everything in order. Bills paid up to date, all his insurance, pension and bank details written down, no dirty laundry, all his clothes were clean and hung up and he left a poem, his final note together with his funeral plans and songs which he had sometime before been into the funeral directors and paid for. He had got into the Christmas spirit for the first year ever. Been to his works Christmas party, was coming for Christmas lunch and sent out cards.

Obviously the family were devastated. He was such an intelligent man. A lovable grump. But I don't think that anyone ever said 'what a selfish act'. Was it really selfish? Although he appeared of completely sound mind, he had obviously been, inside, desperately unhappy with his life and had reached a peace in the months before knowing what he had planned. Could we have helped him if we had known? Maybe.

I guess I haven't added much to this discussion... just rambling about my thoughts as we approach the anniversary.

An neighbour of mine hung/hanged himself from the rafters of his garage. He was found by his two little boys. If that's not selfish then I don't know what is

I'm really struck by what you've just said about not having had enough of an impact to 'balance out' the lack of meaning in your life.

This suggests you have set very high standards for yourself. That you believe you need to done or achieved a certain set of things to have enough value to stay alive.

I think that the world around us can help reinforce that idea from the perfect looking people in adverts to the upbeat Facebook boasts about all our successes. I've been struggling with this idea myself for many years and I've come to believe that it's simply not true.

You have value, just by being you. And I don't mean, I'm assuming you are actually great and have done bunch of good things that you've forgotten to mention. Whatever you have or haven't achieved in life, you are valuable. Your value doesn't depend on what other people think of you. By breathing in and out, getting out of bed when you can, eating food when you can, you are doing more than enough to show your value. Really - I'm not kidding. You are alive and - though you can't see it - you are valuable because you are you.

There are things about you - interests (though you might not feel interested in much right now), hopes and dreams (though these may be difficult to hold on to), even just mannerisms, turns of phrase, the way you laugh and smile (when you can) that are needed in this world. We all need you to be you and to stick with us if you can, giving the gift of you to the world, just by being here.

This is how I look at it. Can you give some self-care a go? Just small things - washing (just your hands or face, if you can't face a full shower), eating something you like, watching a tv programme you enjoy, drawing a picture. You deserve care.

And please consider contacting the Samaritans or Mind.

Vida. That has to be the most heartwarming post I have ever read.

Grand I disagree, people can make a huge difference when others are suicidal, but they need to know how to talk about it and how to listen to how bad things are- this requires training for most people as their instintictive response is to tell people not to kill themselves, to tell them how much their family/friends need them and that's not what people need when they are suicidal. What most people need is for someone to recognise the little clues people let slip- the half sarcy comments etc- and to listen to how bad things are for them. Most people struggle with hearing how truely bad things are for other when suicidal- family especially- but often just the effect of having someone sit with them and be brave enough to let them pour out how awful things have got helps some in itself. In reality most people panic and say don't do something silly or but we need you so much or you have so much to live for etc when this just shuts people down & invalidates their feelings.

There's a plan, I forget the exact pattern, for suicide intervention that goes something like ask someone straight out if sui- when someones dropped hints, and most of course not all, do. So say are you feeling suicidal, then listen, without trying to persuade them otherwise, just listen and ask the types of leading questions that help people open up- like can you tell me more about that- then you come up with a plan to keep safe based. The asist training has a really positive effect on helping people talk about suidcide in a way that keeps people at risk safe. I wish it was available more, but people can inform themselves without it.

Sorry OP - just spotted what you said about the Samaritans. Completely understand that it's not for everyone.

Mind have an online forum: elefriends.org.uk
This might be worth a try instead. It's peer support from other people in similar situations.

Hope you enjoyed your meal christmas

Sorry you feel like this sometimes although i appreciate that you dont feel like it at the moment

I dont believe that its a selfish act but i believe that it affects more people than the suicidal person may think

There is a plot in an agatha christie book which i will not subject you to which has always made me think about how all sorts of people may be affected

But if you are feeling very low thoughts like that wouldnt help at all, someone close to me said that although rationally they know we love them and would be devestated by their death when they feel low they think we would be better off without them

I haven't read the full thread yet (still on page 2) but something jumps out at me, a comment about having tried medication, having tried talking therapy, what else is left?

Us. That's what's left. A bunch of internet randoms who will talk to you and understand you and try our best to keep you going, perhaps maybe shine a light in the void.

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem

Can't say how much I hate this statement, in many cases it is true but in many it is not.

Yy Pete.

I think there is a horribly self-perpetuating destructiveness to the way our society views suicide. And to death in general, which feeds into that.

Yes, someone we love dying is always going to be painful. But why so much more so with suicide than from any other illness?

One reason is surely because there is no 'safe' way to do it - because of the stigma it happens either violently - causing trauma to anyone else involved or witnessing it - and/or in secret - again, traumatising those who find the deceased.

People talk about assisted suicide/Dignitas being different - again, why? If we can accept that physical illnesses are sometimes terminal despite our best efforts at treatment, if we can provide palliative care to ease someone's inevitable passing or even let someone say "no, this is too much pain, I want to go now instead of waiting for nature to take its course" and help them for cancer et al, why not MH? Then some of the most traumatic elements of suicide could be avoided, and the pain for those left behind would be more akin to that for any other death from natural causes.

How we get there I don't know - as long things stay as they are, the stigma will remain, but as long as the stigma remains, other options won't be seriously considered.

I'm probably not making much sense, I am struggling to verbalise my thoughts on this but as someone who has been suicidally depressed (not for years now) and has lost people to suicide I feel very strongly about it.

I also feel that suicide can be a rational decision, and that one day hopefully a long time in the future when my life no longer has sufficient value to me to outweigh its cost, I should be able to choose to end it. To me, agency should be absolute. I guess that's a whole other conversation though.