distressedSince then, people have contacted me via email (when they had it), via my old email (which I rarely check), via my contact form, via Facebook, and via my Tumblr, to give me their phone numbers, to tell me not to hurt myself (which I did not threaten to do), to provide crisis hotlines, to make suggestions about medication (which I did not solicit), and in one case, to threaten to report me to the police as a suicide risk if I did not update my blog immediately to show that I was still alive.
Please. Stop. "Comment amnesty" did not mean "work harder to make sure that your words, your well wishes, your specific need to engage with my depression will be heard." I try to keep open dialogs on this blog, and I usually appreciate communication, but right now, this contact is intrusive, and upsetting, and seems to prioritize the needs of the contacting person above mine. Please. Stop.
This is why I do not talk when I am sad.
January 12 2014, 23:38:36 UTC 3 years ago
I read your post, but decided to wait to reply until or if I had something new or useful to say. I actually went to bed thinking you might most like unrelated Tumblr discussion of Prodigy and other new mutants on teams. Empathy can generally be assumed and is probably drowned out among other voices. I'm not in the habit of telling friends (or clients, for that matter) untrue cliches and well-meant generalities like "things will always get better!". I thought of replying with echoing stories of my own life, then thought, "Seanan has enough to read in this thread."
So I went to bed. :)
I'm of the opinion that we all have the right to decide what criteria will lead us to check out of this mortal coil. If one is in control of one's faculties, then death is everyone's right. I'm talking about the existential forms of rational depression, dissatisfaction with life, What things do we require to stay on this planet? But if I talked about this analysis calmly and rationally, many people would call mental health professionals on me or otherwise act like jackasses. Yet Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and the other Stoics would have understood exactly what I was talking about. They would have been astounded that people were not making that analyis. Modern culture has sometimes lost certain perspectives on death that the ancient world of Greeks and Romans possessed.
Mack
P.S. Prodigy is still technically depowered, last time I checked -- his abilities are now skill-related, not memetic-copying as per the disconnected mutant power. More on Tumblr when you feel like it. Have you been reading Kieron Gillen's excellent Young Avengers with Prodigy in it?
January 13 2014, 01:19:54 UTC 3 years ago
I did a fair bit of reading on the subject some years back - for a couple of otherwise glorious years I lived on a housebarge under the Aurora Bridge in Seattle, which is the second most jumped from with intent to end one's own life bridge in the country, after the Golden Gate bridge. Relatively early during that period, after a 15 year old girl ended her life by jumping into what was essentially my driveway**. One of the things that really struck me is how the people most likely to make impulsive, one time attempts at suicide are also most likely to choose the most lethal means (guns and jumping from high things)... and yet, 90%, if stopped, won't try again, and even trivial measures arae pretty effective at stopping people. (Slightly higher fences, that sort of thing. The best known example in the clinical literature is the drop in suicide attempts in the UK after the shift away from coal gas.)
* And certainly during some of the bleaker bits of the once and future (well, maybe not, at this point) spine injury I had a lot of internal monologues about how much worse it would have to get without hope of reprieve before I decided that my quality of life warranted not being alive.
** I'm still in touch with some of her friends. I think half the reason that her death hit me so hard is that her friends really impressed me.
January 13 2014, 05:16:37 UTC 3 years ago
On a personal level, I have close friends living on Disability benefits become of chronic depression. I was also diagnosed with chronic depression in the past. I've been on many antidepressants over a period of six years, though am very glad I was finally taken off them. I've read a lot of books (from Prozac Nation to the Encyclopedia of Depression).
As far as cultures and suicide: the Muslims who die as suicide bombers to kill their enemies in fatwa, holy war, see this as a rational tactic. Islam says that martys will be rewarded in heaven in the afterlife. On the other hand, the Catholic Church sees suicide as a mortal sin. Classical Greek and Romans saw suicide as appropriate in certain situations (saving honor, under order by the Emperor, to escape intolerable situations, as an act of defiance against one's enemies). Their conception of afterlives did not generally punish the act of honorable suicide. And then there are the Japanese kamikaze ("divine wind") suicide fighter pilots of World War II... If that's irrational, then it was an irrational belief held by much of Japanese society. What the Jewish rebels did at Masada against certain Roman reprisal is also of note here.
So I know that modern mainstream thought agrees with you: suicide is usually irrational. I disagree. I've held this belief for quite a while, and it has kept me warm through many a lonely, miserable night, to paraphrase someone else's quote. Anyway, I know what it's like to have chronic health problems or feel like there's no way out. But I also support the right to die movement -- I think we don't have a choice at being born, but once we are, we chose how we live and we chose how we die, if we can.
January 13 2014, 23:13:13 UTC 3 years ago
(Just ended up close to two situations involving impulse suicide or self-harm during suicidal ideation in the last 4 months. Neither was rational, based on actual events in the person's life -- though one was in a painful situation, it was not one rationally resolved by her death. Know another person with frequent suicidal ideation. Again, not rational based on the actual events of her life.)
January 16 2014, 05:24:38 UTC 3 years ago
I wrote a two-paragraph, thoughtful reply to your thoughtful post yesterday... Then Firefox crashed (probably too many open tabs), and I lost the piece. :(
Next time, I write it in a text editor/word processor and copy to LJ...
I will retype it as soon as I can, since I really wanted to respond!
Mack