Whats wrong with Suicide?

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The Twin Towers was a different story because those people had no way out. They were trapped above the fire and they either get crushed to death from the building when it falls or fall to their death. They were going to burn to death anyway so falling to their death was a lot faster and quicker. Their families would still be sad and upset they died but they were going to die anyway if they didn't jump to their death so them committing suicide was irrelevant in that case. I said the same thing too about them being cowards when my mother said Hitler was a coward for killing himself so I said what about those people that jumped out of those buildings from the World Trade Centers? Were they cowards too because they didn't stick up to the fire and face it like Hitler didn't face the people and the trial? Mom said that was also different what they did than Hitler. I just think people say Hitler was one because they are mad people couldn't put him to trial and execute him so because he beat them to it by killing himself, people say he was a coward.

You still seem to think suicide in one instance is justified while in the other it is not. The time frame is irrelevent. In both cases the suicide is based on the instinct to end intolerable pain. Just face it. You can't put yourself in the shoes of someone who is suicidal. I'd also say you are the selfish one for judging people simply because you could not help them.

Also. I don't agree that the people who jumped from the twin towers necessarily did it in a state of panic. Some held hands and jumped together.

As my final statement, the 9/11 jumpers were faced by the very real threat of an excruciatingly slow and painful death. Suicide to escape an otherwise horrible and slow death is completely different from suicide to escape ones own personal and emotional problems.

This is a pointless debate that neither of us is ever going to win. You see it one way, I see it another, and lets just leave it at that. We could rebut each other until the end of time, but we'd just be retreading the same ground over and over again, with no new points being made, and I'm not interested in that.

Last edited by Zokk on 21 Jun 2011, 1:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Last edited by marshall on 21 Jun 2011, 1:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

And your selfish attitude only causes more pain. You are what's wrong with this disgusting world. Why should I back down when you are deliberately causing people pain?

How am I selfish? Please, by all means, explain your reasoning, because I honestly don't see it. If I'm selfish for having a strong negative reaction to suicide, then I guess I'm a horrible person for being raised with the idea that each human life is special in its own way, and to end one early is a waste of a perfectly good human being, and a waste of all the experiences, stories, insights and creativity they might have had to offer this world.

Thirty years ago, when I was just a kid, I had an infinite amount of optimism for the future. I was suffering horribly from crippling, chronic emotional pain, but I had no end of faith that things would get better and that I could find ways to fix everything in time. I spent ten years in extremely intensive and productive psychotherapy, three of those years in an open psychiatric hospital. My symptoms were excruciating emotional pain, depression, and horrifying nightmares. My behavior, reasoning skills, etc. were 100% normal. Just in a lot of pain, and that pain was so deep and profound that I couldn't hold a job or stay in school.

Eventually-- through ten years of courage and effort and perseverance, I completely overcame my emotional problems, returning to school and getting on with my life. Later on in my life my wife, my soulmate, left me for another man, and I did the same thing. I made lemonade out of the lemons life had given me, embarking on a path of forgiveness, personal growth, and spiritual questing. When my marriage failed, my career tanked as well, so I pursued other possibilities, traveling and working in different corners of the globe, different careers and lifestyles, boldly exploring possibilities that most people would never even have thought of. All the time furthering my personal and spiritual growth. All the time, doing everything that one could conceivably do. All the time, taking full responsibility, doing the hard things, facing my pain and problems head on.

And I was still in pain, decades later, because my root problem was incurable. I was different. Fundamentally and profoundly different from virtually everyone on the planet. Almost as different from aspies as from anyone else. I'm an aspie among aspies. Of course, on a planet with over 5 billion human beings, I know that there must be other people like me out there, but I would be very lucky to meet any of them in my lifetime. Looking back in hindsight, after decades of hopeful, courageous struggle and proactive problem solving-- ALL of my pain, through ALL of my life, was the pain of loneliness. An unfixable loneliness. Through effort, courage, cleverness, creativity, ingenuity, and perseverance I developed all of the social skills that I needed to make friends, opened myself to relationships, explored alternative career paths, and things sometimes got better for a while. For a while, before things regressed to the mean and I was suffering again. Suffering from loneliness.

I have no problem with people not liking me, or not wanting to be my friend or my lover-- but it doesn't work. I'm not happy because they can't even see most of what I am, and I can't share what I am with them. Can a giraffe be happy married to a squirrel? Even and adoring devoted squirrel? Can an atheist libertarian hippy be completely happy with only creationist Republican war veteran friends? This problem is existential. It defies fixing. Thirty years ago, I myself would have said otherwise. But I didn't understand then. Not only did I have the naive optimism of youth, but I had not yet had time to recognize, question, and challenge the unfounded social mythologies that society propagates-- all problems are solvable, things will eventually get better, there's always a solution, all you need is to seek help and everything can be fixed. I bought all that, too, before I spent decades doing everything one could possibly do, only to fail. Since I bought the propaganda that all problems are fixable and the future is always better myself, I don't expect many people to recognize the Truth in what I am saying:

Many problems are fixable, but many are not, and the refusal to acknowledge this reality has no basis in logic or fact. It's just wishful thinking-- just a foundationless belief, a blind faith, that people feel they can't live without. Because life would be too daunting and overwhelming without it. This is human nature.

Another aspect of human nature is the tendency to look away from the suffering of others. It hurts to see others suffer, and the more they suffer, the more it hurts, so we tend to live in denial of the horrific, excruciating and HORRIFYING suffering (both physical and mental) that many people bear. We play it down, rationalize it away, deny it, belittle it, ignore it, because we can't bear to look at it head on. It's very easy to say things like, "Suicide is wrong because it hurts others-- so it's a selfish act." But such a statement reveals that the maker of the statement is either ignorant of the realities of extreme suffering or in denial of those realities. If you were standing in an interrogation room, watching someone being tortured-- watching them being pinned down while a power drill is inserted into their left eyeball, or they're legs are being dowsed with kerosene and lit on fire, would you say to that person, "It's wrong to give away military secrets, because people will be hurt. It's selfish of you if you talk." Would you do that? Could you do that? Doesn't that seem just a little bit absurd?

There are many kinds of problems, and many kinds of pain, and many ways of taking one's own life. Fixable problems should be fixed, tolerable pain is probably best tolerated, and if suicide is chosen, it is irresponsible to do it in an insensitive, unnecessarily destructive manner. Of course "going away" is painful. It's painful when "going away" means ending a relationship, but we do it. It's painful when "going away" means giving up custody of the kids in divorce, but we do it. What really matters is whether we have workable alternatives or not, and -- if we don't-- HOW we go about ending the relationship, the marriage, or the life. There are minimally hurtful ways to choose to die, even though "going away" and "saying goodbye" is always hard.

I strongly disagree with your assertion that suicide is, by definition, a selfish and cowardly act. But I acknowledge the truth that's in your perspective and in many of the things that you're saying. First of all, I'm not an advocate of suicide. All I'm doing is challenging the claims that it's automatically, and by definition, sinful, morally wrong, irrational/emotional, short-sighted, selfish, and cowardly. That's all.

One of the reasons why I myself have never attempted suicide, and have no immediate plans for intentionally ending my life in the near future, is that I'm not the kind of person that gives up easily. Another is that there are an almost infinite number of ways to approach or deal with a given problem. I never run out of things to try, strategies, tactics, ideas, paths, etc. However, after being tough and brave and courageous for years and years, and after attempting literally HUNDREDS of solutions that haven't fundamentally solved my root problem or lifted my pain for more than a few years at a time-- I just can't listen to your claims that suicide is a coward's way out without smiling.

My sense is that your assertion that suicide is INTRINSICALLY cowardly is mostly just an idea-- the product of philosophically contemplating an issue with which one has little actual life experience, analyzing it in purely abstract terms. There's nothing wrong with that at all, and when one is young, one really doesn't have any alternatives. But such abstract philosophying doesn't always lead to the truth. If I'm wrong, and you've suffered horribly in your personal life but have chosen to "tough it out"-- and you feel deeply that not "toughing it out" (no matter how horrible the pain or how deep the despair may be) is cowardly, then I'm incliined to question the foundations of your axioms. I, myself, am a "tough it out" kind of person, and I find quitting a very difficult to do. But the "tough it out no matter what" philosophy is built upon several hidden assumptions.

One is that "toughing it out" is itself an intrinsically good practice regardless whether it achieves anything or not, and regardless of how painful it is. That's a subjective value, so one either embraces it or not. I wouldn't try to challenge it, or say that there's anything wrong with it, but it certainly doesn't qualify as an independent, objective rule of the universe. In my opinion, that sort of subjective personal value shouldn't be forced onto other people. In calling others who don't share that value "cowards," I'd say that you're crossing the line between subjective personal valuations and statements of objective reality and Truth.

Another (likely) hidden assumption is that if one "toughs it out" things are almost certain to improve significantly-- and more or less permanently. Again, that sounds like the intelligent, well-thought out philosophical idea of a young, inexperienced, but very thoughtful person. It sounds good, and everything that society tells you reinforces it, but have you spent a few decades testing it out? What if one toughs it out and things get worse and worse and worse? Over the course of many years? Or if the problems are intrinsically unsolvable? Or what if the attempted solutions create even worse problems?

The most important/significant hidden assumption (or implication, actually) is that virtually all problems that one encounters in life are temporary and fleeting and that, as long as one doesn't panic in the moment and become overwhelmed by fleeting impulsive emotions, everything will work out fine eventually. Again, I question the axioms. On what basis do you make the assertion (or implication) that problems are almost always temporary and fixable? Sorry, but yet again this sound to me like a reasonable-sounding, intelligent philosophical idea. I don't get a feeling of gritty life experience sitting behind it. I could be wrong, but that's the sense I have. It just doesn't match reality as I know it. In saying that, I don't mean that one can't solve many problems, or that life is always too painful or too difficult. No, no, no. What I'm saying is that the broad, general, universal claim that all problems are temporary and fixable and everything will keep getting better in time hasn't been tested out in the laboratory of Life. It's just a hypothesis. Unfortunately, when an entire society embraces an unproven hypothetical assumption, it seems to be something more than it is. It seems to be beyond question-- like the sun and the stars orbiting the Earth, diseases being caused by evil spirits, or people with dark complexions being meant to be owned by people with light complexions. Again, people are clueless. We're very clever, as primates, but we're completely out of our element these days.

You seem intelligent, thoughtful and sincere, and nothing that you saying is B.S or hypocritical. But the argument you're trying to build rests on too many unexamined assumptions.

The one argument that you make that I agree with is that, when people are trying to help-- regardless of whether or not their efforts are succeeding-- one let's them down by quitting too easily, by not trying to make it work. However, this can't be meaningly defined or decided in the abstract. My parents love me dearly, and struggled and sacrificed to try to make me happy-- but they let me down profoundly, and never had anything even remotely approaching the self-knowlege, wisdom, courage, and self-honesty needed to help me even a tiny little bit. Their efforts to help me were like throwing dumbells to a drowning person. Given that fact, would I be in the wrong for not trying to catch the dumbbells, and giving up instead? Sure, its important to seek help, and to let people try to help, but sometimes they just can't.

Not unless the problem you're struggling with is getting the peel off a banana.

there are "homicidal maniacs", but i have never heard of "suicidal maniacs".
one can only commit suicide once, so how could one develop such a taste for it that they become maniacal about repeatedly committing suicide?

it is a question i resign myself to never be able to resolve so it is now filtered from my perception by my disinterest to a core degree about the "matter"

I'm not perticipating in this thread anymore. The ignorance of the human race can only fill me with trembling rage. People just stubbornly insist on being blades that cut others down to pieces. It makes me sick to my stomach. This topic doesn't even belong in the haven IMO. It belongs in PPR with the rest of the hateful BS.

I backed out because of my kids. Can't/won't do it to them, ethically. Doesn't make me want to be here any more. *shrug*

~Kate

There's nothing wrong with suicide- it's like any other decision regarding one's body and life.

Except for the fact that drugs, alcohol, tattoos, piercings, diets, exercise, sexual preference, and everything else one chooses to do with themselves, in general, don't kill the person choosing to do them (at least not right away, anyway).

But maybe that's just me...

"There's nothing 'wrong' with someone making a decision concerning their own life and body."
"Suicide KILLS people, yo!"


You don't say.

Existence is something like a, typically 80 year, sandwich with oblivion on either side. When you find yourself in a place where all your worstmares come true again...and again....and again... and you're being ripped down past the point where you can prevent yourself from losing your humanity or really going dark, its not a choice so much as its natural progression. This world and this life, the human condition, does some unspeakably evil things to people. Just that made me want to smack the hell out of people who'd claim up and down that suicide is selfish - and keeping someone around who's existence is pure anguish isn't..... #$%^ a duck.

What a sh***y poem. And I've seen it posted, elsewhere, before, so it's highly unlikely that auntblabby wrote it... so I don't find that I'm being particularly rude.

To the original poster... I'm personally wanting to find my true love, who I, after some happy years, together, in this life, will have a romantic suicide pact with, as neither me nor her would want to live too long in this flawed life, when the afterlife is so much better... I don't get why people can't accept that some don't want to live a long life, where they'd be getting old - especially when you eventually will die, anyway - if a person wants to live a brief, young life, then that should be that person's business.

I understand that you (the original poster) don't believe in the afterlife, though, but still, I felt I'd share my view on it... even if this is a rather old thread.