As someone with an invisible illness who has spent 16 years of my life in a suicidal hell, these glib, patronizing "anti-suicide" messages only make me want to go through with it even more -- and I doubt I'm alone in feeling that way. If you want to reach out to suicidal people, automatic "don't-do-its" are not the way. It's really not your place to decide for someone else how much suffering they should or should not endure.
Without knowing the specifics of their life, telling someone not to commit suicide is completely presumptuous and can feel like a minimization of their suffering. If you want people to open up about suicidal feelings, you have to be open to respecting their decision to end their life if theyâre not just temporarily impulsive. If youâre NOT open to respecting their decision, then truly suicidal people wonât come to you. Theyâll keep their feelings in because they can already predict your words.
I really do see where youâre coming from, Iâve been extremely suicidal on and off over the past 11 years and I understand that itâs awful to be condescended to and to have those feelings belittled or dismissed or misunderstood.
Iâve never authored one of the posts youâre referring to, but when I see them pop up on my dash the thought that goes through my mind is, âWhat if this saves just one personâs life?â, and thatâs when I hit the reblog button. I know âdonât do itâ is far, far too simple when it comes to suicidal ideations, I know sometimes the pain is just too unbearable. I would never presume to decide for someone else how much suffering they should or should not endure - Iâve endured a lot of my own and I know no one could ever understand that, much as I could never understand anyone elseâs suffering. But on the other hand, if I thought for a second that I could provide someone with something to live for or something to hang onto for another day or week or month, then I would do my best to provide that.
The thing is, running a blog with 3000+ followers, some of whom are suicidal, I feel Iâm in a very difficult position because while I would and do respect the decision some people make to take their own lives, I donât feel itâs necessarily safe or responsible for me to publicly encourage that choice. I would never, ever condemn someone for making the choice, I know sometimes it is the only way to escape immense pain, and I know sometimes people simply canât see a situation in which things are going to get better for them. I know I canât make the choice for someone not to commit suicide, and I would absolutely respect that choice if anyone were to make it. But I am also always going to do my utmost to offer people something to live for, or at least something to think about.
Ultimately, if someone were to come to me with thoughts of suicide and they made it very clear that they didnât want to be talked out of it, I would respect that and I would be happy to discuss it with them and to relate my own experiences. I strive to be someone who can be turned to without any fear of judgement, and I donât ever want to minimise what anyone is feeling.
âWhat if this saves just one personâs life?â If someone decides to live because of an anti-suicide message, how do you know they're actually being "saved," as opposed to just having their suffering extended? Seriously...
Even people who were once suicidal and view themselves as having been saved from that -- how do they know that living even a non-suicidal existence is preferable to death? To "save" someone implies that they're being spared from something bad, but what basis do we have for thinking death is automatically a bad thing? It's either non-existence, which can't be regretted, or something else. And as bad as this existence can be, I don't believe in, or see any of evidence for, the existence hell. The fear of death and the belief that death is automatically "bad" creates an untold amount of suffering. Suicidal people live on for decades for fear of hurting their family members, and family members of those who have committed suicide suffer from such a "bad" thing happening. But if people thought differently about death, suicidal people wouldn't have to endure a miserable existence to spare their family suffering, and families of people who committed suicide would get over it easier knowing that death is not necessarily a bad thing, certain exceptions not withstanding. The fear of death is instinctual, but it's not rational. If we could view ourselves from outside of ourselves as though we were looking at a snow globe, we might laugh (and cry) over how seriously we took our fear of death. That said, even assuming that lives genuinely could be "saved" in a meaningful sense, the saving of them would come at the expense of other lives. Just by being alive, we consume resources that would otherwise go to other creatures. Trees that were cut down so we could read books come at the expense of all the creatures who relied on that tree, and the same principle applies everywhere you look. Our life depends on the death of other creatures and vice versa,