The point about suicidal thoughts is that the urge to have the thoughts is a symptom of a disease, a phenomenon that is occurring in your brain. And on top of the other symptoms of the disease these thoughts create their own suffering.
My advice is not to try to rationalize the urge. If you ask yourself the question "Why do I have to kill myself?" You will get answers. Bullshit answers, usually, but they don't look that irrational because of your state of mind. And a lot of the suffering is caused by these essentially fruitless discussions.
Another key point is to realize the impermanence of the mind and of the self. Though it sounds like a buddhist teaching, everyone who survived suicidal ideation knows this: You enjoy live, then you don't, then you do again.
The mind is never static. Finding that reality helps one to get a grip on the seemingly illogical phenomenon on suicidal thoughts.
> The point about suicidal thoughts is that the urge to have the thoughts is a symptom of a disease,
This is wrong. Thinking of it as a "disease" is a misunderstanding, it makes it impossible to truly understand it.
Alcoholism might be a disease... excessive alcohol consumption probably doesn't have any benefits. Suicide though? It sort of does.
You see, biological organisms aren't programmed to survive... we're programmed to reproduce. And that means not just laying the eggs, but making sure that at least some of the offspring survive. So it became advantageous if a parent (or even uncle/aunt) was psychologically capable of killing themselves or letting themselves be killed.
And we're not necessarily talking about throwing yourself in front of a rabid grizzly either. There are all sorts of circumstances (killing yourself so there will be enough food for the other to survive a famine).
The psychological machinery is all there for killing yourself. Hard-wired into your brain through countless thousands of generations of people who only lived because a close relative voluntarily died.
But evolution isn't intelligent, and it goes with a "what works most of the time" method of keeping a trait or not. And this is probably cross-wired in with quite a few mental illnesses and other questionably-useful traits.
It's a malfunction of a (once in a great while) useful tool.
On HN, it's anything other than the strict mental health party line on suicide. On other threads, I've seen people looking down on David Foster Wallace, as if they had a prayer of doing in their lives what he did.
I upvoted, because interesting comments on this topic are rare.
"This is wrong. Thinking of it as a "disease" is a misunderstanding, it makes it impossible to truly understand it."
I would classify it as a medical condition since that is how the modern society can provide attention to it. If one is clinically depressed and borderline on suicide the way to get help is to seek immediate medical attention.
I'm not sure what the philosophical difference is between a "malfunction" and "disease".
It's important on medical topics to distinguish message board noodling from actual vetted advice. I'm not a doctor but have spoken to doctors about this specific issue, and, like all of us, have access to the actual medical advice available on the Internet.
Every piece of advice I can find prominently states:
Do not argue with or attempt to invalidate the reasoning of a suicidal person. Listen. Ask questions to gauge intentionality ("do you have a plan? what is your plan?"). Vector them towards professional help. Do not try to fix suicidal people yourself.
Suicidal impulses are a medical emergency.
This may not directly apply to your comment, but it seems very likely to apply to the thread as a whole.
>Do not argue with or attempt to invalidate the reasoning of a suicidal person.
Merely saying this may not convince people. They need to know why this completely fails. While suicidal actions are largely impulsive (one reason why guns are a worse threat than other forms of suicide), the individual has spent a long time thinking about it. Nothing you can say will convince them that you have any understanding of their reasoning. To them, you are just like all the others who do not understand them (regardless if they are right or wrong in such an assessment).
By listening, you are likely doing something that no one else has done for them. It will often show them that you want to know their reasoning instead of just dismissing it. It may not be enough to stop them, but it often does delay them, hopefully long enough for a professional to get involved and take over.
> (one reason why guns are a worse threat than other forms of suicide)
I come from a family of avid hunters and gun owners. I don't personally own a gun. Not because of any political reason but because I don't want the ability to pull the trigger when I'm in my darkest of moods. At least without that I have to think about it long enough to hopefully snap out of it. There are a handful of times if you would have handed me I gun I think I would have pulled the trigger... Then when I look back it seems silly but the cycle repeats. One time I simply couldn't find my car keys and almost rage quite life. The car was in the shop.
> One time I simply couldn't find my car keys and almost rage quite life. The car was in the shop.
This is one of the most terrifying aspects of depression for me. I can be functioning perfectly normally (obviously just on the surface), and then one morning I stub my toe or spill a glass of water and I just breakdown. All the frustration, anger, sadness, or whatever that I've been holding in just floods out and I want it all to be over. This is why I used to never drink (and now wish I'd never started), and also why I won't consider owning a gun. When you get depressed you may not be able to control yourself, but you can try to instill good habits in yourself when you're of a sounder mind. Or at least control your environment so you have fewer tools to harm yourself with.
That's the weird thing about depression. At the moment it seems totally rational. Then you look back and think WTF? Like today. I look at the comment I originally made and there is no way I would even share that in the mood (positive) I am in today.
Indeed. The way I explained it to my ex-girlfriend (it ended because of my depression, though I didn't realize I'd fallen back into it at the time): In the moment I was perfectly rational, based on what I believed or "knew" to be true. But what I understood to be true wasn't, in fact, true. Or it was, but the scale was far less significant than what I perceived it to be. Which means that, to the outsider, I was clearly out of my mind (and was), but if they saw what I saw, and heard what I heard, they'd have come to the same conclusions. Goes back to this and other recent posts on things like catastrophic thinking.
OTOH, I generally make these comments when I'm in a more positive mood. That's the only time I can put words to what I experienced.
It isn't just depression. Look at a teenager in love. They will do something today fully defending it for being true love, but in 10 years they will lay awake at night cringing at the very same action.
> "Nothing, I've got a great job, seeing all my friends weekly, just started on a really exciting new side project,
You haven't met a lot of depressed people. Many have jobs, and family, and friends, but still irrationally feel alone and don't feel trust in the people that love them.
You evidently have never heard of Aaron Beck, the doctor whose new approach to treating depression has saved tens of thousands of lives during my lifetime.
"What's wrong with your life" is not the same as "Why do you want to kill yourself?".
And even then I would categorize these reasons as quite irrational reasons to kill yourself. People who are not currently in that particular state of mind don't see these reasons as rational and valid.
My point is to not argue with some one who is suicidal about his reasons. Even not with yourself, if you do have suicidal thoughts. Take the symptom seriously, start treatment, but don't take the thoughts and reasons themselves too seriously.
I don't speak for everyone who was suicidal obviously, but one of the answers to "Why do you want to kill yourself" is that you are unhappy and don't think you'll ever be happy again. I am not suicidal or as you say "in that particular state of mind" right now, but I can definitely see this as being rational or valid.
If you have been depressed for as long as you can remember, I can certainly see why you would feel as though things are hopeless. I like to think they aren't, but I wouldn't disregard their feelings and opinions as irrational. Like an aspiring musician or athlete whose prospects don't seem to be getting better, sometimes you feel like it's time to give up.
Have you ever been suicidal? Not trying to be rude; I'm just curious whether your opinions were formed because you had a different experience than I did is all.
My point is that "It will never be better" is objectively wrong for most people. There is a very small portion of patients who indeed don't improve after years of treatment, but for the absolute majority depressions can be treated in weeks or months.
I don't disregard anyones "feelings" if I call these feelings irrational. But these feelings are obviously caused by a temporary state of the mind. I did have those feelings, but I learned early on to not take them as seriously as they looked at first.
But it's hard to get to this perspective, I know. A Depression undermines the patient's ability and will to fight it. Some patients develop elaborate delusions about why they are this way. Most patients have less obvious "delusions" where they believe something not completely extraordinary but still wrong and harmful, like not being worthy of life.
I can recomment the youtube video "Sapolsky on depression", he explains depression from a biological viewpoint.
> you ask anyone who's suicidal what's wrong with their life, they will give you a litany of actual real-life things rather than, as you suggest, answer "Nothing
You need to re-read what bayesianhorse wrote more carefully, because you're not actually disagreeing with him. He said: "If you ask yourself the question "Why do I have to kill myself?" You will get answers" Attacking a straw man is bad enough, but attacking it with such vehemence is really not cool.
Right, I've had the experience that thoughts can deeply affect my mood and how I feel about life and myself. I wonder, though, why most people seem to simply leave it at that - "some thoughts are bad, be aware of that". Where's any kind of advice on actually dealing with this mind of ours? Sure, we have meditation and mindfulness, and at least meditation seems to be very effective for many things (I don't know enough about mindfulness). But is the mind really such a chaotic and uncontrollable beast that the only alternative is to focus/quiet it (meditation), or to symbolically shrug at the impermanence of its temperament?
We tell people to exercise if we want to get stronger, but the mind is seemingly something that we either try to repress in an unhealthy way (alcoholism and friends), just blurt out/vent whatever it has been nagging us with lately ("talking about our feelings"), or meditate/mindfulness. The last alternative seems very promising and healthy, though sorely underutilized by most people, even the "my body is my temple". But I find it strange that there aren't more alternative (and complementary) approaches that are being suggested, like trying to think more constructively ("positive thinking" being a part of this).
People who see the mind as a separate and wild beast will probably say that the mind can not be controlled. And I would be inclined to agree. But I think it can be steered to some degree, or at least nudged.
Mindfulness is not enough. For one thing, being mindful of your breathing won't help you a bit when dealing with unpleasant thoughts. But you can start to become more mindful of these thought, especially when not in a formal meditation.
The "observing" of these thoughts alone can improve the situation a lot.
Mindfulness training also improves the prefrontal cortex and thus the ability to control impulses and thoughts. The idea is to evolve the ability to choose to have a certain thought or not.
Knowing what to do is one thing, doing it is another. Meditation can immensely improve the latter!
Meditation is not a sufficient treatment for depression or suicidal thoughts, but it can help to avoid relapses, and it helps to deal with the consequences of recurring depressions.
I have found basic cognitive behavioral therapy techniques like the "three column method" to be immensely helpful in dealing with negative thoughts/moods. Especially in combo with meditation. Copy of the book 'Feeling Good' is about 10$ and will teach you how to do it and give lots of good examples in different practical contexts, or just google 'triple column method cognitive therapy'.
Steps are generally: write down your automatic thoughts when you are feeling bad, identify how they are irrational or distorted, write down more accurate, balanced, realistic ones -> feeling better.
It's a can of worms - there's this notion of freedom of religion for instance.
Anybody can think and believe any crazy idea as long as it's a fairly mainstream religion. That's our current state of affairs - we take any ideas seriously as long as many people take them seriously.
There's not much other criteria at play.
So people live with crazy incompatible ideas that keep causing internal conflict and what vague solution can you propose that'll sell? (Capitalism is the new religion, so things MUST sell :)) Right, 'mindfulness' - in other words, just don't pay attention to the internal conflicts you are continually having - they'll go away on their own.
They don't really, but we can't say ok, we have to use logic and sense to approach these things - because then archaic ideas like freedom of religion are going to fall apart.
So we are where we are, mindfulness, 'positive thinking' and other sterile methods that don't talk about the real problem - your mind is a big mess and it'll take a while to sort through it.
We as a society haven't even started - we're too busy coping with never-ending fuck-ups that stem from people in power not losing their heads for being incompetent. Of course they love it that way, they're at the top of the heap and beyond scrutiny, how convenient. Just don't get caught with hookers and blow.
No. Someone may well work out perfectly logically that there's nothing more for them to do in life. And that's their choice. You're pathologising someone just for coming to a certain conclusion.
Of course, people might also make emotion-based decisions to kill themselves, which might be a symptom of their depression or whatever, but that doesn't mean that all suicide must be a mistake. You'd kill yourself to keep the Borg or the Alien from getting you, wouldn't you?
If you're pro-choice w.r.t. abortions at all, then you should really be pro-choice w.r.t. suicide. If your logic for the first one was "it's their body, so it's their choice", you're inconsistent in your logic if you oppose the second one 100% of the time.
> illogical
Given that there's no good reason to be alive in the first place, it's perfectly logical. It's only ill-logical if you assume that what's good for the (selfish) genes and what's good for the individual are the same thing, which they're not.
That's just not the reality. If you look at suicides, you pretty much always see someone who was depressed for a long time.
And that disease of depression has been studied in so immense detail, that your point of view about it is plainly wrong. The suffering is clearly immense. And it is clearly temporary for almost all patients, especially with good treatment. It can't be rational to kill yourself to avoid temporary suffering.
Of course you can construct situations where it would be more rational. But really, if someone has suicidal thoughts, the assumption that this is an irrational, "insane" idea, is pretty much a no-brainer.
It only seems insane to someone completely averse to nihilistic thought processes. If you believe that everything in this life and universe are effectively meaningless then ending your own microscopic existence is basically irrelevant.
My understanding of his comment was that he was trying to convey the above, not necessarily argue that feeling depressed one day (or year!) makes killing yourself a fantastic idea. See:
"Of course, people might also make emotion-based decisions to kill themselves, which might be a symptom of their depression or whatever, but that doesn't mean that all suicide must be a mistake."
> That's just not the reality. If you look at suicides, you pretty much always see someone who was depressed for a long time.
That's definitely not true. Most people who die by suicide have a mental illness, but not all of them. (And by "had a mental illness" I'm including those people who had an undiagnosed illness.)
My advice is not to try to rationalize the urge. If you ask yourself the question "Why do I have to kill myself?" You will get answers. Bullshit answers, usually, but they don't look that irrational because of your state of mind. And a lot of the suffering is caused by these essentially fruitless discussions.
Another key point is to realize the impermanence of the mind and of the self. Though it sounds like a buddhist teaching, everyone who survived suicidal ideation knows this: You enjoy live, then you don't, then you do again.
The mind is never static. Finding that reality helps one to get a grip on the seemingly illogical phenomenon on suicidal thoughts.