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A Note From a Ricochet Member on Suicide
Recently, I wrote about my father’s suicide in the New York Post. I received a lovely message from a member here at Ricochet, and because of its sensitive nature, s/he didn’t want me to disclose their identity. But it was so powerful, I asked if I could share their thoughts anonymously. Below is their message, starting with a quote from my Post piece:
Published in General“In the wake of high-profile suicides like Spade’s, there is a great deal of discussion about the person who committed the deed and far too little about the survivors… We often hear from those who have attempted suicide but survived that they believed the world would be better off without them… we survivors are living witness to the fact that it is not.”
This reminded of an argument I had with a friend almost four years ago.
Robin Williams had just died. There had been constant encomiums for more than a week. At that point, no one knew about the Lewy body dementia. We did know that he had a wife and three children, but everyone was being consistently reverential, and it was getting on my nerves. That’s when Henry Rollins wrote an essay critical of Williams called “[Expletive] Suicide.”
My friend was very upset by the essay. There are three things she and I share. We share political views that not only aren’t compatible with the two main parties but aren’t even supported by any third party. We think that the grunge era was rock’s renaissance and the best period for pop music during our lifetimes. We’ve also bonded over shared experiences of chronic depression. She was outraged by the essay, but I thought Rollins had said some things that needed to be said.
She was concerned about stigma and how that can be a barrier to people getting the help that they need. That’s legitimate, but I didn’t think it applied to what Rollins wrote. She didn’t like the idea that suicide could cast a pall over one’s life’s work and in some ways even diminish it. I didn’t like that idea either. I thought it was stupid, but it bothered her a lot more than it did me.
She thought it was wrong to judge someone harshly for taking themselves out when they were just trying to end their suffering. She feels that it’s cruel to tell people who’re so distraught that they should feel guilty about how their decision will hurt others if they choose to take their own lives. I couldn’t disagree more. She seemed appalled. “Why would you want to make them feel worse?”
My view is that it’s not about their feeling worse. If the message I wanted to send would make someone feel worse merely for contemplating suicide, then the difference is negligible. It would only be significant if you’ve rounded a corner and are starting to embrace the idea that you’ve figured out how to get relief. If feeling worse actually means shattering the illusion that you’ve discovered a way to stop the pain – and coming to grips with the fact that you’d only been transferring that pain onto those you love – then I am all for “feeling worse.”
She said that you can’t expect someone to continue to suffer for the sake of another person. I said that whether or not I expect someone would fulfill such an obligation is one thing, but whether such obligations exist is another. They do exist. I know this.
Once when I was seriously considering doing something permanent, I watched a television documentary about people working at a coroner’s office. There was a segment, maybe 10 or 15 minutes long, about dealing with the families of people who have committed suicide. There’ve been many times since when I thought that going to sleep and never waking sounded tempting, but now I can’t help thinking that it would also be an unforgivable betrayal.
Before watching that TV show I would sometimes think to myself that any resources expended on me would be put to better use if only I were gone. Absenting myself would remove a burden from those around me. It’s possible those things might be true if I had no family, and I don’t have a wife or children. I do have a mother. The only thing she ever wanted to be was a mother. She came from a big family and wanted to have lots of kids, but all of her pregnancies ended in miscarriage except one. If some man chose to murder her only child, even putting aside the matter of the taking of human life, then based just upon the pain that she would feel, that man would be a terrible villain.
I told my friend that sometimes we really ought to expect that a person should continue to suffer for the sake of another person. It’s commonplace for us to say, ”there are certain things that a person just cannot live with.” I think we should be encouraged to think about whether there might not also be certain things that you just can’t die with.
Thank you to the member who wrote this, and thank you for sharing this, Bethany.
Of course we should suffer for other people; of course we all have an obligation to suffer for each other. Figuring how to do that and how not to do that can be very difficult, but rule number one is easy to understand: don’t ever commit suicide. I say this as someone who has been suicidal. If it weren’t for the fact that I was raised to view suicide as wrong, and I knew that others would suffer if I killed myself, I seriously doubt that I would be here.
Suffering for other people is kind of the main point of life, isn’t it?
Survivors of suicide are entitled to feel how ever they need to in oder to heal.
Yet this conversation has to eventually return to how do we get fewer people to commit suicide.
If we understand suicide as your suffering exceeding your capacity to cope with suffering then the obvious answers revolve around convincing the person let things won’t always be like this.
A message that regardless of whether you’re suffering improves you are morally obligated to endure that suffering is simply telling a suicidal person that on top of all of their other issues they are also morally bankrupt.
This message is utterly devoid of hope and may help a few odd individuals but will be an utter failure against the vast majority of suicidal people.
For the love of God if someone ever comes to you with thoughts of suicide do not experiment with this shame philosophy unless you want that person dead.
This attitude is a huge part of the problem. You are fundamentally treating a suicidal person’s suffering as if it is no more serious than the suffering everybody feels.
That nobody will understand is a primary motivator in people not getting help.
How do you know that it will be an utter failure? Our culture is far more sensitive and understanding about suicide now than it used to be-there was a time when those who committed suicide were denied a Christian burial-but the relative lack of shame isn’t lowering suicide rates.
We should never judge someone who commits suicide; we have no idea what was going on their minds, and even if they were totally sane when they did it, it was only one very unfortunate moment of their lives: their final act is not the sum total of who they were.
I don’t think the message is utterly devoid of hope, at all. In fact, suffering for other people is kind of the whole point of Christianity-not a hopeless philosophy at all.
This is why I speak openly about the mental health issues I have experienced: my hope is that by doing so, I may be able to help others who are out there. I have always had suicidal tendencies; I have no idea how other people suffer, or whether my suffering is more or less serious. No, wait, in one case, I do know: the husband of one of my friends killed himself almost a year ago. Her suffering and the suffering of her children is far worse than anything I have ever had to go through: I have been in the psych ward more times than I can count. I have been diagnosed with schizophrenia: my mental health issues are serious, but that doesn’t absolve me of moral responsibility.
There is no shame in feeling depressed; there is no shame in being tempted to commit suicide. People can’t help how they feel, and trying to stuff those feelings can definitely cause a great deal of harm. But we are accountable for whether we act on our feelings or not.
Sorry to go on like this, but a crucial distinction must be made between having feelings and acting on them. I would advise anyone struggling with depression to read “The Road Less Traveled” by Scott Peck. Scott Peck was a military hating liberal and a philanderer, among other things-a very flawed messenger, but his message is so important. He was a psychiatrist who struggled with depression himself, and he had great love for those facing depression. He didn’t have any magic cures, but his books have helped me a great deal-it might be difficult for a conservative to look beyond his more leftist tendencies, but it’s worth it.
Condolences for the loss of your father.
In some ways I was very close to a person who committed suicide. He was probably my best friend in school other than perhaps my next door neighbor and his brother who just happened to live where they lived.
I was quite the loner. I really wasn’t close to anyone, or anyone of my own age perhaps I should say. My friend and I had so many strange things in common that it was like that popular comparison between Lincoln and Kennedy. Even a few teachers got us confused. However, my friend changed a bit the last year or two that I knew him. He suddenly started smoking and listening to loud music almost as a way to fit it rather than that being something that he actually enjoyed. I thought that was odd.
I remember that my mother said that my friend was home from college one day. She had seen him mowing the grass for his local church. She kind of encouraged me to call him, but I never really called people on the telephone, and they never really called me. That’s just the way young men were at the time before e-mails, texting, social media, etc. I was kind of embarrassed at how well I was doing in college. Besides I had all the time in the world to get in touch with my friend, if I really needed to do that.
About a month later and perhaps only about two weeks later, my mother opened my bedroom door, asked me to turn down the radio, and with tears in her eyes spoke the words I’ll never forget, “…I’m afraid there’s been a tragedy.”
I always wonder what would have happened, if I had somehow very uncharacteristically gotten in touch with my friend a few weeks earlier. Perhaps many people have saved many lives without ever knowing it.
It’s a Wonderful Life soon essentially became my favorite movie, and a few years later I decided that I was more of a Christian than a deist or something that really didn’t see a difference between good and evil.
I have never been one to be influenced by peer pressure much. That sort of thing often has the opposite effect on me, but I’m the type of person who really enjoys being alone, and I’m the type of loner who doesn’t understand the attraction to alcohol and drugs. It seems that many people seem to crave more human contact and feel quite unfulfilled when they do not receive that.
I believe there is a drive to death. At some point, it takes over from the most powerful drive we’ve known since we were born: the drive to go on living.
I saw my beautiful mother turn into a shriveled, pathetic creature happy to give up its life. I reckon I will do the same.
It happens in extreme old age, and it happens to younger people when illness has, undeniably, won its battle.
But it shouldn’t happen to a mature, healthy individual.
My nephew, a handsome, strong, intelligent 27 year old, committed suicide. It was wrong, wrong, by any Standard. Yes, a sin and a crime, I say.
Oh!! God forgive me, but all I could think was, hey, if you didn’t want that magnificent body, there are so many people who would’ve given anything to inhabit it…
i guess that was wrong, too, on my part..?
But here’s the thing: organisms oughta want to live. Primarily that! As long as they still have a chance of reproducing, at least.
Because there are people who deal with suicide on a daily basis and they have learned the hard way what works and what doesn’t.
Because suicide is a phenomenon of rich nations, and we have become rich since the days you are speaking of. There is no useful connection there, and one cannot simply treat such an analysis as uni-variable.
Believe it or not we have a good handle on what stops people from committing suicide. The problem is that you don’t know a person needs help until they reach out. Don’t blow that moment when they do.
I agree with this, kind of sort of. Medication has been a great benefit to me; therapists not so much. I don’t know what your experience with psychologists is, maybe you have had a more positive experience than I have: in my experience, most therapists lose all interest in working with me when they find out that I am a conservative who disagrees with feminism. I went to a therapist who sold himself as a Catholic conservative; he spent a lot of time praying over me and then dropped me when I ended up in the psych ward. And then there was the psychologist who told me that my schizophrenia was at least partially caused by the fact that my parents, she said, were too nice to me. I can’t begin to count the number of therapists I have been too: most of them are, in my opinion, really bad and not really interested in treating serious mental illness. They would usually much rather deal with the worried well.
I did finally find a decent therapist who was very good to work with, but by that time, I had pretty much figured it out on my own. This is why I am very reluctant to tell people that psychologists have all the answers. In my experience, they don’t.
*The fact that we have become more wealthy is only one factor that has gone along with rising suicide rates.
As someone who has been in the psych ward at least 9 or 10 times-I lost track-the thing that struck me most was how few visitors most of the people there received. Most people in the psych ward had no visitors. Many of them were there for suicide attempts, and no one visited them. The psychological establishment cannot make up for the lack of family, and if they say they can-I don’t pay attention to what they say anymore-they should be sued for malpractice.
One of my cousins is a psychologist; she never once visited me in the psych ward. She never called, or even sent a card. I called her once, and she told me in very condescending tones that she hoped that I would find what I needed in the psych ward. I have no use for her whatsoever. What I learned when I lost my mind was that there were precious few people in the world who really cared about me: from what I can tell, that is what most people learn when they end up in the psych ward. Even the best psychologists can’t fix this.
What I would tell people in the position that I and so many others have been in is that, in the words of Victor Frankl, life expects something from us, and I would recommend his book “Man’s Search for Meaning”.
It’s not really a competition of who is in more pain and whose pain is more valid when you acknowledge the fact that suicide does not help the suicidal person. It’s not the cure for suicidal tendencies. It’s a deadly side effect.
So sorry to go on like this, but this is very important. The time in my life when I was in most danger of killing myself was after one of my cousins was murdered in 9/11. I had very bad survivor’s guilt, and other issues as well. I went to various therapists hoping for some grief counseling; they all told me that I was overreacting, and most of them were puzzled by the fact that I was upset about my cousin’s death because, in their words, she was only my cousin. In other words, they basically just told me that I was crazy and neurotic. It wasn’t helpful.
The most helpful thing anyone said to me at that time were words spoken to me by my uncle, my cousin’s father. He came to visit me in the psych ward, and without me saying anything, he just told me flat out that he didn’t want to go on living either, but he said, very gently and lovingly, that he went on living for his children and grandchildren and his entire family. I didn’t feel that I was being condemned in any way; I felt, for once in my life, like there was someone who really understood me, and I very much appreciated the fact that he wasn’t telling me that I was crazy.
As a very wise friend once told me, it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
I promise this will be my last comment. I realize that much of what I have said sounds like tough love, and it is, but I really did mean it when I said that we cannot judge those who commit suicide. The only reason I didn’t kill myself in the days and weeks after 9/11 was, I lost my mind instead, and my psychotic delusions kept me alive.
After 9/11, I felt as though I had been set on fire, and it seemed to me at the time that the only way to stop being on fire was to die: death looked to me like a pool of water, and the only solution. But luckily, I had a psychotic break the day after 9/11, which I was able to hide from those around me, but I was very delusional: I believed at that time that I knew the future, and I was sure as the ground beneath me that I would die naturally within a month or two, so there was no need for me to kill myself. That is why I didn’t kill myself.
I have no idea why I experienced these delusions that kept me alive; I don’t know why other people don’t. I am not better than anyone, just a lot more fortunate. There have been other, less traumatic times when moral fortitude prevented me from killing myself, and that is why I believe in it, but we should never judge other people. We have no idea what they are going through.
I haven’t seen this discussed since the recent celebrity suicides (so pardon, if it was and I missed it), but on one hand, we are expected to celebrate suicides. If Kate Spade had been diagnosed with some terminal cancer and was facing only months of dreadful anguish and then decided to kill herself with the help of a medical practitioner, her decision would have been heralded as brave. She would have been feted on magazine covers as the poster woman for dying with “dignity.” People would have been made to feel that second-guessing her decision was expecting her to live a life of excruciating torture from which there was no hope of recovery.
On the other hand, if suicide comes as a complete surprise to most people, it was a terrible tragedy that should, somehow, have been prevented.
Suicide can’t be both a terrible tragedy and a laudable decision
If someone said this approach should be used exclusively then that person would obviously be wrong. No one’s saying that. You’re the one saying that an approach should be excluded, which is why I think you’re wrong.
Also, it’s not about shame. It’s a philosophy of duty.
It’s more accurate to say they have learned what approach is most likely to yield positive results for an unspecified case. That is vastly different from knowing what works and what doesn’t.
That is a problem, but if you really think it’s it’s the problem, then I think you’re foolish. That oversimplifies to a ridiculous degree. People are right to encourage those considering suicide to reach out. It’s unlikely that things will improve otherwise. Unfortunately, a lot of people go far beyond that truth and say that when someone does reach out, we know what the solution is to their problem. You seem to be doing that, and with all due respect, that’s totally nutballs.
It’s like the difference between saying you should seek help if you’re in pain and making a blanket statement like, ‘we know how to stop pain.’ I’d argue that simplistic thinking about having a ‘solution’ was a major cause of the current opioid crisis. We have many options available, but we don’t necessarily know what will work for a particular person. You may have success with the first thing you try or the fourth, or you might not be successful at all. A lot of people suffer from chronic pain which can’t be stopped and the best that you can do is try to manage it and cope with it.
You don’t know it won’t always be ‘like this.’ What you’re suggesting would be best for someone whose suicidal depression resulted from a traumatic life event. I don’t think it’s going to work if the cause is a chronic mental illness. Sometimes, “it gets better” is a lie.
Are you reccomending deceiving people with lifelong psychological problems? That may work the first time they’re considering suicide, but the person will not trust anything you say the next time they’re in the same place.
There are different approaches you can take with someone considering suicide. The only reason you could say that one approach needs to be excluded is if it’s actually harmful, which is what Frank seems to think about telling someone that suicide is wrong because of the harm it causes to others.
Except that it’s not saying that the person is morally bankrupt. It’s saying that the action would be morally blameworthy. If you’re trying to dissuade them, then they haven’t gone through with it and you’re not criticizing their character. You’re condemning an act that they’re considering taking.
Exactly. We’ve got plenty of natural desires that we can’t be blamed for having but that we could be condemned for acting upon. If we all agree that we don’t want people to take n action, then I find it odd for someone to argue that it’s wrong to tell a person that they can avoid having people judge them harshly and think of them as selfish if they refrain from taking that action.
My bottom line is this:
Convincing people they can become happier may be a very productive strategy in a lot of instances, but there are also a lot of cases where it just doesn’t apply. Telling someone that they will hurt the people that care about them may not change as many minds as other approaches, but it doesn’t do any harm and crucially it is universally applicable. There are no cases where it doesn’t apply.
I’d argue that it’s not what you start off with, but you should never fail to include it.
I don’t think it’s the main point, but I think that it can be the right thing to do and sometimes it’s what gives life meaning. There are people for whom it may never be necessary but not everyone is so lucky.
Uh oh. There’s a problematic implication regarding gender in there – lol.
Seriously though, Frank referred to the idea that there’s a moral obligation not to hurt others by committing suicide as a ‘shame philosophy,’ but it’s not about shame. It’s about obligation. Ethics of duty are amongst the oldest and (at least until very recently) the best-respected philosophies known to man. Philosophies which claim that the purpose of life is happiness seem to be overtaking deontological philosophies. If we’re limiting ourselves to the English speaking world, they probably already have.
Sam Harris is a clever guy and he’s definitely an expert on neuroscience, but he’s really hit and miss when it comes to philosophy His book Free Will is good, but The Moral Landscape is awful. He argues that scientific study of humans can determine that our purpose is happiness, which is of course nonsense. Happiness is essentially positive feedback whose primary purpose is to get us to do other things. It’s an incentive, not the goal.
As Hypatia alluded to, if we’re just looking at what we can learn from a scientific examination of human organisms then we’d have to conclude that the purpose of life is to maximize the number of functioning copies of our genes in future generations. I don’t think that’s our purpose, and that’s a good reason to conclude that some questions can’t ever be answered by science.