marko_the_rat and i found this... Gotta post it...

[ristin]

As ordered, stolen from tygercowboy
From lonerpack's journal

Suicide: The Permanent Solution To A Temporary Problem
Ask the 25-year-old who tried to electrocute himself. He lived. But both his arms are gone.

What about jumping? Ask John. He used to be intelligent, with an engaging sense of humor. That was before he leapt from a building. Now, he's brain-damaged and will always need care. He staggers and has seizures. He lives in a fog. But, worst of all, he KNOWS he used to be normal.

What about pills? Ask the 12-year-old with extensive liver damage from an overdose. Have you ever seen anyone die of liver damage? You turn yellow. It's a hard way to go.

What about a gun? Ask the 24-year-old who shot himself in the head. Now he drags one leg, has a useless arm and has no vision or hearing on one side. He lived through his "foolproof" suicide. You might too.

But... Who will clean your blood off the carpet or scrape your brains from the ceiling? Commercial cleaning companies may refuse that job--but SOMEONE has to do it.

Who will have to cut you down from where you hung yourself or identify your bloated body after you've drowned? Your father? Your mother? Your wife? Your son?

The carefully worded "loving" suicide note is of no help. Those who loved you will NEVER completely recover. They'll feel regret and an unending pain.

Suicide is contagious. Look around your family. Look closely at the 4 year old playing with his cars on the rug. Kill yourself tonight, and he may do it ten years from now.

You DO have other choices. There are people who can help you through this crisis. Call a hotline. Call a friend. Call your minister or priest. Call a doctor or hospital. Call the police. They will tell you that there's hope. Maybe you'll find it in the mail tomorrow. Or in a phone call this weekend. But what you're seeking could be just a minute, a month, or a day away.

You say you don't want to be stopped? Still want to do it? -Well, then, I may see you in the psychiatric ward later. And we'll work with whatever you have left.

Remember: Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

IF YOU'RE READING THIS, PLEASE STEAL IT AND PUT IT IN YOUR JOURNAL, TOO.

Comments

[archdukechocula.livejournal.com]

You are imposing your desire on someone else, which is a big difference. Someone who commits suicide doesn't impose anything on anyone.

They are imposing the burden of grief upon others by avoiding it themselves. It is an innate human reaction to be saddened by the death of a family member to which you had any level of attachment, barring an extremely unusual or hostile relationship, or some kind of difficult to obtain buddhist detachment from the material world that few of us possess.

I beg your pardon, but who the fuck are you to judge others..?
I am in a position to judge from my own experiences and what I have read, and my own personal experience, as well as discussions I have had with many others who have gone through the same thing indicates to me a psychology of narcissistic self indulgence. This is to some extent annecdotal, but from what I have read based on psychological profiles, this seems fairly consistent with my experience. There are suicides that fall under the "relieving the burden" category, where a person kills themself because they feel they are a financial/emotional burden upon another as well, but that is why I qualified my statement as "usually." My judgment is as much a judgment of self as anything else, because I was narcissitically self indulgent when I pondered suicide with a gun in my mouth. In retrospect, I feel I have a pretty good grasp of why I did that. Many people I have talked to have felt similarly. Given how I have seen suicides ruin the lives of others, including young people who are hardly at a point in their lives to live in this magical state of emotional altruism you proscribe, I am notably judgmental of the act unless there are some kind of extenuating circumstances that make the act just.

I didn't say their love was a weakness, I said their attachment was. If you truly love someone, then you love them for exactly who they are, which means accepting their decisions as their own to make, and being unconditionally happy for them when they make them. People that hurt are exactly those people that have "invested" in you, as you put it, because their investment means they have something to lose. People that truly give to others haven't "invested" anything, and don't stand to lose anything, so their agenda doesn't come into it.

While I believe such love exists, I think few of us practice it, and that it hardly works as a basis for social norms. What you speak of takes an incredible amount of discipline and will to achieve. I consider it an ethical responsibility for a person to take such things into account. Thus, in the case of a potential suicide, I hold them ethically responsible for considering the impact it will have on those who love them. The "norm" is for people who love to feel attached (I do not say norm as a value judgment, but simply as representative of the population). Attachment is a weakness from certain perspectives, but detachment is not an unambigously positive trait. Zen meditation allowed many a great saumrai to kill with complete detachment while later writing about the beauty of a Cresanthemum.

Excuse me again, but who the fuck are you to judge others..? Suicide is reasonable whenever the person committing it believes that it is.

That is a bizarre standard for ethical behavior if you ask me. An act is not inherintely reasonable because a person believes it to be so. Reason is a quality apart from the whims of any person, including you, me, or a potential suicide. A person can be reasonable if they apply their faculties in that pursuit, but they are not reasonable just because they believe they are. Similarly, suicide is not unreasonable just because I think it is unreasonable. Rather, I beleive it to be unreasonable because, to the best of my mental faculties, I have reasoned and thus concluded it to be so. I may yet be wrong, and am open to that possibilty were I provided with a more rational argument to the contrary.