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Suicide

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created by bloodlust

(thing) by Jet-Poop (7.1 hr) (print)   ?   (I like it!) 2 C!s Fri May 19 2000 at 13:17:37

Back in the day, when all the kids I knew played soccer instead of those wimp sports like baseball and football, everyone got treated to a soda after the game was over. While some kids insisted on Coke or Pepsi or Sprite or whatever the "cool" soda was, all the really smart kids ordered a Suicide. A Suicide was what we called a mixed soda with a little bit of several different sodas. Some ordered a "Coke/Orange Suicide" or a "Pepsi/Root Beer/Sprite Suicide", while others ordered a "Suicide with Everything", which mixed together a little bit of every soda at the concession stand. One assumes that the name came about because some poor schmuck thought that drinking root beer mixed with orange soda was a risky undertaking.

(place) by piq (1.3 mon) (print)   ?   (I like it!) 1 C! Thu Oct 19 2000 at 8:31:33

      The thin strip of pavement (composed of assorted pebbles, sand and tar) had marked the majority of Baxter's way but now ended abruptly. Replacing it was a dirty type of sand, stretched in an attempt to cover the bare and ever-moist ground underneath. Layered on top of the sand were sun-baked magnolia leaves, interwoven with pine straw, creating a carpet-like ground of unusually low resistance. To the inebriated Baxter this proved a great hindrance, as his sandals slid over and under the pine straw, unearthing the ground and digging into the sand just to find a foothold. Frustrated, he kicked them off and placed his numb, soft feet onto the hot pine straw.
      Finishing off the last of his ballast, the empty bottle of Skyy slid out of his limp fingers and rolled out of his path, onto the grass, into the bushes. Ironically enough, it was his father's money that had bought the alcohol, the land and even the pills in his pocket. `Lazy money,' they called it (behind his back of course,) both before and after the high-profile graduation dinners and parties. Baxter was scheduled to graduate from Ole Miss' College of Business this semester and take over his father's enterprise. So it was planned. Yet it had happened that Baxter's father decided not to be incredibly honest on his tax forms, resulting in swift proceedings that practically disowned him through his father's debts. It took a while for this fact to settle into Baxter's mind and fully develop, but when it did the realization was devastating. Not only would he have to work for a living and carry new responsibilities, his 2.0 GPA guaranteed that Baxter would never again experience the lifestyle he had grown to accept as a standard. In order to support his ever-growing cocaine habit and alcoholism, Baxter sold his guitar (as new,) laptop (slightly used) and finally his stereo. As word of his father's bankruptcy spread through society, those who Baxter once considered his friends abandoned him. He could no longer afford to go out with them, stopped getting the invitations and finally they avoided his phone calls. Abandoned, he bought a bottle of sleeping pills.
      Through the thorny bushes he could see the pair of railroad tracks, his tracks. Behind them was a small clearing, reminding him of a similar plane. In the center of it stood a boy of four, holding his father's hand. "One time this land will be yours. The trees, the field, the railroad..." ...the railroad. At least he wouldn't wake as a cripple, which had always been his worst nightmare.
      The chirping had decreased in volume and the birds in platitude as Baxter neared the train tracks. His stumpy feet pushed his torso into a somewhat stationary position and he checked his watch. Unable to read the numbers anymore, he figured now was as good a time as any. Coarsely, he thrust his soft hand into his pocket and retrieved a dozen or so white pills. Unable to cup his hand and lead it to his lips, they met somewhere in the middle, his numb tongue lapping up the bitter white pills, dropping half of them. It did not take long for the pills to develop their tiring effect, for Baxter to line his spine up with the rail, or for the train to scare away the latent birds at 5:32 that afternoon.

(idea) by QXZ (7.8 hr) (print)   ?   (I like it!) 5 C!s Tue Aug 07 2001 at 18:22:42

There was a time when I had strong feelings about suicide. It was completely beyond my understanding that someone could prefer death to life.

I'm not religious. I don't believe in any concept of an afterlife that permits consciousness and awareness after the body's demise. As such, I failed to understand how anyone could find relief in death.

"It's not," I thought to myself, "as if you're going to kill yourself and then suddenly think 'ah, that's better'". Even if nothingness was better than the current situation, there was no way you were going to be aware of the nothingness and that it was somehow better. So what was the point? Life is clearly better than death, right? Just as something is better than nothing. Right?

There we were, my strong feelings and I. My "superiority" those who thought they always had death as a way out.

My friend Pete committed suicide last April.

"Why" is not the first question people ask when you tell them your friend has killed himself. That's tactless and everybody knows it. But eventually the question is posed; when the time is right, when things can be discussed rationally.

I'm not going to tell you why. It doesn't matter, really. The easy, short response is "he was sad". The longer, real answer requires (of course) a complex analysis of Pete's life, a lot of assumption and guesswork, facts related second or third-hand, and personal details that it's just not right to tell the world at large. And, anyway, the short answer seems a lot more meaningful.

At the end of the day, Pete is dead because he was sad.

That stupid, banal, gargantuan understatement is the only way I can understand it. Because what I can't understand, what there's no possible way for me to fathom, is the depth of his sadness.

And that's why my strong feelings about suicide have evaporated. I am ignorant. I was arrogant.

At Pete's funeral his older brother Mat, my friend...my brother in all but blood, read a eulogy. He loves Pete so much. And hearing his expression of love and grief, his words of joy and pain, was the most emotionally devastating thing I've ever experienced.

I was sad, but Pete was sadder. And that's all I can know.

I have no right to judge suicide. There is nothing in my experience that has reduced me to the despair that Pete felt. The only opinion I can have, all I can say is, "right now I have no reason to kill myself". Right now at this moment, I don't. And I don't forsee it. But that's as far as I'll go.

Pete wasn't being selfish; he was sad. Pete wasn't begging for attention; he was sad. Pete wasn't being escapist; he was sad. Pete wasn't trying to hurt us; he was sad.

And now he's dead.

That's all there is to it, really.

(thing) by dustfromamoth (7.1 mon) (print)   ?   (I like it!) 7 C!s Tue Aug 21 2001 at 12:08:54

Many poets and writers have described their suicidal feelings. Leo Tolstoy, for instance.
Tolstoy passed through a suicidal crisis before his religious conversion at about the age of 50, and described it in My Confession. It is curious that he describes himself as both happy and healthy and yet suicidal, but that is just one of the paradoxical features of depression:

"The truth lay in this - that life had no meaning for me. Every day of life, every step in it, brought me nearer to the edge of a precipice, whence I saw clearly the final ruin before me. To stop, to go back, were alike impossible; nor could I shut my eyes so as to not see the suffering that alone awaited me, the death of all in me even to annihilation. Thus I, a healthy and happy man, was brought to feel that I could live no longer, that an irresistible force was dragging me down into the grave. I do not mean that I had an intention of committing suicide. The force that drew me away from life was stronger, fuller, and concerned with far wider consequences than any mere wish; it was a force like that of my previous attachment to life, only in a contrary direction. The idea of suicide came as naturally to me as formerly bettering my life. It had so much attraction for me that I was compelled to practice a species of self-deception, in order to avoid carrying it out too hastily. I was unwilling to act hastily, only because I had determined first to clear away the confusion of my thoughts, and, once that done, I could always kill myself. I was happy, yet I hid away a cord, to avoid being tempted to hang myself by it to one of the pegs between the cupboards of my study, where I undressed alone every evening, and ceased carrying a gun because it offered too easy a way of getting rid of life. I knew not what I wanted; I was afraid of life, and yet there was something I hoped for from it."



Freud tackled the task of theorizing the explanations for suicide in Mourning and Melancholia:

So immense is the ego's self-love, which we have come to recognise as the primal state from which instinctual life proceeds, and so vast is the amount of narcissistic libido which we see liberated in the fear that emerges as a threat to life, that we cannot conceive how the ego can consent to its own destruction. We have long known, it is true, that no neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses against others, but we have never been able to explain what interplay of forces can carry such a purpose through to execution. The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object - if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego's original reaction to objects in the external world. Thus in regression from narcissistic object choice the object has, it is true, been got rid of, but it has nevertheless proved more powerful than the ego itself,. In the two most opposed situations of being most intensely in love and of suicide the ego is overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways.

But is it really reasonable to accept that self-love of the ego is a primal state and that suicidal thoughts always reflect murderous thoughts towards others? To find evidence to support such views we really must further examine the psychological basis of depression.

There are a lot of suicide related nodes on Everything2. I thought I'd put them all together.



People who committed suicide:

Suicide Notes:

Personal propensity towards suicide, experiences and opinions:

The Facts:

Methods of suicide:

Songs and poems about suicide:

Movies about suicide:

Books about suicide, or with suicide in them:

Help, support and advice for suicidal people:



Everything suicide

Other miscellanous 'forms' of suicide: (things with suicide in their name, etc)