Just posted a long response in another suicide diary, and would like to explore it further to see what others think.
Suicide is one of those choices we aren't, apparently, supposed to make for ourself. Everyone else is supposed to be considered.
Below is the post I just rang up. Perhaps you have something useful to add, or something you just want to get out there.
Everything is permitted. I got trolled out yesterday for expressing my honest opinions on an I/P diary. Hope it doesn't happen again.
Interesting discussion but with a few lacks, to my way of feeling. Not thinking, feeling.
I study cognitive science fairly intensively because it has given me some insights into a tendency I have to think about the most graceful way to exit this existence.
At 67, and being apparently immunized to the American obsession with living forever, and being a little insensitive to the impositions of others' desires on what I find interesting, I think about suicide on a regular basis.
I've been doing this since 1964, when I was driving a powerful motorcycle up Mt. Tamapais and it occurred very strongly to me to just let it fly off the mountain with me on it at 70+ mph.
Didn't happen then, but I'm still driving powerful motorcycles (just renewed my M1 license yesterday) and still thinking about it enough to have picked out a large tree close to the road to smack into. Why? Why why?
Well, I think "Why?" should not be the direction the discussion should take, because as far as I can figure out, we humans don't do things for why reasons. We don't even seem to have a sense of reason that guides us.
I'm constantly understanding from my reading in cognitive science that the way we work is this: patterns of responses to sensory and memory inputs are churning around, bouncing around in our heads, and constantly, as they do, eliciting chemical reactions.
We choose, somehow, from these chemical reactions, thoughts associated with them, but not thoughts as sentences.
That's the flaw in our descriptions of thinking. We don't form sentences and then pull them out in strings and say "Oooh, look, what a beautiful thought, all shiny and well formed!"
From what I read, and think about, and talk to people about, and from forming opinions about what people say and how they talk, and respond to their own thought processes, I think the idea that we have some sort of emotional blob of associations and metaphors and then rationalize them over a span of a half second or so, and if they won't rationalize comfortably, we let them fall apart.
(I can be, apparently, a little disconcerting to talk to, because I listen very carefully to what people actually say, and seem sometimes to be paying closer attention to what people say than they do when they are saying it. I find this very common, this lack of understanding of what one is saying.)
From curiosity about suicide, and why people dislike it so, I went to Sweden in 1964 to find out why people there ended their own lives more frequently.
The answer was so simple that it made me distrust my own culture. People in Sweden are allowed that choice in their life. Think about it.
We carry on a lot on the left about choice in abortion, ending another's life before it begins, but stop thinking about choice when it is someone who has decided that they want to end their own life.
Suicide, people, is not always a result of depression. It might be something as simple as an aesthetic choice about what a life should be.
It might be a result of wishing to stop using up natural resources, a logical response to nattering about there being too many people in the world.
It might be a logical response to a financial dynamic, a desire to keep a loved one from being bankrupted by end of life medical craziness. My father took this choice, when pancreatic cancer had dead-ended his life. It was a sane choice, typical of his oak-like resolve and fairness, and I have felt no abandonment or resentment for the action.
He wanted to go out with fairness and good sense, and my mother lived for thirty more years on the unwasted insurance money, having a much better standard of life than she would have if thousands of dollars had flowed into the ghoulish medical practices so common today in this selfish culture.
I'm healthy now, and rewards flow in on a consistent basis, but if I thought it a fair deal in all respects, I'd consider it my decision to make. Of course I'd consider the feelings of others in my life, but if ending one's own life isn't finally my choice, what the fuck IS choice about?
Hope I haven't offended anyone. It's nothing personal.
Ormond