Robin Williams (1951 - 2014)
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| If you were depressed and told me you were going to kill yourself because of the pain you were always in, it would be selfish of me to tell you to suck it up and stay alive fighting that pain just so I won't be sad after you were gone. |
Maybe so, but that still doesn't negate the selfishness of killing yourself when you know it will send your loved ones into a deep depression themselves. I guess it depends on the situation. If you are suffering bad, and really can't beat it or be helped, then maybe your loved ones would take comfort in the idea that you are no longer suffering. For example, someone who chooses to not go through chemotherapy when they have terminal cancer.
The selfishness itself is in knowing what damage will be done to others by your actions, yet putting your own interests before theirs and doing it anyways. You can't really generalize this because everyone is going through different levels of suffering, and will cause different amounts of pain to others by ending their lives.
I think that a lot of people just like to superficially promote to themselves the idea of suicide as a good idea, when the merit is not there at all, because it may seam convenient as a quick and easy solution to some difficult yet not out of reach solutions; and I think some are lazier than others in this sense. But depression and thoughts of suicide can grow like a disease. As you think more and more about it, and you find more and more rationalizations for it, and perhaps illogically convince yourself it's a good idea, you also inflict more pain on yourself, lost pride and love for yourself, and feed the problem artificially. What you need to do is break yourself from that habit if it starts, just like any other bad habit, and you will probably be much better off, happier and successful. Also, some people tend to tell themselves that they will kill themselves at some point when they get the courage, but they don't have it, and it really wasn't merited in the first place. But meanwhile, they use it as an excuse to not take care of themselves. They don't make a future for themselves because they have given up, and then their lives fall apart and their misery has been accelerated and increased unnecessarily by their own doing.
And I think this is something that can often begin at a young age, when you are foolish and don't know any better, and grow like a disease.
So basically, I think that fantasies of suicide, and persistent thoughts of suicide is a self fulfilling thing. You start out with some petty reasons ( you are unaware how petty they are ), but then you let your life slip away from you as you have stopped caring for yourself, and guess what, you realize how petty the original reasons were, now you would give anything to have your life back how it was; you appreciate what you had when it's gone. And you have to realize that things can almost always get exponentially worse. Your suffering, not really be so bad; instead of feeling sorry for yourself that whole time, you should have felt lucky, and that felling alone may have changed the way your life progressed.
Basically, you need to make the choice, is your life so bad that you must immediately end it, then do it, if not, then put those thoughts completely out of your mind; choose to live or die, but whatever you do, don't be the living dead, don't gradually kill yourself emotionally and mentally. Either get out their and live like you have a future, or don't, nothing in between. Then when you choose to live while you're alive, and are motivated to work hard and take care of yourself, you will gain love for yourself and pride and things will get better.
Basically "sucking it up" as I described it, is your best bet at beating depression in my opinion. Maybe just saying to someone to do that seams harsh, but it's actually good advice if you can get them to not take it the wrong way. It's not simply saying "live with it and stop complaining", it's saying, try to stop feeding it, to stop helping it to consume you, and try to appreciate what you have and make the best of it. You are alive, there may not be anything else to experience besides life, and suffering or not, it's something, and there are ways to appreciate a tough life. Maybe think of it like a challenge, or game. This is what you are given, see what you can do with it, experience life, the good and the bad, and stop feeling sorry for yourself.
I know that doing what I say is not easy, especially if you have underlying mental conditions such as bi-polar, but it's what you should try to do, and even if your not fully successful, I think you will definitely be better off simply by trying to be positive.
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At no time did I ever say it wasn't selfish, where are you guys getting that?
Starting to wonder if his motives were selfish or to save his family the heartache from watching him slowly suffer:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/14/robin-williams-parkinsons_n_5679283.html
Starting to wonder if his motives were selfish or to save his family the heartache from watching him slowly suffer:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/14/robin-williams-parkinsons_n_5679283.html
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I wasn't really trying to make an argument against you. I was just giving some of my thoughts about the selfishness in suicide topic.
htirwin
That may be so, but a side effect of depression is a different point of view. You can't impose one view onto another who may have a different point of view.
| Maybe so, but that still doesn't negate the selfishness of killing yourself when you know it will send your loved ones into a deep depression themselves. |
I don't see the significance in calling a person in a major depressive episode selfish when he/she wasn't even in the state of mind to form a rational thought.
| At no time did I ever say it wasn't selfish, where are you guys getting that? |
| Basically "sucking it up" as I described it, is your best bet at beating depression in my opinion. Maybe just saying to someone to do that seams harsh, but it's actually good advice if you can get them to not take it the wrong way. It's not simply saying "live with it and stop complaining", |
That is exactly what it is saying. If you want to say something else, you'll have to say something else.
"Sucking it up" would only help you beat depression if you weren't depressed in the first place. Probably the most significant features of depression, at least in my experience, are apathy, anhedonia and self-loathing. Someone who loathes himself does not feel he deserves to get better, someone with anhedonia can not make the effort required to get better, and someone with apathy doesn't care whether he gets better or not.
Exercise (aerobic and anaerobic) is probably the best thing for a depressed person, if they can find the motivation to actually do it. It balances your hormones, and hormone imbalance is generally why people are depressed in the first place, the progress you make provides incontrovertible evidence that you can actually achieve something if you stick to it, and your appearance improves which gives your self-esteem a boost (though you shouldn't generally base your self-esteem on things that can be taken away, like your appearance, but you need something to start with). Also, if your depression is of the self-loathing variety, you can treat exercise as a punishment. It sounds unhealthy, but it's better to channel your self-destructive urges into something positive than to dwell on them or to turn to substances or self-harm. As your depression improves, you will lose the urge to punish yourself altogether, and then you just stick with exercise because it's good for you.
If you know someone who you know or suspect is suffering from depression, my advice would be to just hang around them. That's what I want when I feel bad; not someone to talk to so much as someone to be near me. Usually when I have lows, there's no good reason for them, and it's actually frustrating to think about it and try to explain it to someone. Often I just grunt or say "fine" because it seems like way too much effort to describe (similar to when people who don't program ask me what I'm programming; there are too many other things I would have to explain to them just to be able to give them the gist of the project, and often they get offended when I decline to teach them CS 101 after they unknowingly interrupt me trying to figure out how the hell an object passed by const-reference is being corrupted).
Exercise (aerobic and anaerobic) is probably the best thing for a depressed person, if they can find the motivation to actually do it. It balances your hormones, and hormone imbalance is generally why people are depressed in the first place, the progress you make provides incontrovertible evidence that you can actually achieve something if you stick to it, and your appearance improves which gives your self-esteem a boost (though you shouldn't generally base your self-esteem on things that can be taken away, like your appearance, but you need something to start with). Also, if your depression is of the self-loathing variety, you can treat exercise as a punishment. It sounds unhealthy, but it's better to channel your self-destructive urges into something positive than to dwell on them or to turn to substances or self-harm. As your depression improves, you will lose the urge to punish yourself altogether, and then you just stick with exercise because it's good for you.
If you know someone who you know or suspect is suffering from depression, my advice would be to just hang around them. That's what I want when I feel bad; not someone to talk to so much as someone to be near me. Usually when I have lows, there's no good reason for them, and it's actually frustrating to think about it and try to explain it to someone. Often I just grunt or say "fine" because it seems like way too much effort to describe (similar to when people who don't program ask me what I'm programming; there are too many other things I would have to explain to them just to be able to give them the gist of the project, and often they get offended when I decline to teach them CS 101 after they unknowingly interrupt me trying to figure out how the hell an object passed by const-reference is being corrupted).
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