Current Events > Yearly anti-suicide post

(+) Yeah! (+)

Hello all. Not very active on GameFAQs anymore, but I used to be decently active. Just stopping by for my yearly anti-suicide topic. Seven years ago today, one of my best friends and his girlfriend both ended their own lives. It was a shock to everyone, we all missed the signs. I'll never forget finding out the news, or seeing his dad sobbing at the funeral service. I just want to say that suicide sucks. You can get help, things get better. And if you know someone dealing with these issues, be there for them. That's all. I hope you all have a wonderful day
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They did it at the same time?
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Do you mind telling why they did it?
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HoopsJunky1 posted...

Hello all. Not very active on GameFAQs anymore, but I used to be decently active. Just stopping by for my yearly anti-suicide topic. Seven years ago today, one of my best friends and his girlfriend both ended their own lives. It was a shock to everyone, we all missed the signs. I'll never forget finding out the news, or seeing his dad sobbing at the funeral service. I just want to say that suicide sucks. You can get help, things get better. And if you know someone dealing with these issues, be there for them. That's all. I hope you all have a wonderful day

Yea dont tell a suicidal person that. Ever. Its like telling a depressed person to "Cheer up. The sun always rises". Its a meaningless platitude and just signals to the person, "Eh, they just dont want me to do this because itll affect their consciences." Not to mention it can get annoying if you hear it alot yet nothing changes.
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Do you think 13 reasons why is good for the cause or does it "glamorize" suicide
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MrSinclair posted...

They did it at the same time?

Yes.

Veggeta X posted...

Do you mind telling why they did it?

They made a pact. I guess they were both depressed. There was no note on motivation

IWBYD posted...

I've heard this before, but its the truth. People can get help. People do get better. I don't know what else to say, I'm not a psychologist. I definitely don't mean to undermine or belittle someone's mental illness

KlRBEH posted...

Do you think 11 reasons why is good for the cause or does it "glamorize" suicide

Haven't seen the show so its hard to comment on it. Logic's song on depressive thoughts/suicide has caught quite a bit flack for glamorizing suicide, but to me that song should be seen as a positive. We can talk/write/make TV shows about suicide without glamorizing it. That said, I think when dealing with the subject it is very careful to be mindful of the message you are sending or could be accidentally sending
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HoopsJunky1 posted...

They made a pact. I guess they were both depressed. There was no note on motivation

What signals did you think you missed?
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Currently dealing with a suicidal ex
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Its the worst feeling in the world, especially when its a family member. Nothing but what could I have done and what could have been done in general to help. And it really sucks when they think nobody cares about them and then they arent around to see the amount of people that did care.
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Why bother committing suicide anyway, if you're not in a great position in life you probably won't live past your 50's or 60's regardless. I think too much some people (at least in the West) get the illusion that living to their 80's or early 90's is just gonna happen. I'm 26, already through a good portion of my life. Those years ain't coming back. Hell, plenty of people die in their 30's or 40's from random illnesses or unexpected heart attacks. Not making light of suicide, just explaining my own rationalization for why I've never seriously pondered it.
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Veggeta X posted...

HoopsJunky1 posted...

They made a pact. I guess they were both depressed. There was no note on motivation

What signals did you think you missed?

He began to abuse drugs, always seemed to be a bit out of it the last month or so (like he would make jokes and talk, but when others were talking it seemed like he would checkout) and he was quieter/sadder in general. Just little things like that. He never mentioned suicide or being depressed or anything of that nature though.

butthole666 posted...

Currently dealing with a suicidal ex

Man, that sucks. Sorry to hear that
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"Just hang in there"
"You're gonna get through this"
"You have a lot to live for"
"I know how you feel"

"I know how you feel"

*sigh*

I have a friend who is going to die any day now. It's been a week since he was given 48 hours to live. He's hanging in there, poor guy.

I gave him a call one day, a couple of years ago. I don't really do phone calls but I felt like I should talk to him. When I met him, he had disability-tier back problems. He walked everywhere holding his back. I honestly never asked why. It was just... a part of who he was, to me. At the time, he was having to work because he had was still in the process of applying for disability. Their family had never had any money, and the labor was killing him.

He left the living room and went out onto the porch and he started just sharing his whole life story with me. He had struggled with depression his whole life. He was on his second marriage. His first wife was unfaithful from day one. I was able to put the pieces together, having met his son's biological father at the son's wedding that the son was a product of one of these affairs. My friend had tried to stay with her and work everything out, but the wife eventually left him anyway. He had been fighting with cancer for a long time, too.

He has two sons with his current wife, one brilliant and the other challenged. They had the brilliant one in a private Bible school, and as I spoke with them, he told me he felt like thst was where God wanted him to be. I honestly had to agree. But it did make money even tighter. They were barely surviving.

His wife didn't work. She didn't want to work. She grew up rich and felt like she shouldn't have to work, in spite of the situation. He didn't want to force her to work, so the situation got worse and worse.

Some days, he told me, he couldn't get out of bed becsuse of the pain. Having mostly lost the ability to provide for his family, his wife had stopped treating him like a husband. A "roommate scenario" was how he described it. He told me how much he's insured for and how many times he'd considered "cashing in" on it.

What do you say? What could I say? None of it was true. He couldn't "hang in there." He wasn't going to get through this. He had nothing to live for.

A few months later, I decide to give him another call for encouragement. I call him up and tell him exactly that. He says he apprecites the gesture, but I have nothing he hasn't heard before. I didn't know this, but he has two other friends he calls on the regular to vent or whatever and sure enough, whatever I tried to tell him, he had heard before and it had done nothing for him.
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He was trimming hedges when I called. They weren't going to keep their house. It honestly wasn't worth much but even so they couldn't make payments on it. He decided if they could sell the house before they lost it, they could maybe buy a trailer--a cheap one at that. But either way, his wife was going to leave him. (That much at least turned out to be overly negative. She finally started to work, and they use that money now to pay for their house. But he didn't know that then and I certainly didn't.)

I was at a loss for words. I couldn't say anything. I had nothing to say. I couldn't empathize with him. I couldn't give him any advice.

The day he learned he was going to lose that fight with cancer was one of the happiest days of his life. He had six months to live, which has now run out. Those six months, he was happier than I had ever seen him.

Look guys, I get it. Suicide sucks and you want to do what you can to try to prevent it. And that's great. Really, I mean that. But I think one of the biggest problems with suicide is that nobody takes it seriously. It's easy to stand at the top of a cliff and tell people to climb it. To the people at the bottom, you can never know how hard it is to climb that cliff, and the worst part is your stubborn insistence that the climb is worth it when you have no idea what it costs or what it takes.

I don't have a solution. I'm sorry. I wish I did. But at least be real for a second. You don't know how anyone else feels. If you have any chance of preventing suicide, it's not going to happen by trivializing their situation with supposition of familiarity.

The best thing I can come up with is actually what I did during those phone calls. I was humbled and completely blindsided, but even after several years, the best I can come up with is just to listen and pray for them.
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masticatingman posted...

Why bother committing suicide anyway, if you're not in a great position in life you probably won't live past your 50's or 60's regardless. I think too much some people (at least in the West) get the illusion that living to their 80's or early 90's is just gonna happen. I'm 26, already through a good portion of my life. Those years ain't coming back. Hell, plenty of people die in their 30's or 40's from random illnesses or unexpected heart attacks. Not making light of suicide, just explaining my own rationalization for why I've never seriously pondered it.

you don't know what it is like obviously. Being depressed and suicidal is not this rational thing. You feel like things will never get better. You feel hopeless and unloved. You feel like a burden on your friends and family so you don't share your problems with them. This makes you feel alone in the world. You stop eating, you stop sleeping because the anxiety gets worse at night when all you want to do is sleep. You're worried you're going to lose your job because your performance has been slipping.
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bump for hoops
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mattnd2007 posted...

you don't know what it is like obviously. Being depressed and suicidal is not this rational thing. You feel like things will never get better. You feel hopeless and unloved. You feel like a burden on your friends and family so you don't share your problems with them. This makes you feel alone in the world. You stop eating, you stop sleeping because the anxiety gets worse at night when all you want to do is sleep. You're worried you're going to lose your job because your performance has been slipping.

This is me. It truly does feel like I'm unloved and in a hopeless situation. The only reason I'm still here is because I can't bring myself to hurt my mother like that.
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mattnd2007 posted...

masticatingman posted...

Why bother committing suicide anyway, if you're not in a great position in life you probably won't live past your 50's or 60's regardless. I think too much some people (at least in the West) get the illusion that living to their 80's or early 90's is just gonna happen. I'm 26, already through a good portion of my life. Those years ain't coming back. Hell, plenty of people die in their 30's or 40's from random illnesses or unexpected heart attacks. Not making light of suicide, just explaining my own rationalization for why I've never seriously pondered it.

you don't know what it is like obviously. Being depressed and suicidal is not this rational thing. You feel like things will never get better. You feel hopeless and unloved. You feel like a burden on your friends and family so you don't share your problems with them. This makes you feel alone in the world. You stop eating, you stop sleeping because the anxiety gets worse at night when all you want to do is sleep. You're worried you're going to lose your job because your performance has been slipping.

Yeah, there's this constant feeling in the back of your head that calls you a parasite all the time, and you feel the urge to push everyone away so they don't waste energy on you. It's why it's just so easy for someone who is depressed to turn down or run away from any help offered.

Sometimes a tiny bit of happiness breaks out of the apathy and sadness, but then it's quickly smothered by an intense feeling of guilt, that you don't deserve to be happy.
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"The so-called psychotically depressed person who tries to kill herself doesnt do so out of quote hopelessness or any abstract conviction that lifes assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fires flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. Its not desiring the fall; its terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling Dont! and Hang on!, can understand the jump. Not really. Youd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

~ David Foster Wallace
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KogaSteelfang posted...

mattnd2007 posted...

you don't know what it is like obviously. Being depressed and suicidal is not this rational thing. You feel like things will never get better. You feel hopeless and unloved. You feel like a burden on your friends and family so you don't share your problems with them. This makes you feel alone in the world. You stop eating, you stop sleeping because the anxiety gets worse at night when all you want to do is sleep. You're worried you're going to lose your job because your performance has been slipping.

This is me. It truly does feel like I'm unloved and in a hopeless situation. The only reason I'm still here is because I can't bring myself to hurt my mother like that.

Absolutely agree..

Deep down, I want to believe that the "real" me is trapped under all this shit. There are brief times where fragments of myself will surface and I'll feel somewhat better, but then it'll just get pulled under again, deeper and deeper.

At the end of the day, I can't bear the thought of putting my parents through that kind of torment.
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anti-suicide, pro-euthanasia

if people want to die, let 'em

HolierThanMao posted...

anti-suicide, pro-euthanasia

if people want to die, let 'em

cant be having that, already lost someone on CE. forgot his username.
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I want to die Im a loser and Im never going to get anything. I cant talk to anyone and I avoid even my family. Theres no point to me

kingdrake2 posted...

HolierThanMao posted...

anti-suicide, pro-euthanasia

if people want to die, let 'em

cant be having that, already lost someone on CE. forgot his username.

That post was so much more harsh than you intended
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As someone who's been suicidal and even called the hotline, I support this topic!
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DreadedWave posted...

As someone who's been suicidal and even called the hotline, I support this topic!

What do those hotlines do, anyways? I'm genuinely curious.

In my head it seems like they'd just repeat the same generic "it'll get better" type lines.
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Mental hospital didnt help anything. I was in last year and when I got out I was just put in the same exact position as before.

mods can we sticky this? @Alucard188 @Error1355
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Conflict posted...

HoopsJunky1 posted...

People can get help. People do get better.

Not everyone does, just fyi. You have a good mindset but you need to be realistic too.

I didn't say everyone does.
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Parappa09 posted...

bump for hoops

Hows it going man? It's been way too long. Hope all is well
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Robin_Dude posted...

DreadedWave posted...

As someone who's been suicidal and even called the hotline, I support this topic!

What do those hotlines do, anyways? I'm genuinely curious.

In my head it seems like they'd just repeat the same generic "it'll get better" type lines.

The hotline ruins your life.

Their job is to contact the police while they lie to you on the phone, then the police arrest you and stick you into an inpatient ward where you're drugged and notify people you maybe would rather not be notified and then stick you with a massive medical bill for the privilege.

Don't call the hotline. You are better off paying a prostitute to just talk.
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@HoopsJunky1 posted...

Parappa09 posted...

bump for hoops

Hows it going man? It's been way too long. Hope all is well

im good bro, im working for vice media so its all good

how about you? hows life?
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Conflict posted...

ChromaticAngel posted...

Robin_Dude posted...

DreadedWave posted...

As someone who's been suicidal and even called the hotline, I support this topic!

What do those hotlines do, anyways? I'm genuinely curious.

In my head it seems like they'd just repeat the same generic "it'll get better" type lines.

The hotline ruins your life.

Their job is to contact the police while they lie to you on the phone, then the police arrest you and stick you into an inpatient ward where you're drugged and notify people you maybe would rather not be notified and then stick you with a massive medical bill for the privilege.

Don't call the hotline. You are better off paying a prostitute to just talk.

Something tells me this isn't accurate

From personal experience, it's not.
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I wouldn't be surprised if it was true, honestly. Offering help to someone, only to trap them in a corner, capture them, and ship them off to a mental institution against their will.
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I want to tell you guys that it CAN get better. Mine got bad enough that I was scared I was going to off myself. So I called my mom and finally told her how bad things were. I took a leave of absence from work. Temporarily moved back to my hometown to live with my parents for 3 months. Went to the doctor and got put on lexapro. Did some counseling. Had a horrible adjustment period to the lexapro. But eventually it started helping.

I'm back to work. Have been for about 6 months now. i have some side effects from the lexapro. I'm forgetful, that's the biggest one. Sometimes my dreams are way too vivid. But I'll take those over constantly thinking that suicide is the only way out.

If you haven't gotten help give it a chance. I was so embarrassed by my depression and thought people would judge me. people said they were sad I hadn't told them what I was going through. That they could have helped me if only I'd asked for help.
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hoops bump
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