Current Events > I seek out videos about mental health struggles but it makes me feel ghoulish

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like an energy vampire, but the energy is people talking about how they almost committed suicide. It helps to feel less sad and a bit more motivated, but when you're seeking out other people talking about how they almost killed themselves, it can feel like you're being exploitative of other people's misery.

That's not the intent of course. I've been living in this in-between state where I'm afraid of death but I don't want to be alive for years now, and I'm really struggling with alcoholism. Videos like the Philosophy Tube black star trilogy have been really good.

But like, how do you look up people's personal experiences with suicidality and self harm and shit without coming off as this energy vampire, going from one suicidal person to the next to feed on their experiences? It helps to process what I'm feeling, but it can look like I'm fetishizing someone else's suicidality y'know. This helps me feel something, I've gotta keep this kick going. The reason I would do something like that is to help process my own feelings, but there's that very real fear that it comes off as just mindlessly consuming someone else's misery for selfish reasons.

I know mods take down posts about self harm and suicide, at no point in this post have I indicated that I'm planning to harm myself or die. I'm just Going Through It right now, there's no cause for concern. Expressing some extremely difficult and personal struggles is all.

As long as you don't feel like you're getting desensitized to the whole topic I don't think it's necessarily such a bad thing.

Though it's pretty early in the morning for me so maybe I'm not reading into this enough.