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Thanks for bringing this up. I have attempted suicide many times. I have a chronic mental illness called bi-polar and one its symptoms are depression/anxiety/isolation and on the other side mania/illusions of grandeur/wild behavior. These are totally uncontrolable unless treatment is taken. It is widely accepted to be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain requiring medication to bring into as close to a balance as possible. I take several psychotropic medications.
I am able to hide my disease out of necessity during 40 years of working but I developed a drinking and drug problem as a way to self-medicate because I was unaware of what the problem was and didn't get the proper help for it.
People need to stop fearing persons who are mentally ill or thinking of them as weak or fake. Be aware.
You sound like a great guy, at least from the things I read that you have posted. Don't get discouraged.
Thank you for this. I'm not suicidal now, but have been a couple of times in the past. I'm in a pretty good place now thanks to working hard on myself. My outlook still isn't great though, meaning I fear the future and growing old alone, primarily.
I've gone through times in my life when I was so depressed that I considered suicide. The knowledge that I could is why I don't own a gun, of any kind. I'm honest with myself about how it could happen. I don't allow those easy things into my life, so that I can gain some perspective if I find myself there again.
That being said, I think what goes on is that we fail to realize that our brains are pattern recognition machines. As such, they are segmented into parts that do certain functions. Our consciousness puts the stamp of cohesion upon those parts. It's very easy to believe, however, what one part is saying over all of the others. It's even easier to believe a whole region of our brains. That sort of voice is very powerful. It's also very susceptible to seeing your world through the eyes of those who only judge you. It interprets this winner take all world we live in, and says that because you didn't win you deserve to die. Or, because you aren't exceptional, you deserve to die. Or, because other people don't worship you, you deserve to die. Enter solipsism. When it tells you that you aren't worth anything, you believe it.
Several years ago I watched this Ted Talk or Youtube video, I can't remember which, about schizophrenia. I'm not schizophrenic, but my sister displays some of the symptoms. I was fascinated to hear this one man's theory. He was a brain researcher. He said that it was entirely possible that the voices one hears when they have that condition are really just a person's own inner voice, but coming to them so out of context in space-time that they interpret it as foreign.
He cited how in the movies they use those clapboards at the beginning of filming scenes in order to sync up the action and the sound. Well, the action and the sound don't have to be exactly precise because people's brains exist in some sort of time space where we naturally put them together, as long as they aren't too far out of sync. The man said that schizophrenia may be a result of a person's inner voice being so out of sync with reality that they no longer consciously interpret it as coming from inside. Normal people hear those same voices, but they come in context. Also, we are much more capable of realizing they are wrong. Aren't the pattern detecting machines going to tell us many wrong things, after all?
I've had some success battling loneliness by using a technique where I remove my consciousness from the herd of voices that my brain throws at me. By herd of voices I am referring to something that Buddhist monks call 'monkeys in the treetops.' That means that when a person tries deliberately to slow themselves down in time to get to a point of center, they realize that their brain won't stop. They observe that they are full of thoughts, even when they tried for so long, and so well, to stop those thoughts. It seems that you can't shut them off by merely willing it. Neither does relaxing work all that well. But relaxing does help you to realize that they are going on. They are like monkeys in the treetops. Once you can see that who you are, as the decision maker, and what they are, as the things that are actually there to give you data and suggestions concerning that data, yes they aren't always neutral, then you can separate yourself from the reality they are trying to tell you that you live in.
This sounds great, but having been depressed I know it is not powerful enough. Depression occurs when there are so many voices saying so many things that it is not like sitting on the forest floor and watching monkeys. It is like trudging through the swamp. You need a better way to deal with the overload. Well, I've found that I can do something with my consciousness that helps. It's a long story about how I developed this ability. I think it would be too hard to explain it really. What I will do is say that it is possible. Anyway, what I do is place my center into my heart, where it is almost entirely away from my brain. That way it is removed from the world of hurt. That world can still go on, but I don't have to listen to it. Another thing I do pertains to my religion. I try to open up my brain, by telling it to open up, and receive its instruction from my God. I say that my brain is in my God's hands, so to speak, and that it should fall into the sort of order that God would impose upon it. You have to believe that if you ask for bread that God is not going to give you a snake. God may give you thoughts that suggest you make some other decisions in your life than the ones you have been making, even. He may ask you to stop judging others, or yourself, or the situations you find yourself in. Oh, those situations. Literally, stop judging altogether. I've had great success with that, in quieting down horrible thoughts.
Last edited by Am I a Prophet; 12-07-2019 at 07:03 AM..
I also think it is important to realize that their are two different ways of approaching what it means to be an individual. Basically, it is Plato vs. Aristotle.
The Platonic way is to consider yourself sacrosanct. You assume you are right, even though you have never considered something. This is the way a child is, when they don't like broccoli even though they have never tried it. Carried to excess, you are doomed to a comeuppance.
The Aristotelian way is to experiment. This is what people do when they drink to excess the first time they drink. They overdo stuff, and then throttle back as they find they went too far the first time. Or, maybe they don't, if they have inadvertently exposed themselves to something which damages them too severely the first time they tried it.
I think, in order to build a life that works, we have to use these two approaches together. The first, the Platonic way, is the most dangerous. It gets offended if it doesn't get its way. That offense can be deep. Coming to grips with humility is very hard for it. But to really build anything requires both. It requires thinking of the projects in your life as whole considerations, then filling the parts of the whole in. Along the way, we discover things we didn't know at the outset would be necessary to those projects. We have to re-examine, then, our idea of what the scope or the definition of the project actually is. We have to be, somehow, flexible.
Thanks for bringing this up. I have attempted suicide many times. I have a chronic mental illness called bi-polar and one its symptoms are depression/anxiety/isolation and on the other side mania/illusions of grandeur/wild behavior. These are totally uncontrolable unless treatment is taken. It is widely accepted to be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain requiring medication to bring into as close to a balance as possible. I take several psychotropic medications.
I am able to hide my disease out of necessity during 40 years of working but I developed a drinking and drug problem as a way to self-medicate because I was unaware of what the problem was and didn't get the proper help for it.
People need to stop fearing persons who are mentally ill or thinking of them as weak or fake. Be aware.
Congrats on your successes. Please note there is no such thing as "chemical imbalance." That was a term coined and phrased by the pharmaceutical industry in the marketing pitches to doctors. There are quite a few articles on the internet detailing the process and some scholarly articles (search: "chemical imbalance debunked" or something like that). "Chemical imbalance" basically became a soundbite.
The meds also have blackbox warnings, but each person has to figure out what is best for them, no doubt about that.
Congrats on your successes. Please note there is no such thing as "chemical imbalance." That was a term coined and phrased by the pharmaceutical industry in the marketing pitches to doctors. There are quite a few articles on the internet detailing the process and some scholarly articles (search: "chemical imbalance debunked" or something like that). "Chemical imbalance" basically became a soundbite.
The meds also have blackbox warnings, but each person has to figure out what is best for them, no doubt about that.
I also think it is important to realize that their are two different ways of approaching what it means to be an individual. Basically, it is Plato vs. Aristotle.
The Platonic way is to consider yourself sacrosanct. You assume you are right, even though you have never considered something. This is the way a child is, when they don't like broccoli even though they have never tried it. Carried to excess, you are doomed to a comeuppance.
The Aristotelian way is to experiment. This is what people do when they drink to excess the first time they drink. They overdo stuff, and then throttle back as they find they went too far the first time. Or, maybe they don't, if they have inadvertently exposed themselves to something which damages them too severely the first time they tried it.
I think, in order to build a life that works, we have to use these two approaches together. The first, the Platonic way, is the most dangerous. It gets offended if it doesn't get its way. That offense can be deep. Coming to grips with humility is very hard for it. But to really build anything requires both. It requires thinking of the projects in your life as whole considerations, then filling the parts of the whole in. Along the way, we discover things we didn't know at the outset would be necessary to those projects. We have to re-examine, then, our idea of what the scope or the definition of the project actually is. We have to be, somehow, flexible.
I think my worst moments come from experimenting, and not getting any sort of positive feedback. Negative feedback doesn't bother me that much. The lack of anything that tells me, outside of my own faith, that I am on the right track can get to me. I'm good at not caring what people say, until it gets to some point where it just seems gigantic. It's like I don't even get the wild guesses in the wisdom of the crowd thing, where the average of everybody's guess tends to equal what the actual thing being guessed at is. I can know what I know out of pure reason, and know that I am right, but, if absolutely no one is with me, I can get depressed. I won't change my mind as a result of my depression, why would I when I have the sort of evidence I do? Maybe I just regret being so different from everybody else? It's the not fitting thing that really works me. I mostly look the other way about it, but sometimes I can't.
I don't have a problem with my ego ruling what I do, and then coming to my end when I realize I haven't been who I thought I was. I check everything about myself, and don't let who I am get that out of line with who I see that I am. Yes, there are certain things about which I hold on with a steel like grip. But I have reasons for those, which my doubters mostly can't understand. I don't laugh them off. Life is about probability. You can be right, and still fail. That's just dice. And that sort of randomness can go against you many times in a row. So many that you can't outlast it. When I couldn't possibly go on, in that way, I continue to go on. I can feel stuck in the mud, but I surprise myself with my resiliency. But, like I said, I don't allow easy things, like guns, into my life. I know the danger.
Last edited by Am I a Prophet; 12-16-2019 at 03:55 PM..
There was an ex-cop turned lawyer who committed suicide because he had some incurable disease and didn't want to be a burden on his family. He went to a cemetery and blew his brains out. It was considerate of him to do it there. I think suicidal people are brave, the ones who actually do it. We all die. These folks get to choose when and how.
Me, I am too much of a coward to do it. All the options are messy and painful.
Why was it considerate to do it in a cemetary? all that means is someone visiting a grave or the groundskeeper is going to be in for the gruesome shock of their lives. What made him choose a cemetary I wonder - did he think someone would just dig a grave next to his dead body and push it in?
What made him choose a cemetary I wonder - did he think someone would just dig a grave next to his dead body and push it in?
The way I look at it is that any other place is reserved for the living and would be tarnished by this dark incident. Whereas a cemetery is already associated with death so it won't have as much of a lasting impact on people compared to say a home or hotel where someone else will need to occupy the same space after you had passed.
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