"Committed suicide" has been updated to "completed suicide".
"Die by suicide" is a preferable term I say; "complete" implies that somehow not killing yourself is somehow "incomplete" in some way. I concern that when we drag in words like "complete" here, we risk treading into all-or-nothing thinking, in a matter where words like "complete" really don't even begin to describe things here. Nothing needs to be "complete".
told me that some people are just wired to be sad
This is a wildly simplistic idea. What even defines "sad"? I can understand 15-year old you accepting this idea at face value, but this notion is in effect a thought-terminating cliché. It refuses to answer this key question:
what makes people sad? I'd argue that defeatism plays some role in it; in tandem with environmental experiences and current situations and perceptions of available options, of course. I don't mean to say that "suicide is defeatism is mindset therefore people just thunk it up", absolutely not, I do emphasize the environmental factors (as I have in our lovely talks, haha ^^) but I just push against this notion itself—it's SUPER easy to make with
no evidence, and it can easily as a
stop for analysis of suicide factors rather than just one among many possibilities.
"Some people are just wired to be sad" has a propagandistic power to it. Many people who care naught for what you and I feel would be very happy to make such a statement. But many people who have died by suicide DO NOT fit that "wired to be sad" cookiecutter mold that this kind of statement paints. - There's this one video that shows these clips of people laughing and smiling, and then adds at the end that they all died by suicide. People are too varied in experiences and emotional ways of being to say "some are just sad because, well, that's just how it is". It's circular reasoning; what I like to call a logical circlejerk.
- Some people are sad
- Why?
- Because…
- Why?
- Because…
- …they're just wired like that.
This kind of
internalizing explanation COMPLETELY disregards the REAL factors of the ENVIRONMENT upon the suicidal person—the way the humans in their interact with them, the way those people perceive pain, the hobbies they have in their life, the nature of their daily activities/work/study or other such personally involving engagements, and even simple stuff like what their days look like for them, and the effects of how that impacts their feelings and conditionings.
That psychologist's statement is utterly remarkable—it punchingly encapsulates the sentiment that has really cursed a lot of suicide perception in modern times: that suicide is merely the machinations of some "messed up" individuals, who were "messed up" not through any external interaction or experience, but simply "naturally", because "they are just wired like that". Well, the "wires" in question are actually plastic, constantly
rewiring, constantly changing, constantly
reforming alongside environmental conditions—and they interplay with social arrangements, structures, connections—it's a web of systemic play at hand, and to isolate one single node (the brain itself) and to universally blame it for everything, is a mistake of dogmatic proportions.
Of course neurobiology IS a thing; but this gives zero license to deny environmental factors.
Environmental factors directly influence how a person's pain plays out in the courses of not just their own body and brain but in the relationships close to them too, their experience in the systems their life directly touches, and the kinds of ideas that their experiences may intensify or weaken.
This means that if immediate environments and experiences can influence someone's feels and perspectives and life quality, that changes in environment can change life too. Not only that, but they change how a person's pains or tendencies
express and process as well.
sometimes theres not really a specific trigger, you just hit your breaking point, and you are done, mental illnesses tend to slowly eat away at you, so it feels like the process of dying has started long before you are actually dead
Inigo:
He's dead, he can't talk.
Miracle Max:
Woo hoo-hoo, looks who knows so much, huh? Well, it just so happens that you're friend here is only "mostly dead." There's a big difference between "mostly dead" and "all dead." Please, open his mouth. [Inigo opens
Wesley's mouth, so that Miracle Max can put the bellows in] Now, "mostly dead", is slightly alive. [Starts pumping air through the bellows] Now, "all dead"...well, with "all dead", there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo:
What's that?
Miracle Max:
Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
—
The Princess Bride
I think this entire narrative of trying to define "what is totally damning and what is not" is ultimately trying to pin down perceptions that are fundamentally subjective, and therefore cannot be easily defined.
its sad when people wish that they couldve done more, sentiments like this reinforce the idea that actually sometimes suicide is just because someone is ill and their brain got tired of it, just like how a terminally ill persons heart gets tired and stops beating
But suicide is a complex phenomenon; and moreover, death by terminal physical illness is more than that as well. The heart stopping is the endpoint, not the cause. The heart does not "get tired", it has its automatic function forcibly disturbed, with no way to take it differently, because it's a beating heart, not a brain.
The brain is nowhere near as simply definable as a "instrument that pumps blood", like the heart. When it comes to mechanical complexity, the brain is worlds apart from the heart. This, I feel, discredits the analogy of the "organ gets tired" even more.
It also blames the heart/brain itself when the problem
is necessarily outside of it. The heart does not just magically stop beating or "get tired"—this means that regulating and compensating
environmental presence is either depriving or violating, which would mean the presence or forcible arrival of disturbance outside of it. It is easy to say "this brain is fucked up and that's why the person is unhappy—there's a kink in the machinery, making it sad", but this fundamentally ignores how the brain is not like a cake where you pour in the right balance of chemicals, but far more like a plant which interacts with its environment and changes its expression based on external conditions.
I want to carefully define this part as well—"you are done" I interpret as someone saying "fuck this, I'm done", as in "I'm done with this", rather than "I'm done for". I think even the language we use and how it interplays with our feelings and worldviews is a notable part.
I'm not really saying that "XYZ way of interpreting is bad"; I'm just trying to draw cause–and–effect factor analyses here, as opposed to moralizing and saying "that way of doing it is bad, this way is good"—I just want to illustrate the various ways that
can be done, and how our own subjective frames can affect how we handle and perceive such issues as well.
Sincerely wishing you well in all things of life hypoxia
.
