Musings on suicide -- and book recommendations?

[ThankYouNYT]

Winnicott said that whenever someone told him they wanted to kill themselves, he never tried to dissuade them, he just tried to ensure they were doing it for the right reasons.

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Freud described one version of what I am calling the wish to give up as the death instinct: 'We have been led to distinguish two kinds of instincts,' he wrote in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 'those which seek to lead what is living to death, and others, the sexual instincts, which are perpetually attempting and achieving a renewal of life.'

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The death instinct, I want to suggest, was Freud's way of broaching the part of the self that wants, at its most extreme, less life rather than more life; the part of the self that wants to give up, to give up on, perpetually attempting and achieving a renewal of life. And in this version, once again, giving up is deemed to be wholly destructive; as though believing that life is not worth living can only be destructive, as opposed to being plausible or convincing, or realistic, or even compelling. Freud can be seen to be delegating to a so-called instinct the part of oneself that loves, that desires, giving up; and by calling it an instinct – by giving it a quasi-biological status – he avoids simply saying that there is a part of ourselves that has very good, convincing, alluring reasons to give up on life and that often doesn't really want to go on living.

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Giving up, which is in everybody's repertoire, should be taught in schools. We need to wonder what giving up would look like, would sound like, if suicide was not the paradigm, or the only paradigm, of giving up, and if it was not taken for granted in some quasi-religious sense that life is essentially worth living. We are torturing people when we force people whose life is torture to go on living.

Just something I read recently here. Does anyone know any good histories of suicide and any novels that explore it?

 

[Onkyo74893]

Since I fell into deep depression almost a year ago, I've become morbidly obsessed with looking up celebrity suicides, as well as suicides in general. And how old they were when they gave up on life. One that I especially relate to is Anthony Bourdain. He was in my age group when he ended his life. He appeared to have enjoyed a very good life. He abused a wide range of recreational drugs when he was younger. As I did. Yet he must have been severely depressed. As I am.

 

[Seiba]

I don't really read suicide books but I have one I haven't bothered reading if you're interested. Culture, Suicide, and the Human Condition by Marja-Liisa is the name. I got it off of libgen and not physical copy.