Interesting conversation---especially since using "SI" can refer to "survival instinct" OR "suicidal ideation," and while it's usually clear from context which one is intended, there may be situations where one acronym is mistaken for the other.
Obviously, people overcome survival instinct: Several good examples above, such as parental instinct overcoming one's own fear for their life. Various cultural forms of suicide, such as religious or political convictions, which prove that not all suicides are the result of "chemical imbalances in the brain," but that some people believe there are things worth dying for. And, of course, the fact that many commit suicide every day.
For myself at least, I don't consider it a lack of courage to not ctb. Just to re-emphasize,
I am speaking here only for myself. I think it's, on balance, a dissipation of the desire to do so. If I had the means in my hand right now, I would not do it. I came on here, read other people's stories and feelings, barfed out my own feelings, and now I don't want to. Not yet.
(Makes my handle kind of ironic. I still want to change it "Horrifyingly Gruesome." I wish I could find that article that, while not endorsing this forum, did not condemn it either. It was remarkably objective, which may be why it's no longer on the Internet.)
If I had the means in my hand right now and I did wish to die, I still don't think that would be a lack of courage. It might be survival instinct. Or second thoughts. Or facing the enormity of the decision. There are very few such irreversible decisions in life. I just don't see courage or bravery as having anything to do with it one way or the other.
I had a user tell me that it was my survival instinct talking when I wrote something about the different considerations involved in making this decision. And several people agreed with them. After that I saw several other comments/posts where people mentioned their survival instinct affecting their ability to move forward with suicide.
Which is what led me to make this post, because I think it is harmful to lump any thoughts or feelings that conflict with committing suicide into "survival instinct." Because there is an attitude that survival instinct is just something that needs to be overpowered and overcome.
The entire point I wanted to make is that, if you are nowhere near an eminent threat to your survival, and you are having second thoughts about committing suicide and mixed feelings about it, those are your actual thoughts and feelings. They are not something to be overcome, they are to be listened to and considered
Basically, I agree with this. Second thoughts are worth exploring. When I'm feeling suicidal, I feel lethargic and helpless. (Again,
I am speaking here only for myself.) On balance, I would rather not feel that way. I just don't seem to have any choice in the matter of when those feelings overtake me and I no longer see any point in continuing to hope when my hopes have continually failed throughout my life. I'm a financial burden on my ex, and there isn't anyone who would care if I vanished into a puff of smoke. All of that is still true. None of it has become any less true just because I don't feel the desire to end my life right now. Those feelings have come and gone since I was probably about 12 years old, which logically gives me some pause because if I can rid myself of the feelings, the only reason to do it would be to prevent them from coming back.
I suppose at some point, the feelings would have to last long enough that I was too exhausted by them to keep going. I would estimate the feelings have lasted anywhere from a few days to a few months. I suppose if I'd had NO second thoughts I would not have relocated this forum, because I know talking about it is likely to talk me back off the proverbial ledge. (Although the method I had planned probably wouldn't have worked, which I think should also be a careful consideration before going through with it.)
I think where it gets tricky is that many people want to die and take actions to kill themselves, but somehow they always sabotage their own attempts. For example, they call friends and family in the last moment, who then come and save them, or they make very apparent and easy-to-avoid errors when they plan their attempt. Perhaps these kinds of things don't fit the strict definition of survival instinct, but they are still built-in, subconscious, instinctive mechanisms that increase the chance of our survival.
We can even consider broader behaviours that increase the chance of our survival, like procrastination, lying in bed depressed, or spending an endless amount of time on planning an attempt but never actually taking action. I see why these things are hard to view as forms of survival instinct, yet we often default to these behaviours and tend to gravitate toward anything that avoids or postpones death.
I think many people here want to die but face internal resistance that makes it impossible to act on their desires. When this happens, they just use 'survival instinct' as a blanket term for what they're experiencing.
I agree, and I hate it when therapists refer to this as a "cry for help." Maybe it is for some people, I don't know. But it's sounds so demeaning, it just pisses me right off.
There's definitely some truth for me that when I'm suicidally depressed, I don't have the energy to get up and do anything about it.
I think these things are worth examining and shouldn't be hand-waved away as a "cry for help." Same with self-harm. When I self-harm, it is not a "cry for help," it's a way of dampening my desire to die. I don't know why it works, but it does. I guess in those moments, I'm so filled with self-hatred that "punishing myself" seems like enough for awhile.
I definitely think survival instinct is real, and that recoiling from an imminent threat of death is hard-wired into most of us. But there are other reasons people want to die besides depression. As my mother got older and lost the capacity to do the things she enjoyed, she lost her will to live. She would never have ctb, for the same reason I never would have while she was still alive. We had the other one's feelings to consider. A few months before she died, I had a dream (which I no longer have any memory of) in which I believe I saw the afterlife. I've always been agnostic about an afterlife. I've believed in a Divine Mystery (probably not an anthropomorphized invisible human), but the existence of God doesn't logically mean there is life after death any more than I had life before birth. (People think I'm off-my-rocker when I say this, as though the only reason to believe in some Divine Anthropomorphized Mystery is the promise of living in HappyLand after death. Or a threat to keep you keep you on the straight and narrow to avoid hell, both of which I think are such....human-limited reasons....)
But this dream was extremely vivid and I knew upon waking that I had to relay every detail to my mother. I believe I was given this dream as a gift for her, to tell her not to be afraid to die, that this life isn't all there is. She died peacefully in her sleep a few months later, and I'd like to think that dream helped ease her fear of dying. Because she was ready to go by then. She was very old. She was in remarkably good health for her age, but arthritis and blindness were preventing her from doing the things she loved to. It gives me more peace than I can express that I know she was ready, and that her death investigation determined the cause as sudden massive heart failure. The scene suggested she had likely fallen asleep before she died, within half an hour of my last conversation with her.
I realize this probably sounds bananas to many people here to don't believe in any sort of deity or afterlife at all, maybe even
dread the possibility of an afterlife (the way I dread the thought of reincarnation---once was enough!). But this is a
speaking only for myself post.
If it weren't for me, or if I had died of some other cause before she did, I believe Mom would have taken her own life.
She was super-pissed that I couldn't promise her there would be no autopsy.
"I'm 85 years old! Don't let them cut me open to tell you the cause of death was life!"
"I don't make that choice, Mom. If you're not in the hospital, it will be up to law enforcement and the coroner."
"Why?? When I'm gone, all the decisions are yours!"
"Well, because if it's unattended, they want to make sure I didn't murder you or something."
"You're not going to murder me!"
"I know that , you know that, but the cops don't know that."
Fortunately, the coroner followed her wishes, given that dying peacefully in sleep runs in my family. And maybe I
would prefer to go that way. I'm glad it's in my genes!
But if I get to be 85, or 75, or 65, or next week, and I can no longer do anything that gives me joy in life, I have no idea if a survival instinct would make it difficult to end it myself at that point. I think it's beyond cruel that we force people and their loved ones to often suffer through the entire natural dying process.
But barring a situation like that, I believe I should think long and hard before making the decision to end my life. Courage has nothing to do it for me. "Cries for help" have nothing to do with it for me. Honestly, I believe a lot more people experience suicidal desires at some point in their lives and many just aren't honest about it because it's socially unacceptable---diagnosable, less-than, "crazy"---to acknowledge such feelings. Not much help for someone like me who can restore my equilibrium by honestly considering it. Someday, the answer may be "yes," but until now, openly discussing it without someone clutching their pearls and telling me, "It takes more courage to live!"
has resulted in a "Not right now."
Come to think of it, maybe that's my aversion to the idea that it takes courage to ctb. Because the flip side of that is: "Oh, but it take more courage to live!"
And I hate such platitudes about such an important decision.
