I really dont know why your post seems so upsetting for some people. You can never kill yourself without traumatizing other people. Suicide is often born from desperation & desperation is not a good pal with consideration and reason. Every suicide is selfish, no matter what method you choose. I can understand that it would be better to leave a traindriver out of it, yet I dont understand why someone who still chooses this method is marked as selfish and cowardly.
And even though if you traumatized (in the worst case) a traindriver severly, then by that logic you would never be able to kill yourself, as for most people the parents, siblings, friends etc. will be traumatized severly as well. But you wont know any of it, because you are dead, which makes suicide one of the most selfish acts you can do. I dont judge anyone who does it, heck I already tried it and probably will try again, but it is my perspective on suicide in general.
There is no "right way" of killing oneself.
It is certainly true that almost every suicide will unfairly hurt
someone. We all need to weigh up the positive of escaping suffering in our own lives
against the negative of creating hurt in those left behind. Generally, the more hurt caused to someone left behind, the greater the suffering in our own lives has to be before we take that final step. If you have no friends or family, you may set a lower threshold of suffering before deciding to suicide, seeing as the only person affected may be a police officer who enters your house and finds your body. Whereas if you had young children who would be highly traumatized, you may choose to endure more suffering in life before you decide to suicide. That's not to imply that everyone makes such rational decisions all of the time, but it is often the case.
The reason why it is often seen as wrong to unfairly involve someone else ('the victim') in your death,
whether this be by train suicide, multiple vehicle collision, jumping from an overpass or suicide-by-cop is threefold.
First is
proximity. An innocent party in any of those methods is going to witness your death up close. They are quite possibly going to see the look in your eyes and the expression on your face immediately before the moment of death. Then, they are going to see the partial or complete destruction of your body. Both of these are very traumatic, and completely unfair on that victim.
Second is
causality. The innocent party is going to feel directly responsible for causing your death, despite your own actions having been the actual root cause. This leads to intense feelings of self-blame, which again are completely undeserved.
Third is
context. Your friends and family may well have had gradual indications that you were depressed or suicidal before your actual death. They will often have a degree of forewarning, whether overt or implicit, about your upcoming suicide. The innocent party unfairly involved in your death, however, has no such warning to help them prepare nor context to help them understand and heal. They have been going about their day as normal when, suddenly and without warning, your death is forced upon them. Again, this makes trauma and PTSD more likely.
Any number of scenarios may involve different combinations of these three aspects (and this is just a rough theory, there may well be other aspects I haven't considered):
- If you jump off a building, a witness at ground level may see your death in close proximity. They will not feel that they have caused it. They will not have any context with which to understand your decision, however.
- If you live alone and commit suicide at your own home, your parents may feel that their parenting choices have led to your death. They will not have witnessed the actual death (proximity), and may have been spared seeing your body afterwards if the method was particularly gruesome. They will likely have known the context that you had seemed depressed and withdrawn in the preceding months.
- If you jump in front of a train, the driver will witness your death at close proximity. They will also feel that they caused your death, despite the reality that it is impossible to stop a train within a certain distance of a hazard. The driver will also have no existing context within which to process your death (and no, believe it or not, train drivers never become accustomed enough to these deaths to not be affected by them).
Within this framework, we see that methods involving innocent people in our deaths are the
most harmful across the most number of categories. I would also theorize that the impact upon that innocent victim is a very high one when measured against my first set of criteria (escaping suffering vs. causing hurt). It is for these two reasons that I believe such methods are both
selfish and morally
wrong.
Additionally, there are very few occasions when someone
only has the option of these such suicides available to them. What is generally more likely is that these suicides are just an easier option for them than finding a method which doesn't directly and severely traumatise others. That it is the aspect which I consider as
cowardice. This is a strong term, but there is really no other word for it. If you would rather directly traumatize an innocent victim than wait slightly longer to find or afford another method, or take slightly longer to die or feel slightly more pain compared to the train method, then you are motivated by cowardice.
There may not be any 'right way' of killing yourself, but there are certainly ways that can seem fairly objectively wrong, and this is a position I stand by firmly and will defend against those who believe otherwise.
