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Re: Follow-up

Posted by boB on April 15, 2000, at 20:27:21

In reply to Follow-up, posted by In Need on April 15, 2000, at 17:01:33

I suppose boB will never publicly admit to having suicidal thoughts, though if he doesn't maybe he can't speak with authority on this subject. So if you can forgive my odd style of obfustication, i will weigh in on the subjet.

I don't mean to say no to what anyone else says to you here, though I sense the meaningful part to you is the concern people express as much as it is the content of the advice. If we were walking alone down the street, I would frankly suggest that the pmeds are part of the problem. On the other hand, I never admit to using illegal meds, but have said before on this board that "my friends do it." I have noticed some of their darkest hours are in times when they cannot get access to their favorite outlaw medication aka MaryJ, though sometimes after a few days or weeks without, they tend to stablize. (Jail inmates tend to go through that same cycle, if they are accustomed to using weed as a mood stabilizer.)

I agree with you that it is your choice to live or die. Some cite the law regarding this, but the law is different in each state, and different if your are in Washington D.C. or a national park or forest. I know how to cause my death by several means. The reason I live is because I choose to, and because it is a habit that I will have to give up soon enough anyway. I bet when I do die, it might be an unwelcome and perhaps painful suprise.


Me or somebody I know very well has spent some time talking to well-meaning young volunteers at suicide hotlines. Mostly they have a book of social services so they can send the caller somewhere else. The services are often of dubious value, and it seems to me they do not lead to any meaningful personal attachments of the sort that tend to discourage suicide. The hot line staffs often have some training in how to seem empathetic. Many of them though, if they met me on the street, would likely not like me at all, and would especially resent how little I appreciate the cultural things that are important to them. The last place I would go if I were feeling suicidal would be an emergency room or a psych clinic, where people would use my condition as a way of reinforcing their ideas about science, medicine and mental health.


If a person chooses to die, it might make a lot of people greive. It adds to the gloominess that we reflect when we feel depressed, and ending our own individual life will do little to change the greater web of life of which we are a part.

I am not a big fan of this "organic" model of "mental disease." To be sure, many of the symptoms, such as depression and bipolar mood swings can be observed as organic changes, but reading your post and many others here tends to reinforce what intuitively seems to me to be true. I think many of us feel low because we are sensitive, and because we try to hold as true ideas that are contradictory. Our civilization tends to condemn that way of seeing things and even our national constitution implys that we should persue happiness. I am not of that mindset.

If the meds help you to deal with the suffering you see around you, and if they don't reinforce your suicidal ideas, I would not spend much time trying to redirect you. There is plenty on this board pro and con that can help explain this in other ways. But my view is that SSRI's increase levels of reinforcing neurochemicals, and if the neurological circuits in your mind see the dark side of this world and want to react, SSRI's might, i think, reinforce your prefered path of action.

Me, when I am really down, I don't want to change my mood. I want to let it be. I more want people to stop telling me that I should be up when I am pretty certain I am down for a reason. To be honest, telling me I am down because I am bipolar or because depression is a disease is like calling me ignorant and saying I don't have enought sense to have the appropriate feelings in reaction to events in my society. It can be very disturbing to face the emptiness of our society, and it can be even more difficult to admit how wrong people in authority can be, especially well meaning people such as psychiatric doctors. I see it as a farce for people to tell me about glasses being half full or half empty when my world is dying of thirst and only a chosen few even have a glass.

Anyway, the best funerals are ones where we can laugh and cry alike, and suicide funerals are usually not that way. With a lifelong effort, you might be able to better control the last thing these cynical selfserving friends and family say about you.

Here are two things that gave me some cheer today:
1. The stock markets cataclysmic collapse, dampening the national mood of glee surounding consumer culture.
2. The niavette of the Washington D.C. police, allowing themselves to be drawn into reactionary tactics against anti-world-bank protesters that will only help our cause.

p.s. Chronic pot use can clog your lungs and can cause a very uncomfortable death by emphasema.

p.s.s. If your are looking for purpose in life, you are welcome in the army I am a member of, which is fighting a multi-millenial war to preserve the web of life and to resist the notion that humans are superior. Knowing that we will not likely win the war in our life time sometimes makes our sacrifices a little easier to offer.

 

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