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One thing that needs to be understood is that, much like with pedophelia, if you suffer from suicide it is profoundly difficult to talk to anyone about it. It is truly taboo and this means that it is so much more difficult to help people with it. People wish they could just throw the therapists at all the mentally ill people and viola, no more suicide. But there is a far deeper problem going on here that we are completely ignorant of because of this taboo, because nobody is really allowed to actually talk about it, not in an honest way. Therapists won't solve this issue because it is systemic. You can try to hire more police officers, but if your society is corrupt to the core, you will not prevent criminality. You can try to catch as many child predators as you want, they will keep coming if the underlying problem here is not resolved. Stigmatization of these issues makes it impossible for us to resolve them. This is essential to understand. Our discomfort, immaturity and inability to engage with these with an open mind is what is allowing for the child abuse, for the suicide, and for all the other ills, to continue. Really, suicide in most cases is a failure of our collective responsibility. And people talking about it openly are a reminder, sometimes a very personal one, of that failure. But us making this a taboo won't suddenly make people any less hopeless.
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I don't feel comfortable to go into detail on some of the points because I don't think that's the responsible thing to do in the context of this forum. But beyond that, I want to encourage people to think about this more deeply themselves. In general, when it comes to autonomy vs harm-prevention, people tend to focus either on one or the other. Freedom, in this case human autonomy, has an essential function to evolution. It confronts us, fundamentally, with aspects of our own human nature that we, prior to the freedom, had no opportunity to truly explore. This exploration will always involve mistakes and suffering, but it will expand our consciousness. In this case it very much confronts us with what it means that there are people who want to kill themselves, and who can do so any time they want. You have to consider that in this case, the person already has the autonomy to do what they seek to do. In a way this is just a symbol for how helpless we as a society to truly prevent people from doing so. It's easier to brush it all under the rug when it is happening unofficially. If people we truly free to kill themselves, maybe we would actually have to start caring about each other more than we currently do. Maybe we would need to fundamentally change how we coexist in society. I think this is mainly a discussion about whether or not suicide ought to be taboo, even if people are not aware of it. But a taboo in many ways prevents us from looking at the situation honestly and ever being able to find a solution that will actually work. We can observe the same with child predation and incest.
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I know you guys hijacked the thread for petty and childish drama, as tends to happen, but I still want to respond to the topic at hand. I think as society becomes more sophisticated and mature, freedoms will expand. A fully conscious and mature civilization would in theory require no regulations as to what individuals can do with themselves and to each other. This cannot be fathomed because of how profoundly immature our society still is. But remember, it was not that long ago when civilizations had to mandate even the position in which you could have sex in, so that you wouldn't become a horny bastard who ruined society and got everyone enslaved by the tribe next door. The kind of freedoms we are given require of us greater responsibility, which requires greater consciousness and maturity. As far as euthanasia for mental diseases goes, I think people underestimate how significant the suffering from mental diseases can be, and how little we have to actually treat some of these conditions. The mind can create any type of hell, ideally, if we have systems to prevent individuals from simply committing suicide (which seems to be the case in the netherlands despite the attempt to smear the whole thing by the media) in situations that might be fixable, there is nothing that makes this different from someone who suffers from some physical condition that causes immeasurable pain and cannot be treated. But nonetheless, it is a complex ethical issue. I want to urge people to actually investigate the reasoning behind permitting such things with an open and mature mind. I also want to point out that these types of topics tend to evoke strong emotions in us, that make us unable to consciously engage with the substance at hand, and makes us reactive rather than open-minded. I think there is something that was given little importance in this discussion so far that in general is overlooked when it comes to controversial topics like these, and that is the value of autonomy. While it is true that certain freedoms will lead to negative consequences, it is also true that limiting freedoms means violating fundamental human autonomy and will. While harm reduction principles are important to consider, we must weigh them against the principles of liberty and dignity. Not allowing this means that you will inevitably violate someones autonomy, and not someone who was simply irrational and therefore not functionally autonomous. You will condemn such individuals to an undignified death or to a life of unbarable suffering. Or simply to prevent them from making the choice of ending their life. It's easy to ignore this, to not be aware of it, to only see the potential harms from this, which are certainly present. But if we do not recognize this reality, we will not be able to actually contend with the issue at hand. In the end, the more pressing manner is for us to find a way of living and coexisting such that we don't have so many people who feel hopeless in life, such that they want to kill themselves.
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Does no one here remember this happening?? A member committed suicide here a handful of years ago.... Taking direct responsibility for people is not something which should be done automatically nor lightly. Having and developing general empathy, within your means as best as humanly possible... that is a separate issue.
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Israel is not improving its survival. https://web.archive.org/web/20230521065233/https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2023-05-20/ty-article/.premium/israels-path-to-national-suicide/00000188-3ad4-d7fa-a1dc-badff8b80000 https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/the-crisis-of-zionism/
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Whitney Edwards replied to Basman's topic in Society, Politics, Government, Environment, Current Events
Poor thing. She must miss ya. She must have needed your help very badly. You should have coached her privately. Bpd sufferers often react badly to their environments and supportive environments make a huge difference. Sad that you let her go. Suicide rates are high in bpd. Who knows some help from you would have made a difference, hindsight. -
I am sorry this text is long and repeating itself. I just had to stream out my thoughts as they came in order to express myself genuinly. I dont have the strength or clarity to organize my thoughts better. Also I posted this in under consciousness because a lot of anxieties, thoughts, strategies to get better came from spiritualty. || I cant anymore. I feel so empty. I feel just sadness. I have no energy. I cant sleep. I did not sleep for a month (0 hours.) I don't understand what is happening. I just feel no love anymore. No desires. I don't want to cause pain to my family and friends, but I am just completly empty. I feel no desire. No real long lasting desire. Is it about loving myself? What should I love about myself? My personality? My achievements? My Body? My thoughts? I am not sure I hate anything about me. I just have no desires and energy. I have been trying to escape my mind with spirituality. I have been trying to let go of my mind. I meditated for hours. Some spiritual shools teach that desires are bad. And some cravings probably are bad for your wellbeing (like sugar). I just want to feel relaxed. I just want to feel relaxed. And to have some strength. Some vitality. If I find something I want to do. It feels empty. I just want to love something. I cant really identify with my mind. But I am far from letting go too. I just feel confused, what to do. Are desires important? Happiness seems to lie beyond desires, yet I have no energy to live. I need some desires. How do people live in caves? I feel drawn to that, but it seems like a trap. I dont have the energy and strength to be so stoic. I just cant anymore. I need to get better. I need to sleep. I need to find some desire. Am I holding onto my ego? Am I desperatly trying to identify with my desires? I don't know why I care so much. Where do I find some strength? Some purpose. For all I know a purpose is as meaningless as a desire. Yet it feels like I need one to survive. How could I live without purpose? What if I was alone on a planet? No humanity. Would there still be a purpose to be found? What does it mean to love myself. This phrase has been used a lot. What should I love? Or is it more about following my desires? Allowing myself to have desires? Love seems to be used as acceptance. Accepting myself. Accepting my "false self". Accepting my ego? Accepting my desires? Or is there no such thing as "loving yourself". Is there just love. Accepting experience. Accepting Emotions. I just want some vitality and some desire. Some pleasant experience. Something that helps me forget the sadness. Something that helps me to relax. I want to survive. 1 month without sleep. Medication has worked once but I dont want to used as it seems to prevent real healing. But i feel so weak, that I might just die, not even suicide. Just death by weakness. I would love some guidance. Is transcending the ego a trap/misunderstood? I often seem to want to escape myself. Yet desires seem so linked with an identification with the ego. Is it okay to feel identified as the ego? Is meditation too much at the moment? What does it mean to love yourself? Should I pursue my desires? Some stress seems to come from the fact that I don't feel like myself. No truly knowing what I am. Yet I have not slept for 1 month and I just want to find some strength. Should I ignore such feelings? How can I sleep? I feel anxious, sad and without purpose (and of course compeltly exhausted). My sadness seems broad. My fear more specific about not surviving, not finding happyness/ not finding peace. I feel irritated by living with my parents. Yet I have forced myself to accept it. Acceptance is king. But I cant. I am not in able to accept all just like that. My mind is too weak. I have grief and anxiety going rampant. Was this some spiritual bullshit. Trying to convince myself that my circumstances don't matter? That I can love everything. That I can apreciate everything. I had no mystical experiences. I don't know what god is. I am just a 27 yo male, very depressed, unable to sleep/relax/ let go. Does anyone think they can help me?
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Added Thought: To make it too much harder than it already is... is patronizing, since it's most often based on the assumption that people can't or don't deserve to make their own fundamental decisions about the quality and meaning of their own life and experience. If you truly care about the well-being of suicidal people (as opposed to obsessing about them being able to do it in a more "convenient" and painless way rather than killing themselves), then forbidding this is likely to backfire and cause those people to suffer more because of the sheer amount of invalidation already existing in their subjective experience. It is unlikely to stop someone from either wanting to kill themselves or actually doing it when it gets bad enough and they get desperate. IMO this is a bit different than the government not providing assisted suicide facilities because they've decided that making decisions about death isn't their jurisdiction, just because it is not within their scope of responsibilities as a government. Intentions and reasons matter, especially when people don't live in social vacuums. Often it is actually INVALIDATION, ISOLATION, and self-negation at the heart of suicidal ideation, not just "pain" alone, whether psychological or physical, even if the pain seems massive and unending in scope. It's believing that you are fundamentally alone, incurable, unreachable, not understandable, unlovable, not worthy... whether by humanity, God, Life itself, etc. Or believing that it is legitimately all for nothing.
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IMO, a bottleneck-type effect is more than enough to deter people who might be doing it more "impulsively", which comes in the form of whatever series of passes and checks that people have to go through to reach their objective. For whatever already exists for countries that allow assisted suicide, this is likely a process that involves multiple years, I imagine at least 2-3 years at the bare minimum on top of a longer waitlist, and likely multiple psychiatric and/or medical assessments. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong...) That automatically weeds out the impulsive and those without determination, leaving a very small fraction of people who were actually serious about the outcome, have likely already thought about the outcome extensively, and have had more than enough time to come to terms with what they desire. Much like anything else which is difficult in life that involves going directly against the grain. Though I don't think we collectively have much to worry about when it comes to this issue of influencing impressionable minds to commit suicide. I wouldn't say that it's making suicide more glamourous or accessible, since people who really want to do it, even if the motives are highly emotional and impulsive, will just do it anyway. Which by the way, was already a known thing with certain cults and even literary works, which triggered clusters of suicides. For example, Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther" triggered many suicides when it came out in the late 1700s. Ironically, the book was written because the author himself was trying to process his own suicidal feelings, and his art came from figuring out how to make something positive and constructive despite it all. Art is probably always going to be more glamourous (and therefore influential) than mainstream science and the government, and therefore more influential with impressionable and young minds. Should we just go back to banning art and media? (This is actually what happened with the Sorrows of Young Werther; I believe it got banned in 3 countries.) The primary influencing factor is a fundamental shift in the emotional and moral fabric of the society first and foremost, and not the government permitting people to do something that most people fundamentally DO NOT want to do anyway. Correct. I was more thinking about this in terms of citizen involvement, people like you and I, discussing these issues on the internet. Though perhaps we should also take a look at what politicians DO first, and then measure that against what they say. Talk is cheap... Decision-making without empathy usually leads to decisions that end up harming the people they are meant to protect though. I think of it as Essential Step 1... Without a deep empathy and comprehensive perspective, there is no foundation for anything good and lasting.
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If there would be a 100% chance that suicide will eliviate suffering, would you agree with it, or do you have a principled stand against it?
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Well, all these arguments are probablistic and not 100%. Its all based on what you think you know and coming from that I think its more probablistic that it will eliviate pain rather than not. But even if we go with the 50-50, 50% chance of eliviating pain is pretty high, and that is probably much more higher chance compared to waiting in real life for someone to find a cure for you - my main point with all this is that I don't think that it is irrational to commit suicide in certain contexts , if your main goal is to get rid of your suffering.
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I was only replying to him. Proof is ridiculous in these contexts. Even if you prove anything, it will not be accepted, emotionally. If n number of people apply for assisted suicide, will you accept all those n people for AS? At some point, you got to say no. I wonder what that point is. To covert your empathy to get something done in reality is a whole different ball game. Conservatives yap about having kids but block any social schemes that may take care of kids. Liberals yap about social programs but they are more interested in sending that money abroad to wage wars in fuck knows where. The problem plaguing these people is ignorance. Mere empathy is not enough. You need understanding and strong will. You need to be clear on what your guidelines. This is how you make things practical.
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So is your position, then that you are completely agnostic (you give 50-50) about whether committing suicide will eliviate ones suffering or not?
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@zurew All I am saying is that killing yourself is not the solution to end the suffering. Because I do not see how it is the solution. It could end up better or worse. If you are advocating for suicide as the solution, then the burden of proof is on you to prove that it gets better. Else it would not be a solution. I do not discount the possibility that it could better after killing yourself. But like you said, you do not have proof for it.
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Arguments like that don't work. The main premise is that you have unbearable suffering right now, and you know that if you don't end your life you will continue to suffer. Lets say it is a fact, that there is plenty of suffering after you die. That isn't an argument against suicide, because you will die either way, so by living you would just delay the suffering that will come after your death - but in this case you are not really delaying suffering because you are suffering right now. The argument could possibly work if you could establish with certainty either that guaranteed suffering awaits you after you commit suicide (but you won't suffer if you don't commit suicide ) OR you would have to establish that there is a guaranteed suffering that will await you after death (regardless if you kill yourself or not) ,but that kind of suffering will be greater than the suffering you are experiencing right now. The gamble arguments don't work unless you can demonstrate that a negative outcome is more probable than the opposite - if you can't do that , then your argument isn't an argument for anything ,because it can go either way (in this context maybe not killing yourself will for some random reason make you suffer more in the afterlife).
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Not surprisingly, this is a complicated issue. A recent research report recommended reconsidering legalization of EAS. "First, we would argue that wishes for death or suicide, even when clearly articulated by the patient to doctors or next-of-kin, and even if it represents the true will at that very moment, this desire or wish for death will likely change in many of these cases. As we have pointed out above, such an articulated death wish, can be a symptom of the disorder and may in reality convey several other possible messages, that have more to do with the patient feeling abandoned, disappointed or angry. It may also convey a wish for help to live rather than a wish for help to die. Second, we would claim that the notion of personality disorders as “untreatable” conditions and “without prospects of improvement” are based on outdated knowledge about the state of PD treatment. Today, a range of effective psychotherapeutic interventions are available for people with personality disorders in most of the countries that have so far legalized EAS. That this has seemingly escaped the attention of both legislators and expert medical communities is deeply disturbing. It may be that the current lack of effective psychotropic medication to treat personality disorders could have made many physicians and psychiatrists not specializing in PD treatment less optimistic about the prognosis in people with PDs and the prospects of receiving effective treatment in general. We urgently call for a revision of the current legislation and practice of EAS for people with personality disorders which we believe, is currently based on an inadequate understanding of these peoples’ needs and their potentials for having a life worth living." https://bpded.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40479-020-00131-9
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BPD can be a really taxing, stubborn, life-long condition. It's hard for such people to live normal well-functioning lives because their mind is so chaotic. It's no surprise that such people have a high suicide rate. It's hard for a normal person to understand the hell that BPD can be and how stubborn it is.
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I started taking it because it was prescribed by my psychiatrist after I was at the brink of suicide at a cliff. I got sent to a psych ward. In hindsight, I think I could have overcome my depression without medication because I forgot how strong thoughts and emotions feel like. I feel like I don't exist basically. But maybe that's a good thing because I see the truth in it. I stopped taking it because it made me too lethargic and it made my body feel weak and after quitting cold turkey, that problem was resolved. I had the most psychedelic visuals that engulfed my field of view after I woke up from dreams during the first 3 days quitting. And dreams got pretty vivid. I know because SSRIs act on serotonin, it also affects the pineal gland. Maybe that played a role in my first awakening somehow. Since taking and after quitting, things just look brighter and almost otherworldly now. A shift in perception most likely happened somehow. Despite the physical side effects of lethargy and weak body gone, I still feel the effects of emotional anaesthesia, poor memory and brain fog here and there but it is certainly getting better when compared to how it was like in the first days of quitting.
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I discovered I was diagnosed with this at a young age. To my understanding, PDD-NOS is a euphemism for mild autism. I was socially awkward, anxious and had weird habits that neurotypicals found strange. First impressions people made of me were fine, but the more people got to know me, the more people knew I was not normal. This lead to people distancing from me subconsciously and not talking as much. I wasn't the most entertaining or charismatic either. I wasn't exactly a looker too. Due to extreme feelings of isolation, I eventually attempted suicide at a cliff but of course survival instinct kicked in. But in the moment, I thought that the cliffs looked beautiful with the sunset. I was sort of just engrossed in the beauty of it. Maybe that was the start of my awakening? But long story short, I did get pretty suicidal knowing that I will never be normal. But these days, seeing what normies do, I'm glad to be not normal anyway.
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People just don't get how truly fucked up severe mental illness is. I don't necessarily endorse assisted suicide but I can understand the motivation.
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In my opinion, we can bring a quicker end to this debate by asking ourselves "who's decision should it be?", the person themselves or the people around them? Who gets to decide when a person dies? In a controlled environment, I think you should have the right to do it. I am for Assisted suicide, you're all free to be upset, disappointed at a persons choice but it's theirs to make not yours.
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Dodo replied to Bufo Alvarius's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
Well, in my dreams I have been Spiderman, I have been a master Jedi stronger than even Anakin/Luke/Yoda, I have jumped immeasurable distances, or even flying. In a dream if I hurt someone, in a flash they can turn into something else or the dream can change, there is never such inconsistency in waking. If I hurt someone in waking, I have to live with that, correct? Or face consequences, I can't just wake up and be done with it. Unless suicide, but they say that's not cool bro. Maybe dream = fantasy, but waking = mathematical fantasy, making it real at its core. 1 unit +1 unit will be 2 units. Not in dreams though. I recently had a dream where I lift a cushion and it just spawns another cushion in its place for me to lift. That breaks maths hard! Its not real. -
Hmm, didn't see anyone recommending something that could actually help. Don't expect it to be easy because life is not, but if you want to have hope in life and improve your mental health - figure out who you are (existentialy), what life is (metaphysically), and how to reach enlightenment. Because you are not doing that of course you are depressed; you are wasting your life stuck in the matrix, and the matrix is evil. Everyone is depressed to varying degrees, you are probably simply more deeply in touch with it. Life is suffering, but there is a way out. Suicide doesn't help, because you die, stay a bit on the other side and reincarnate into the same shithole again. What works is spiritual practices. Everything else is playing around with shadows until you die and repeat. I'm not treating you with kiddy gloves here, so hopefully you are mature enough for it.
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So suicide is the solution? And yes, the human body is a deterministic system. We can study the inside out of it. There is a solution.