Do you think some suicidal attempts are less justified than others?
 

I don’t want to open a whole fan of psychiatrically-laced worms with this thread here but I feel like it’s something that’s worth talking about in some capacity. It goes without saying that in a purely pragmatic sense at least there’s a difference between a 21-year-old lad who contemplates overdosing ‘just because’ his girlfriend broke up with him and someone of perhaps a similar age or a bit older who wants to violently end it in connection with 15 years of internal trauma, corresponding c.-P.T.S.D., sustained and unrelenting narcissistic abuse, a young daughter who died suddenly with a certain degree of endogenous depression running in the background (at the more extreme end). Would you sympathise with the case of the latter person (or cases in general in a similar pragmatic ilk) more-so than the first if a suicide attempt (or actual fatality) came about in both instances or would you humbly-pride yourself on having an equal amount of sympathy for both instances?

(C.F.H. = cries for help.)

And I guess “severe personal trauma” could be better-construed as “grave/trying personal circumstances” (including a level of financial hardship - important in this era of inflation - that would make someone go “what’s the point?” in a way sympathetically-observable to even someone quite insensitive to the true core).

No, if someone even seriously considers suicide, it shouldn’t be trivialised even if we don’t think the reason is ‘good enough’ if someone considers suicide or attempts suicide, there’s a reason behind it, one persons insignificant can be somebody else world-ending, there’s no place for a sympathy scale when it comes to things like this

I'll feel sorry for most suicidal people, unless they're a Paedophile.

The thing is a lot of suicide ‘attempts’ are in reality just cries for help (as we all know) and while at least a certain degree of sympathy just comes naturally to most people with a decent emotional compass there is kind of the issue of those attention cries (I don’t mean that nearly as bluntly as it comes across on paper) draining already-overstretched hospital resources (including beds) and in a clinical sense that could give rise to the question of (knowing the patient’s intent) prioritising more definitive, actual attempts over minuscule paracetamol overdoses that the person obviously knows won’t even remotely come close to unearthing them when it comes to something purely-practical like allocating hospital beds in a typical NHS hospital. That’s one of the situations where equal doses of sympathy all-round might become kind of messy.

In response to Mock’s point about not giving certified child molesters the time of day in this sort of context I do hear it (of course) but there’s often so much going on in the mental lives of people who indulge in those perverse acts (for which per se there obviously isn’t much justification) that even then it’s hard to definitively-assume. There are just too many shades of grey (in my opinion) when it comes to deciding who to allocate any kind of sympathy at all (or not) to but then I guess that depends on how much you inherently value the concept of life itself and the fundamental right everyone has (or, again, not) to go when they go out of natural causes alone and not murder or a desperate way out. It’s a tricky one.

Lots of cry’s for helps actually leads to death,
People who take an overdose of paracetamol who are initially saved only to die of organ failure days later.

A friends son who was 21 and had a child with a girl who cheated on him, hung himself
And I know of another who’s relationship ended he hung himself from his mums loft hatch and his mum found him

I used to think suicide was a selfish act but it not because it’s hard wired into a person

Oh my viewpoint is definitely more of a black and white one when it comes to convicted child molesters.

Ironically I can feel some form of sympathy for murderers, as normally they have been dealt a bad hand that can take them down the path that they go down.

Of course it doesn't justify their crimes, but I do hold the belief that anyone can kill if pushed hard enough, so I could still maybe see some humanity left in a murderer that might make me feel a slight sympathy towards them if one of them were to commit suicide, and they had a sympathetic past.

They sound like horrible scenarios.

I honestly think it's a shame that these types of people see suicide as their only escape from their pain, when society should be doing all it can to show that's not the case.

That’s a good point, to be fair.

You will never truly know the extant of what goes on in a person's mind

"justified" is an odd word to use to comment on a persons pain and hopelessness and the validity of it

Yeah, this was what I was struggling with.

I have so many conflicting feelings on people who take their own lives - like other's have said my first instinct is it is a selfish act but then when you think about it, in some ways its such a hopeless and almost brave thing to do. I don't think anyone will ever understand someone's thought processes about ending their life unless you are ever at that point yourself.

One of my colleagues lost a friend last week through suicide - he has been on a 3 day bender and then hung himself....he left behind 2 little boys. Those boys now have to face a life without their daddy and also are higher risk to also suffer from similar mental health issues from the trauma.

That's very sad Annie.

I lost my childhood best friend to suicide years ago when I was 18, she suffered with Depression throughout her teenage years, I do often wonder had she waited a few years would things have gotten better for her, was it to do with being a teenager maybe because most of us struggle a bit at least through puberty but maybe she wouldn't have either and it must be such a bleak feeling to think you're never going to get out the other side of it. She wasn't a selfish person or an attention seeker

The fact that a lot of people choose to gossip about people obviously going through hell than doing anything along the lines of actually trying to help them doesn’t help, either. Going through all that is one thing but having it reiterated on a daily basis that more people than not are likely to judge and talk about you for laughs and juicy tidbits only increases that feeling of helplessness. If only people like that knew were to just leave it if they can’t be productive and try helping the person if they need help.

Sorry to hear about your childhood friend, by the way, Niamh. Did you allow yourself to go through a complicated grieving process for her (that might’ve needed therapy) or did you feel like you just had to take it in its stride because of the stigma surrounding the way she died?

I didn't feel any stigma around how she died actually, I had a great support system around me with my own family and other close friends, there was no shame and no closed-ness in talking about it. She left a letter for me actually which I was so glad of, I think I would have found it a lot harder to get through and reconcile in my head if she hadn't at least said good bye to me and tried to explain a bit.

I’m glad you had a good support system around you. Sadly though a lot of people are surrounded by so much gossip and overall toxicity that they can’t even talk about the person without feeling shamed or that they’re not really allowed to grieve for them because of the fact that they chose to end it. There was an experience involving someone very close to me last year (who thankfully stayed alive through it all and got well) that I’ll never forget, not for as long as I live. The gossip surrounding them was absolutely disgusting (and also unprofessional). From what I heard one or two people involved in that situation (one of whom funnily enough worked for the NHS at one point) should’ve absolutely been sacked but because of the way society enables toxicity and gossip they pretty much got away with it.

I actually don’t disagree with the bit about murder. I do feel like if a good half of people were confronted with the person who murdered their best friend or raped a family member (to use two examples that would even remotely-warrant such extreme measures) and a gun was concurrently-present (and the assurance that they wouldn’t get sent down guaranteed) the hardened criminal wouldn’t make it out alive. I’m not sure I’d condone the act of murder per se under any circumstances (not that my opinion would hold much weight in the course of justice either way) but in those circumstances I’d definitely be able to sympathise with them if they attempted suicide. But that’s something I’d kind of strive to do anyway. I know my thread title (specifically the word “justified”) kind of implies a black-and-white approach to sympathy (I should’ve picked a better turn-of-phrase, t.b.f.) but I dunno. I’m just a bit cautious about writing off entire groups of people when it comes to suicide considering that paedophilic acts are often the result of mental illness (bipolar mania and also certain types of schizophrenia) and things like that can often result in impulsive attempts at suicide so there’s just stuff like that to think about in the grey area. It’s a bit like people with certain depressive psychoses drowning themselves and their families under the delusional belief that they’d be putting not just themselves but their loved ones as well out of their misery and news stories making them sound like remorseless monsters when really they’re just very, very ill. It just breaks my heart that people with the most severe forms of mental illness aren’t always given the sympathy and support they need if they comment heinous actions (however unjustifiable in and of themselves per se) as a direct result of their illness. In theory I’d love to be able to say people who sexually-abuse children shouldn’t be sympathised with at any costs if they don’t have acute mental health issues at play (and they do make me sick regardless) but I just feel like it’s a tricky call to make in an absolute sense.

(A congrats is in order if you managed to make it through that wall of text.)

Don't worry I've read it all.:laugh:

Tbh most of these people that commit these heinous crimes are probably mentally ill in one form or another, it's just for me personally I just can't see a convicted Paedophile as a Human Being, it's my biggest mental block when it comes to criminal activity.

You make very good threads and are a credit to the forum. Thought provoking ones.

No I don't feel it is selfish. Someone who is at that stage isn't thinking rationally, most likely psychotic and can't see the wood through the trees.

Rather than quoting people, I will pick out a couple of points from this thread.

People are not hard wired to commit suicide. To say so is just worded wrong, people can rather have a family history, genetics which might make them more likely to suffer with Z illness which might increase the risk... furthermore, trauma might result in someone to have suicidal ideation or be more dispositioned to have those thoughts because of former point I've just made. The trauma may just be the straw that broke the camel's back.

As for pedophilic. This is an illness just like any other. Is it justified, 1000% no. Do I have sympathy, to a degree, yes. It should be treated as should any other illness. People often forget this and they're not viewed in the same light

Thanks for the thread-compliment, Tom. I appreciate that.

I mean I don’t respect people who say “I’ve tried to kill myself 11 times” I mean come on is it really that hard. If I really wanted to kill myself it would be done in one go, it be so easy.

I think people with borderline personality disorder (at least the more acting-out types) are notorious for a long thread of suicide attempts and I can sympathise there because it’s usually the expression of the illness (which is obviously serious) even if the intent’s not-too-serious. But in general I do know what you mean.

Speaking of social/sexual taboo in connection with mental illness there’s actually a type of OCD marked by sexual obsessions, otherwise as benign as any other subset of the illness (and only a risk to the sufferer - they’re actually less likely than the average person to ever engage in any kind of activity that would put someone else at risk) but because of the stigma associated with it and the fact that a lot of actual doctors aren’t taught about the non-stereotypical subtypes of OCD they kind of run the risk of being mislabelled as sex. offenders and subject to all kinds of unnecessary and demoralising risk assessments when in reality they’re as liable to the same treatment as someone with cleaning/symmetry-related OCD. I don’t know the suicide rates per exact subtype but I imagine the more misunderstood subtypes have a higher risk because they just don’t get the help they need more times than not.