I just found out a Friend of mine commited suicide...

We weren't best friends or anything, but we did hang out on occasion...I knew he had money problems, was struggling, had heard from someone else that he was about to be jailed because he had fallen behind on his child support payments, I never asked him, so I can't confirm it. I've never had one of my friends die so it feels kinda surreal. Obviously I feel bad for him and his family/close friends, but this is my first taste, I guess you could say, of an unexpected death. I had hung out with him a couple of weeks ago, just playing xbox and stuff...he didn't seem any different...man, this is so wierd.

 

I'm sorry about your friend.

 

I still think about the people I knew who committed suicide years later. Two I knew only briefly, another was the partner of a long term friend. It is a sadness different to other deaths and brings all kinds of feelings of responsibility even as your brain tells you that you don't have them.

 

I'm very sorry for your loss.

 

Things do get better, and teacake is on the money. Wishing you good days ahead.

 

That is terrible.

Just do yourself a favor and never try to understand his decision, or ask yourself what you could have done differently. I lost a friend as well. And at the moment of suicide, it makes only sense to that one person. And there is nothing you could have done differently. Most of the time, the warning signs are extremely subtle, if any. You can have a guy who complains all the time about his life but never ever thinks about suicide, and you can have a guy who is absolutely cheery and hanging out with you, and an hour later, jumps off a building.

 

Yeah, I keep thinking about the last couple of times I saw him, like maybe I should have noticed something, and at least could have talked to one of his closer friends about it, (or him), I also keep thinking or try to Imagine what he must have been feeling right at the end, He managed to get to the top of a parking garage at night and Jump off, what was going through his head as he stood on the edge?

 

As I said, do not do that, please, for your own sake.

 

I've gotten some good out of doing that though, thinking about what I could have done. It's a regret I have of not speaking to the last person I knew who suicided, a teenager. I wanted to say something positive to her but I was in a hurry and didn't and that has really upset me over the years. Not that the positive thing was in any way related to her being vulnerable, I had no idea she was suicidal or depressed or anything like that, it's just that my last impulse towards a person (who I barely knew) was a positive one and would have been nice to hear, I didn't go through with it, and then the death.

What I have gotten out of that is to act on positive impulses. It's painful to have this failure on my part come to mind which it does regularly but it's a prodding to just go ahead, say that positive thing even if you don't know someone well. Or make that phone call, or buy someone a cookie to take back to the office or.. really anything that your brain goes "I should/could do that" but shyness or laziness or apathy just stops you from doing. So though I do not think rationally that my actions would have prevented this suicide I do think I can take away from my experience a commitment to be nicer to people and act on my thoughts and impulses to do that.

 

thanks for the advice/thoughts everyone...JarodRussell...I get what you are saying, it's a slippery slope and for some I could see it become obsessive, possibly in the most extreme circumstances...event an attempt at emulation...but you are right, I can never know exactly how he was seeing the world, and what he felt at the end. Teacake, thanks for the story...it made me think a little too...life is of indeterminate length, why not do those little extra courtesies for others? why not do things here and there and complain a little less? maybe on a societal scale it will make no difference, but at least you did what you could to make the world a little more pleasant.

 

God.. this afternoon I found out that a woman I had been friendly with on and off over the years has recently suicided, leaving two very young children. It is so shocking and sad and angering.. I got angry hearing about it because I remembered another woman I knew in the same area who spent 10 years fighting cancer before she died and suddenly I was so angry that someone else could just give up but then I thought No. No. You don't know what she was fighting, you have no idea.

Weirdly she passed through my mind this morning because the last time I had coffee with her there was one element she was talking about in her life that I was quite jealous of and it just came up again in my head this morning, literally "she was certainly lucky with that, I wish I had that".. and of course I'm totally humbled now and determined to be grateful and appreciate and enjoy every single thing I do have.

What's hard to is your memories of a person are often vital and alive, I remember this woman as just FULL of energy and vivaciousness and it's hard to reconcile it with what has happened.

 

{{{{{Tribble puncher}}}}} I'm very sorry.
Quite teh same happened to me some 5 years ago when a colleague/friend shot himself dead after he lost the major-elections and his wife had an affair with the neighbour (both his own fault, though! He treated his wife like a slave and was an annoying know-it-all who affronted everyone).
When I heard it first, I thought it a very bad joke. But when I had learned that it was true, and I started to think about it I found it was indeed completely in character. He was the kind of person who never lookes for an alternative. If they come to a mountain they don't search for a way around it but run headfirst against it until they have made a tunnel.

I think that your friend was in a similar frame of mind. The idea of talking to his friends didn't even occur to him. All he could see was his huge problems as he was too close to look around them. He was too overwhelmed to look for an alternative route (He could for example have done social service work or community work instead of going to prison).


With all these suicides I wonder - could it be that people nowadays have difficulties to handle problems? I mean, just look at the divorce rates: the minute couples encounter difficulties, they file a divorce. At my time a divorce was not as easy to get and people were forced to stay together and work their problems out.
All these suicides seem to me to be of a similar nature: people don't have the ability anymore to tackle problems and they run away.
Maybe it's our fault and the fault of our parents: we have always made life easy for the younger generation, we wanted them to have a better life than we had and so they never got the proper fighting training that's so essential in life.

 

That would depend on whether the rate of suicide is any higher than the past. This article focuses on baby boomers and the sharp increase among them. I don;t know if there are increasing trends in other groups, though. Perhaps, another issue beyond economic factors would be an increasingly isolated existence in the first world and over reliance on the internet as a substitute for physical contact which our primate ancestors and ourselves require?

Silly me, forgot to link the article http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/health/suicide-rate-rises-sharply-in-us.html?_r=0

 

The bit about the isolation is an excellent point. I'm in a very similar situation: I have contacts to colleagues and to the staff at the shops I frequent but my close friends (in the sense of soul mates) are distributed over the whole globe. Life nowadays involves following the jobs. We all have to be nomadic but contrary to real nomades, our tribes get scattered all the time.
The internet is both a chance to stay in contact with faraway people and a risk to lose contact to the immediate surroundings, I think.

 

This is really a horrible thing to say. People have mental health issues, the whole point of my last post was that we don't know what people are up against. Run away? You think people just off themselves because they are lazy? People struggle with mental health issues for years, decades.. sometimes it gets too much for whatever reason.

Unless you are close to a person you probably aren't going to know just how hard they struggled, how many times they almost did it but came through, how many ways they tried to cope better whether through medication or self medicatin or faith or support groups.. YOU DON'T KNOW.

FFS reading your post it's like you never heard of depression.

 

no, teacake, you misunderstood me completely there. I was only speaking of your "normal" suicidal person. People with mental health issues are of course a completely different matter, alltogether. What I said does not at all apply to them. I was exclusively refering to those people who don't have mental health issues but commit suicide out of momentary despair.

What I meant to say is that the "normal" suicidal people are not at all lazy but that possibly they grew up too sheltered and therefore lack the experience with problems. When they encounter a really big one, they panic and in that frame of mind don't remember to think of looking for solutions. Much like scared birds that fly against a window pane and break their necks.

It's by no means a lack of mental strength. It's a lack of coolness that would allow them to step back, have a look at the problem from all sides and then dissect it into small sub-problems they can solve. And that coolness comes only from experience.

I see that with my brother every day. While I had to fight for myself all my life, my brother always got sheltered, protected and pampered. And now at the tender age of almost 50 he is unable to deal with everyday problems like mobbing at work, feeling underpayed and not being able to make a living from his (rather considerable) earnings. Problems I would be almost glad to have as I know from experience how to tackle them.
If my brother were facing my problems he might possibly panic and kill himself or someone else. I, being a seasoned problem-fighter through 5 decades of practize, analyze my problems, divide them up in handy portions and solve them one by one. I may not be able to solve all, but at least I can make the heap smaller as long as I don't panic.

And that was the point of my above post. One must not allow panic to get the upper hand, because then one is very likely to make a mistake (like committing suicide).
Life is too precious to throw it away without a fight.


And believe me, I know everything about depression. Been there, fought, survived (without any medication whatsoever, I might proudly add -. my job requires me to drive and meds interfere with your reaction time. Don't want to kill myself or others by driving under the influence), have the scars to prove it and I'll still fight tooth and claw for every breath that prolongs my life for even a second because I am in love with life and shall never give it up voluntarily nor shall I give in to some illness that thinks it can force me into giving this love up.

 

A suicidal person has a very skewed, egocentric point of view, which is partly why it doesn't make much sense to outsiders. At the moment of the suicide attempt, it's all about them, and nothing else matters. And most of them seem to realize the mistake they make the moment they commit suicide. There have been reports of people who survived, for example, jumping off a bridge, and realized during the fall that they actually did not want to die.

It's fascinating how some people can cope with having their limbs blown off in a war, and some people jump out of a window because they lost a job they didn't even like.

 

There's no additional pride to be found in dealing with depression without medication. You're creating more misinformation. There are many medications to treat depression which do not affect your ability to drive whatsoever.

It's problematic to make assumptions about "normal" suicides or any suicide victims at all. You do not know what anyone else is going through or dealing with.

 

Some years ago I ended up chatting real-time on a board with someone I didn't know after the admins announced it was my birthday at the behest of a friend of mine who was online at the time. I was having kind of a bad one (first clue - I was online on my birthday) and while I appreciated the conversation, the fact was that it was coming from someone I didn't know at all and I wasn't as receptive as I might have been.

The next day the person who'd talked to me jumped off a building.

I'm almost entirely certain that our conversation had nothing to do with his decision, but every once in awhile I have a shadow of a doubt.

 

There are MANY totally different reasons for suicide that can often work in combination. Both you and Rhubarbodendron are correct. No need to get upset.

Mr Awe