Reflections: An Excerpt

I find this to be exactly right:

"I do not think of suicide as the act, the death, the fall from a height or the trigger pulled. I see it as a long illness, an illness with origins in trauma and isolation, in deprivation of touch, in violence and neglect, in the loss of home and belonging. It is a disease of the body and the brain, if you make that distinction, a disease that kills over time."

        ~ Donald Antrim, "Everywhere and Nowhere, A journey through suicide"; The New Yorker; Feb. 18 & 25, 2019

Quote du Jour: The Truth About Suicide

“The truth is that no one is interested in why you want to kill yourself, no one really believes that you will, until you’ve already done it, and then it becomes morbidly intriguing to try and map it backward.”  ~ THIS CLOSE TO HAPPY - A Reckoning With Depression, by Daphne Merkin

Reflectons: The Future of Loneliness

We will have nowhere to find out the effect on the suicide rate as a result of their shutting down the social media.

Reflections: To Be, or...Well, whatever...

X
Albert Camus puts it quite nicely near the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus:

... Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit [of living], the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.
...What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be  seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.

Rock on, Albert: "This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting..." Exactly. Exactly that.
X

Reflections: To Be, Or...

X
Give  a bit of thought to this passage from Unamuno's magnum opus, The Tragic Sense of Life:

It has often been said that every man who has suffered still prefers to be himself, with all his misfortunes, than someone else, even without those misfortunes. For the fact is that unfortunate men, as long as they keep their sanity in the midst of their misfortune, that is, as long as they still strive to persist in themselves, prefer misfortune to non-being. Of myself I can say that when I was a young man, even when I was a boy, I was not to be moved by the pathetic pictures of Hell that were drawn for me, for even at the time nothing seemed as terrible as Nothingness. I was already possessed of a furious hunger to be, “an apprentice for divinity,” as one of our ascetics put it.  ~ Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life

What Unamuno is saying here may, on the one hand, seem to some to be patently true. On the other hand, those persons who share with me what might be called "suicidal tendencies" may consider the idea that suffering is worse than oblivion to be utter nonsense.

I guess that it is the ferocity of Unamuno's desire for "divinity"--that is, for immortality--that makes him so willing to risk what Prince Hamlet called "the rub."  It was surely oblivion--dreamless sleep--that appealed to Hamlet as he found himself inextricably caught up in afflications for which he could find no remedy other than death.

Whatever your immediate take concerning Unamuno's thought on the matter, until you have contemplated death as the ultimate antidote, you can't really know where you stand.
X