Didn’t want to thread jack the thread dedicated to our former member, so instead I’ll start this one.
My question is this: Do you consider suicide a selfish act or do you consider it a selfless act, given the mental state of the person.
Personally, after having worked with troubled teens and persons with mental disabilities, I can say that I feel confident saying that suicide is not selfless. Even with severe emotional disabilities, you still have a will to live and thrive. Using the excuse of “he/she had a mental problem” to justify suicide is erroneous on all levels.
Suicide, no matter how the end is met, is a selfish act. Yes, they may have had an emotional or mental disability, but 99.9% of the time it plays no role in the death. Suicide is the outcome of a mechanism to make people feel pity and regret, at the ultimate expense of living to see the result.
This is my personal opinion, I’ve known quite a few people that have committed suicide, and seeing what is left in the wake…the family, friends, everything…I can honestly say it is the most cowardly thing one can do.
Don’t suicide attempts fail more than they work? Those people are selfish because they know how much attention they’re going to get when the “make it through” … and how “things are going to change”.
People who do pull it off, they are also selfish and don’t deserve to live anyway. But, kill yourself near a hospital so that they can harvest your organs.
Selfish all day. I have ZERO Respect for anyone who ends their own life in any way. Some people say those who OD are not trying to take their own life, but they I have even less respect for. I will not even post in a thread for someone like these idiots, they don’t deserve the attention. Suck it up and deal with life like everyone else, maybe go hang out with a homeless guy and tell him how hard you life must be.
For someone who claims to have worked with troubled kids, I’m not sure you understood all sides of the story.
You know not everyone who has attempted or completed suicide had mental problems correct? Sometimes people never learned coping mechanisms in life and don’t know what other choice they have. Sometimes everything becomes the worst of the worst to some people and they simply cannot handle it anymore and rather than taking this out on other people they save the world some trouble and take themselves.
Suicide CAN be a selfish act for every one of those little fucks that know they are going to be saved and end up failing at their attempt for attention, that is selfish.
Suicide can also be selfless depending on surrounding circumstances and other alternatives.
I’m really not going to argue this because most people have never gone through these thought processes, so I’m just going to leave it at what I said above.
I think without actually trying to commit suicide it’s hard to know what it’s like. As LZ stated people of all different types commit suicide, for all different reasons. Without being in their shoes how can we really call that person a coward? How can we say to an armed service man/woman that they are cowardly, because they commited suicide to avoid being blown up like their friends, being paralyzed, shot at, amputated, etc. The mind is a powerful thing and there isn’t really a way to grasp what someone is thinking.
I think it CAN be selfish. Just like murder can be selfish, beating someone up can be selfish, etc. But really, how selfish can it be if you aren’t alive to get all the attention? I think attempting suicide could be deemed more “selfish” than actually committing suicide. \
What if you’re terminally ill and stuck in a hospital waiting to die? Every day, family and friends come in to visit and just cry and feel miserable. You KNOW you’re going to die, say, within a year. What is more selfish: staying alive and making everyone around you incredibly sad for an entire year, or killing yourself so they can begin to move on and don’t have to see you “suffering” any more? I wouldn’t call someone in that situation a coward.
It’s gotta take some balls to do yourself in. You would think that if one would have the balls to kill themselves, they wouldn’t have a problem changing their lives or whatever. I knee a guy who killed himself over a chick. Fucking lame.
If you don’t want to live any more so you kill yourself, you are being selfish. But what if you want to kill yourself and other people don’t want you to? Aren’t they being selfish then since they aren’t really concerned about what you want, only what they want? You have to keep living and being miserable so everyone else can be selfishly happy with your existence and so they don’t have to be sad too?
I don’t necessarily believe what i said there, just putting out points for argument.