From: llama@tramp.cc.utexas.edu (sine nomine)
Newsgroups: alt.suicide.holiday
Subject: Re: Arguing people out of suicide (was Re: Christmas comes but once a year)
Date: 26 Dec 92 22:06:44 GMT
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL5

Stan Brown (brown@NCoast.ORG) wrote:

: of my experience.  Not one of the therapists I saw, each of them for a
: year to several years, helped me.  Not one of the drugs pushed at me by
: psychiatrists had any beneficial effect for more than the first few
: days--though the side effects endured.  When I dared speak of suicide to
: one psychiatrist, I was threatened with instant incarceration unless I
: recanted.  Now what sort of help would you recommend to someone with
: these experiences?  

it would depend on what sort of help the person who'd had those
experiences wanted. there's a lot more to getting psychological help
than just presenting yourself to a therapist/doctor and saying, "hey,
this is wher eit hurts. make it better."

one of the biggest factors is the readiness of the person seeking help
to make teh changes that are necessary or even ot be able to perceive
what those necessary changes are. being in great emotional pain does
not equate to being ready, willing, and equppied to do something about
alleviating that pain. that's where emotional pain can be evven more
of a bitch than physical pain: if you break your leg, your body knows
how to heal it when you get the proper medical support. you don't have
to figure out how to make the ends grow back together again. it's
automatic. if you break your soul, you have to figure out what's wrong
and how to heal it manually. all a therapist can do is offer guidance
and support. s/he an only be like th plaster cast that holds things
together for a while; *you* have to figure out how to make things mesh
again.

i speak from experience: during an intensely suicidal period of my
life, my therapist once kept me with her for almost an entire day
because i could not agree to a no-suicide contract. looking back on it
now, i don't understand what the big deal was, but at the time, i just
could *not* say, "i promise not to hurt myself today." having her
there to support me and temporarily give me the streength to resist
giving up helped immensely. she didn't try to talk me out of anything,
not even suicide. she just said, "you are not in complete control of
yourself today and i don't think this is a decision you should make
when you are not in complete control," a statement with which i had to
agree.

: All too often, the subtext is "This person wouldn't have to be unhappy;
: he or she could get help."  Bear in mind that that person feels his or
: her pain much more than anyone else, and would get help if he or she
: could.  But when avenues have been tried and proved fruitless, despair
: is (it seems to me) quite a rational response.

i understand the feeling of despair; i went through several therapists
before finding someone with whom i felt comfortable and could work.
but even the ones i thought were failing me had given me omething.
thre are so many factors: you have to be ready to do the work and you
have to find someone who understands you, who you trsut, to help guide
you. sometimes it takes years for everything to fall into place. it
took nearly ten years for me to be ready to confront a lot of the shit
that had been eating away at my foundations for that decade.
sometimes just realizing how vastly different psychological healing is
from physical healing can give you enough breathing room that you're
comfortable just existing in a kind of limbo (yeah, i've got this
broken leg, but i don't have what i need to heal it right now, and i
can afford to wait a while) for a while longer.

: II. On refraining from suicide because of pain to survivors
:
: I don't think so, at least not in most cases and certainly not in all.
: Perhaps the suicide quite rationally balances his or her continuing
: pain against survivors' temporary and lesser pain (which they must feel
: sooner or later in any case).
: 
: [...]
: "So should I add years or decades of virtually constant pain for myself,
: just to postpone the pain my survivors must feel?  That makes no sense. 
: So I choose A because it is rational given my clear, sober look at my own
: life.  What, then, is my obligation to my survivors?  To recognize that
: they will feel pain, and to do my reasonable best not to increase it.

the assumption here and in the rest of this argument is that all
emotional pain is incurable, or that years of trying to cure
poorly-understood emotional pain with the help of people who might not
have been idea for this sort of thing mean that that pain will never
be cured. that's nuts. that's like saying that because some people die
of pneumonia, and some treatments for pneumonia fail, and sometimes
people get complications from pneumonia, people with pneumonia can
never be made well.

another issue her eis that of self-diagnosing a terminal illness. you
wouldn't do it with cancer. why do it with psychological pain?

i'm not meaning to preach or sound happy and chirpy. i've been there
(from both sides; i was a suicide hotline counselor for a while and
then a couple years later tried to off myself). i know it sucks and
it's awful and everything weighs a ton and it doesn't seem like it's
ever going to change or get better. and it might never change or get
better. there's no way to know, there really isn't. but until you take
control of your life (and if you don't have the energy or the skills
to do it right now, then it's cool to get help supporting yourself
where you are until you do have the energy and skills) and make
changes and see whether or not they help the pain, you have no
justification for assuming that it's always going to be this bad or
worse. it goes both ways -- it's stupid to say "it's all going to be
all right," but it's equally atupid to say, "it's never going to be
any better than this."

--
sine nomine | deb martinson
the lab's about to close, so fix the typos yourselves.
Xref: sparky alt.suicide.holiday:3214 rec.arts.poems:13289 alt.personals:25081