6-1: A Sensitive Topic

Hello Internet!

Today’s topic is one that is quite a bit heavier than anything else I’ve talked about on here. It is also something that isn’t talked about enough: suicide. I think that we as human beings dodge this topic because it is so misunderstood. Unless you are dealing with it, it’s absolutely impossible for most of us to understand. Life in general is a really abstract idea that our mortal minds simply cannot comprehend. I think that the reason this isn't discussed more often is because it is so abstract.

When I was doing my research for this post, I came across a TEDx talk on YouTube called Why We Choose Suicide by Mark Henick. I think he explains this epidemic fabulously. He ties in personal examples and you can see how personally dedicated to this topic he is. He says some really profound things and I would like to elaborate on those a bit more.

“I was barely a teenager the first time I tried to kill myself. If I knew then what I know now, well it probably wouldn’t have changed very much. And it probably wouldn’t have changed very much because sometimes it doesn’t matter what you know, what you feel just takes over.”

A big part of Henick’s talk was about this idea of perception, this idea that someone suffering from mental illness suffers from a distorted perception. Especially in teenagers, perception can become distorted and as he says, “what you feel just takes over.” When I hear this, I think of sappy Victorian era romance novels that always chastise the two people in love, saying they need to think with their mind and not only their heart. This is another example of a distorted perception. Extreme emotions can cause people to think and act irrationally.

Can suicide really be a choice if it’s the only choice available? We ask ourselves – how can it be the only choice? How can it even be a rational choice? And hopefully we wonder and we ask ourselves: how we can help? Well, we can start to help by better appreciating that our mental health is contingent on the state and the flexibility of our perceptions. Whether we have a mental illness or not, how expanded or how contracted our perception becomes, impacts the choices that we make.

This talk has given me a brand new perspective on the concept of life. Life is a very abstract thought and we as humans aren’t able to comprehend the complexity of it. The idea that life is a choice and we can choose to stop living doesn’t sit well with the vast majority of our population. When someone dies of natural causes or of a terminal illness, we often say that we are happy for them: we are happy that they can finally escape their pain. This is the same kind of idea but it is harder to comprehend because suicide is a “choice.” I use the word choice very loosely because it is impossible to delegate what is a choice and what isn’t. This ties back to the idea of perception and if suicide can be a choice if it’s the only choice available in that moment.

Because I just didn’t want it to – I just didn’t want it to hurt anymore. In that moment, my entire life was completely in my control. And when you’re living in a hurricane like this all the time, that’s a really unfamiliar but really satisfying feeling: to feel like you have control over your whole life.

This ties in really well to what I said about the last little section so I’m not going to say much about this one. I like this because it gives the term “life” a less abstract connotation. I feel like this statement makes it is easier to understand that your life is literally in your hands.

One way that we can help is to stop saying that people commit suicide. People commit rape. They commit murder. But nobody has committed suicide in this country since the early 1970s when suicide was decriminalized. And that’s because suicide is a public health concern, not a criminal one.

A big reason why suicide is so misunderstood is because it is not addressed as acceptable. We treat mental illness like it is a crime when it’s not. It is, as Henick states, a public health concern and we need to treat is as such.

So for those of you who might be thinking about suicide today, good. Keep thinking about it. And then start talking about it. And then start doing something about it too.

How is this epidemic going to be cured if nobody is willing to talk about it. Think of it: if everyone was just as afraid to discuss cancer, no research would be done about it. No cures would be found and in turn, no lives would be saved.

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I hope that this post gave you some perspective on this extremely sensitive topic. I would highly recommend checking out this TEDx talk. The link is listed below.

Sources: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1QoyTmeAYw