Beyond Suicide
The act of suicide is someone deciding that the only choice left is death.
Except that is not what they’re thinking at the time.
The common drive in suicide is the consuming and desperate need to stop the pain: mental and sometimes physical pain too, but in short the unbearable pain of being alive.
But this final and terminal choice is still that, a choice.
I am using the word ‘choice’ consistently for a reason. But if I switched to ‘option’, ‘alternative’, or ‘course of action’, the point would become diluted. This is very clearly about a choice that needs to be understood.
I have written several times, in other posts, that trying to understand what triggers this final choice, and wondering what could have been done to stop it, is a path to mental hell.
But for those heading there, and for anyone who has thought about suicide, there is something that needs to be looked at closely when the idea of suicide begins to spread, as it does, like squid ink, darkening all around it, sucking life out of everything.
Because that is what happens when you consider suicide—the singular focus on the idea of death suffocates life.
When someone starts to think about killing themselves they need to consider this: it is very hard to think about life when you are thinking about death.
In this vein, it is hard to think about being happy when you are sad, and it can feel impossible to believe that the sun will ever rise when you are flailing in the dark night of the soul.
Thinking about death in this single-focused way becomes entirely consuming.
It mines such a very deep seam, arguably the root of all of our fears—our fear of death.
We are designed to think about death for two reasons: in order to avoid it while we are alive, and so that we can grasp its inevitability.
If evolution has designed us to avoid death as best we can, soulful philosophy demands that we examine the meaning of our life. For how we feel about death is inextricably linked to how we feel about life.
An over-simplification of this is that if we are afraid of death we are likely to live our life fearfully. If we accept the inevitability of death, we are more likely to be able to accept the difficulties of life.
An over-simplification, as I put, but it is an interesting starting point to see our fear of death as being the thought pattern that stops us from living our lives fully. It’s also interesting to consider that understanding our fear of death may enable us to live less fearfully. Both ideas are indeed simple to put, but very hard to live by without a profound understanding of where the fear stems from, and how to challenge it.
It may seem too basic but it is arguable that suicidal ideation is when obsessive thinking about death becomes too highly personalised, as in obsessive thought about our own death, by our own hand.
So, to go back to the starting point: in order to fully understand our sometimes obsessive and compulsive thinking about death, we need to grasp, fully, that our minds have a pre-set to overthink death.
And we must not let ourselves be fooled—choosing not to think about death, pushing it away, is still thinking about death to the extent that it is still a response to our fear of death.
When I am working with someone who says that they can no longer see the point of being alive, the first two things we usually talk about are:
– Whether their desire to kill themselves is as a result of long-term and compounding despair, or if it is a response to a recent personal disaster.
– Whether there is a family history of suicide, this being one of the most commonly occurring pre-existing triggers for suicidal ideation. To grasp this is to give a breathing space, a chance to re-assess, something that is literally vital when suicide seems the only remaining choice.
Once the underlying cause and the possibility of inherited pain are out in the open, then we can begin to explore our mind’s design to think about death too much. From there we can start to talk about life, and the meaning of it, to them, to their life.
To summarise: we are designed to think about death, therefore we have to train ourselves to consider the importance of our own life.