Suicide is Not Selfish

Probably one of the most disturbing, heartbreaking things I've read recently was someone calling their relative selfish because he took his own life.
Like most things people say online, I just ignored it. It irritated me, like many things do, but I chose not to reply to it or even let it disrupt my day.
But now it’s 4:14 AM and I’ve been up since about 3. I woke up because of back pain, and have stayed up because of my brain running 1000 miles a minute. My psychiatrist likes to call this “racing thoughts”. I’m not sure how accurate that wording is for me, but I’m not writing this to analyze my own issues.
I’m writing this because, in the midst of my scattered thoughts, my brain bounced back to those words I read yesterday. “Before he committed that selfish act….” or something to that effect. And since that popped in my head, I haven’t been able to take my mind off it.

I’m having trouble figuring out why someone would ever think that committing suicide is selfish.
I should first say that there are many reasons someone would kill themselves. But I can generalize most of them into a few categories.

Drug abuse- sometimes causing either an accidental suicide, or the drugs cause a bad trip and make the person hallucinate. I don’t know much at all about this category because I’ve never taken drugs, so I can only image how someone would have a drug induced panic attack and decide to kill themselves, as it’s certainly never something I’ve experienced. I think, perhaps, this might be the ONLY category I could ever agree that suicide is selfish, and that’s because drug use, to me, is selfish. But, I don’t know anything about drug use other than the selfish behavior I saw in my brother, so I only have that to go on. I don’t claim to understand people’s reasoning behind using drugs. It just doesn’t seem like a well thought out option to me. But I don’t always think when people say “suicide is selfish” they don't mean a drug induced suicide, because that, to me, is more stupid than selfish.

Physical pain or disability- Have you ever had a tooth ache? Have you ever been pregnant? Have you ever suffered cluster headaches or migraines? Have you ever had any kind of chronic pain? Have you ever had back pain? Pain is a horrible thing. It’s a helpful thing, because it tells us something is wrong, and tells us when we’ve pushed ourselves too far. However, chronic pain is the worst thing in the entire world. And if you’ve never experienced it, you can be thankful. Chronic pain is pain that is almost always there. For me, it’s my lower back. I have rarely gone through a day that I haven’t felt pain in my lower back, hips, and legs at some point. Sometimes it’s just a shooting pain that only lasts a minute when I bend over to pick something up. Other times it’s an all day pain that no matter what I do, how I move, how I sit, lay, stand, whether I put heat or ice on it, it just plain hurts. Pain like this makes you cranky. It makes you insane. Because it doesn’t make sense. It just won’t quit. It interrupts everything you want to do- NEED to do. Sometimes pain medication helps- if your doctor will give it to you. Other times you can’t take the amount of pain medication you need to dull it because you have the responsibilities of life in front of you- like children. Pain is… pain is pain. It just plain hurts. And it affects you in more ways than just hurting. And if you’ve never felt that kind of pain, you just can’t comprehend. Pain can cause depression. Pain can cause suicide.
Physical disability falls into this category as well. There’s a lot of physical disabilities that cause a person to need constant care. Sometimes embarrassing, constant care. When a person can’t go to the bathroom by themselves; can’t feed themselves; dress themselves- do anything by themselves- it’s maddening. Even if pain isn’t necessarily involved, the fact that if you want to do something and you can’t without someone else taking on part of the task of doing it with you or for you, it can feel degrading. The lack of independence is frustrating. And again, sometimes embarrassing. Which can cause depression or suicide.

Mental illness- This is the biggy. This is probably the most misunderstood reason someone would take their own life. And it’s probably the most common. I have no statistics, I may be wrong. But I KNOW about the hidden world of mental illness. And I don’t just mean depression, that’s just a more popular and well accepted form. I’m talking about schizophrenia, munchausens, bipolar disorder, PTSD, omg there’s so many. In fact, here’s a website http://www.psychforums.com/forum.html that you can just scroll down and see the list of different disorders. And many of those main topics have SUB topics in them. It’s a HUGE world that’s hidden in the shadows of society. We may have moved past the cruelness of an asylum, but we’re far from acceptance and even farther from understanding. Consequently, mental illness is hidden by the sufferer, mostly due to fear. The pain of mental illness is a chronic pain. It may not cause literal ‘sliced my finger open’ kind of pain, but it hurts. Whatever demons are rolling around in the head of the mentally ill are ALWAYS there, and unforgiving. There’s some medication out there that can help- if you get the right one, or the right combination. But the difference between physical pain and mental illness pain is that the drugs that help physical pain all pretty much target one area of the brain- the pain center. The medicine, at different degrees of strength, will dull pain receptors in a few different ways, with the ultimate goal of blocking the signals from the nerves so you don't feel the hurt anymore. Mental illness doesn’t have a special place in the brain. It consumes the whole thing. If it did only focus on one area, we’d still have doctors performing lobotomies. But we’ve learned that that doesn’t work- it just causes the person to suffer silently, since they’re no longer able to talk, walk, or crap by themselves anymore. But the pain is still there. The voices, the thoughts, the nagging, the aching, the racing.
It can take years of testing different medications over the course of a few months each before you find the right fit for your illness- if you ever do. And many of those medications can actually make the problems WORSE while they’re being taken. And even then, depending on the illness, it’s sometimes hard to stick with taking them. Bipolar sufferers are some of the worst, because the mania can cause a person to believe they don’t need the medicine anymore, so they stop taking it. Other illnesses cause a person to hear other voices that tell them to stop taking the medicine. And one illness can actually cause a person to BE several different people at one time. Each one with their own personality, and feelings. One alter may not want to take the medicine, so when it comes time, they take over the body and dispose of that dose, so when the primary comes back into control, they believe they have taken it and go on with their day.

Different mental illnesses allow different levels of control to the sufferer. A person with schizophrenia or dissociative disorder may be able to supress the delusions and go on about their business. However a person with clinical depression may not be able to fight off the sadness and continue through their day.
There’s an ‘in between’ road as well. Unfortunately this is a road that so many mentally ill travel. Rather than let the illness consume them so that they’re stuck in bed all day long, or completely get a handle on the illness so that it doesn’t bother them at all- they struggle silently. They go to work, take care of children, have social lives, all the while inside their head is screaming. Inside, they are struggling, and hurting, and feeling things that don’t make any sense to a healthy person. A person with some kind of compulsion disorder may be constantly fighting to NOT do what it is they are wanting so bad to do, whether it’s clean, steal, kill, or open and shut a door 20 times before they feel it’s complete. You may not think twice about it, but a person with mental illness may be internally going INSANE because you set your drink on the bar without a coaster.  Another person may be trying to have a conversation with you, the whole while trying to ignore the voice in their head screaming at them to punch you in the face, or grab the knife off the table and slice their own wrists open, or run to the balcony and just jump off, all the while you’re talking about the stupid thing that happened to you at work that day.

Could you imagine living your life like that? There’s an exercise you can do to try and help you understand what a mentally ill person goes through. (This is also affective in helping you understand a person who has ADD/ADHD)  Sit at a table somewhere busy, bustling with people and noise. Take 3 needy children with you, preferably ones who are hungry, cranky, and impatient. Put a pair of headphones on your head and listen to some quiet heavy metal music. All the while read a newspaper article. After 30 minutes see if you have any idea what that newspaper article was talking about. Then, and only then, could you have a miniscule fraction of an idea of what a mentally ill person deals with CONSTANTLY. Day to day, off and on ALL day long- not just for 20 minutes.
Could you live like that? Could you function? Could you satisfy the needs of those 3 children when all of that is going on? Eventually, yes. You learn how. You cope. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Many parents do it every day. They’re not bad parents, or incapable parents because of the distractions. But it’s a hard, long, suffering, struggling life. And they suffer silently. They manage to push the distractions aside and focus on the children, and suffer inside, alone. All alone. Nobody understands. Nobody can hear. Nobody can know. Because if they do, would they think you’re not a capable parent? How could YOU care for your children in that situation? You’d probably think you can’t. So a person who deals with that constantly can’t either. And that’s just not true. A parent’s love is stronger than a mental illness. It may not be able to beat it. The parent may still suffer. But they’re still going to be a parent. Some don’t. Some become neglectful. But it doesn’t take mental illness to make someone neglectful. All I’m saying is that just because a person has a mental illness doesn’t mean they can’t be a good parent. All it means is that they struggle silently.

And during that struggle, sometimes suicide comes into the mind of the person. Why? Because more often than not they believe their children would be better off without them. Their spouse would be better off without them. Their family would be better off without them. The WORLD would be better off without them. They would stop being a burden to everyone. They would stop suffering. The pain would stop. The distractions would stop. The voices would stop. The horrible feelings of self loathing would stop. The compulsion would stop.

How on earth is that selfish?