How many of you have ever seriously contemplated suicide?

This should be an interesting topic.

General rules:
-Let's try to keep religion out of it as much as possible
-Let's have as little of the "it's selfish!" bullshit as possible
-Let's have as little of the "it's the coward's way out" bullshit as possible.

I'm now 21 and have thought about it quite seriously since I was 17 or so. Roughly over the past year I've thought about it more intensely. There are particularly bad moments when it seems like the only sensible thing to do. I've more or less made a pact with myself that if I'm not in a much better position by the time I'm 25, then I'll kill myself.

Now, I started this not because I wanted lots of people to feel sorry for me or try to tell me how wonderful life is, but because I think it can give the community here something to talk about, and, one way or another, bring us that little bit closer together. This thread is not about me, or any other single individual. Let's share as many stories and as much information related to the subject as possible.

Thanks for reading.

I can't say I have.

The closest I got was when I was suffering panic attacks (due to an illness making it difficult to breath) and for a couple of days it was almost one continuous panic attack and I thought I couldn't carry on like that.

But thankfully my illness was diagnosed and I was given pills which stopped the symptoms within about 6 hours.. and thankfully, that's been the end of it.

Incidentally, you don't say WHY you feel like death is the only sensible option. What is soooo bad that you would think that way?

The search function works wonders.

I'm not enough time has passed to go through all this again.

My brother committed suicide in 1992, i was 12 and i think i was too young to ever have thoughts of it back then. After going through that kind of family tragedy you don't really think of suicide as an option because you can recall how painful it was to deal with a loved one doing it. I also saw how it tore up my parents. There is no way i could ever put them through that.

Now, i did start to have some chemical imbalances this year and after getting my medications adjusted the morbid death thoughts went away. They weren't like actual "im going to kill myself" kind of thoughts. They were more like "I want all this pain to go away. It would be much better to be in the after life. What would it be like?"

I have frequently contemplated suicide. Seems to be part of my make up.

I know people who have thought about... know people who have tried it... both successfully and not...

Myself... its mystifying... why anyone in this modern world of the west would want to end their lives...

Life is so good.... even the painful parts are achingly sweet.



And, of all the things in life.... Death is the ONE thing you do not have to worry about missing out on.... sooner or later it will come, regardless.

But hey... I understand that some folks just can not eek any joy from this existence... that they hate life and hate pain and see joy as just the setup to sorrow...

And for them... I say, if you ain't enjoying the show, fine, get up and get the fuck out.


But I think suicidal thoughts are the primary symptom of being totally self absorbed.

Considered it daily, hourly, for a while. Almost ate up my entire psyche.

How to do it with the least harm to those I left behind. "Will they get the insurance money and in what percentage each after the lawyers have dipped their beaks" etc., etc.

Seems boring now.

But I do remember, still, how I felt then. It was awful.

I got thru it and became a nicer person because of my previous desperation and now I glow whenever I see one of my kids or a friend and am grateful I'm still around to see them at all.

I not only thought about it, i done it, took a good size bottle of pills, all different types, swallowed them with pepsi. What i do remember is that i was sick to my stomack all night and had one heck of a head ache the next morning. And i was really pissed off that i survived. After that, i thought, why the hell am i living at home with an asshole for a father, so i left home 2 days later, ( i was 13), have been on my own every since, got my grade 12, i have only had 3 jobs so far in my life, i make the most money out of all 6 kids in my family, i travel, my house if paid for, i always have new cars, money in the bank, and i have also been employed the longest, and i have never had any help from anyone. As for my father,,if you can call him that, i have never gone back home and never will, i dont even talk to him. Same goes for that poor excuse of a mother.

I have at times.

Some suicides I can understand. I knew this man in his 70's who saw his only brother and sister die of cancer within the previous 2 years of his "check out". Then, when he was diagnosed with cancer, he put a shotgun in his mouth.

I can't understand the ones where folks are having a "hard time", "down on their luck", or just plain "tired of it all".

sorry to go against the op's wishes but it is selfish and it is an easy way out. any one who would take their own life , no matter how great the burden , is ungrateful for the gift of life and doesnt value how sacred it is. and before anyone calls me insensitive , know that i myself have dealt with depression.

you dont need man-made drugs and expensive counceling. you simply need to slow down and enjoy the litlte things in life. like that smell if teh air at 6 am. or gentle wind blowing through mossy trees. or watching each blade of grass bend while you watch a wasp move from one to another to another.

It's hard to say what serious contemplation is in retrospect. I thought I did, but I sort of look back on it and laugh, because it was just adolescent idiocy.

i'd suggest some work where you take a few minutes to go outside your body and look in. try to compare yourself to people in past times, to people in other countries, to people in other situations (family, career, financial, relationship-wise) and see how you shape up. i do this sometimes and find that though i'm not happy, at LEAST i'm not as miserable as i COULD be (or more specifically, like those OTHER people are), which in a strange way gives me hope.

i'm not one to recommend self-help books, but the central tenet of The Power of Now gives me a lot of peace.

While I was in college, a few people killed themselves within a short period of time. This was in 1990 (before email and such) and the professors took a day to "talk" to us so that an epidemic would not break out. My english lit. prof started the talk like this,"look if you want to kill yourself...don't do it with pills, crash your car, or any shit like that...really do it....hang yourself with piano wire." Don't think anyone in our class killed themselves...I guess it worked.

geechee, oh please, enough of the hippy shit. I read the thread the prissy asshole linked, and I was quite surprised that all suicide is (by Americans, at least) now linked with "mental illness". It's not even considered logically possible that a being could will for it's own extinction. Quite mystifying.

Antinatalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The "selfish" accusation is also difficult to comprehend...

MAN A wants to die.
MAN B doesn't want MAN A to die.
MAN A takes his own life.
MAN B considers this very selfish indeed.

You've gotta love human relations.

Life is not a gift. For the overwhelming majority of people, nay, even animals, for the overwhelming majority of the time, it is a degrading, miserable experience. Who wants to live in a world with Interest Rates? Not I! I joke.

What did uncle Arthur Schopenhauer say?

I concur.

BTW...ezra pound...at 21 don't do it, there are too many things that seem overwhelming at your age that really don't mean crap in the broad scheme of things...if you still feel the same way at 35...go ahead