interesting read about teenage suicide...

[hockeyman84]

I just finished a really interesting book that approaches suicide from a completely different angle. I found it by a random keyword search on Amazon. It's called Southeast, Forgotten Memories by Blair Cunnyngham. It's set in high school sometime in the 70's and the main character is a teenage girl that falls in love with the "new guy" at school. This is no ordinary guy as he is a demonic being having come to destroy the girl's soul by manipulating her to commit suicide. His methods and what she deals with are strangely familiar to anyone who has ever had a high school love. A hard core group of guardian angels are there to try to protect her and save her from his influence. They literally battle it out in the small town and halls of the high school for this girl's soul and salvation. Very unique story and has a pretty scary message about suicide. The author believes that those who commit suicide are damning themselves for eternity. Whatever you believe, this might make you think twice before killing yourself.

As an interesting aside the author died in a shooting before he could write the sequel.

Just thought I'd share because this book changed the way I think about suicide.

[slick4591[$]]

I found it by a random keyword search on Amazon.

Just curious, but what was the keyword you used to find this?

[hockeyman84]

Angel and suicide. I was actually looking for something quite different when I found it.

[Redlass]

I'm afraid a book like that would get me too angry.

Scaring someone who is suffering from depression is likely to make them more depressed and more likely to kill themselves, not less.

[hockeyman84]

Redlass said

I'm afraid a book like that would get me too angry.

Scaring someone who is suffering from depression is likely to make them more depressed and more likely to kill themselves, not less.

I don't see it that way. There is a big step between being depressed and being suicidal. You don't scare a depressed person into committing suicide.

Someone considering suicide should be scared. Scared for what may happen to those who love them and are left behind and scared of what they may face as consequences for their actions.

Suicide isn't a subject to be tiptoed around or taken lightly. I think you hit it face on.

[drmomentum[$]]

How did you think about suicide before?

[theworm[$]]

I won't comment on the book or its message since I haven't read it. I think it's a very sensitive topic, and, while it might be a great book, I wouldn't want to rely on info from a novel when dealing with real life issues regarding suicide.

[Redlass]

One of the reasons that depression is considered a life-threatening disease is because people who are depressed (and I'm not talking "feeling down," but severe clinical depression) do sometimes take their lives.

Fear is a strange thing and rarely motivates people in a positive fashion.

Do you know what soundtrack would get started by fear in this situation? Let me provide an illustration:

"If I kill myself, I'm going to face eternal damnation--of course, that's exactly what I deserve. I don't deserve to go to heaven and I couldn't face God anyway, so it's far better I kill myself and take the punishment I deserve. Besides, I'm not good enough for heaven anyway. Why would God take me there when I'm such a rotten, horrible person. And if I'm damned for killing myself, I'm going to be damned for thinking about, but it's all I can think about--about doing it, about how to do it, about how things can't possibly get any worse, and if they can, then why not have them happen now rather than putting off the inevitable?"

then we get onto the people left behind:

"They'll only be hurt for a little while--I'm going to hurt them so much more by being around. If I kill myself now, they'll suffer for a short amount of time, but then they'll start to recover. If I keep living I'm going to keep hurting them and keep annoying them, and keep being a bother."

The thing about being suicidal is that it is insiduous. It isn't logical and the rationalizing that goes on is extremely intense. You throw any sort of rational argument at someone who is suicidal, and they are likely to counter it in a way that further convinces them that they should kill themselves and that there is no hope. Arguing rarely works because when the person is not in the depressive mode, they don't want to kill themselves and they'll recognize that it is a bad idea. When a person is depressed and contemplating suicide, they need to be able to stop the internal monologue, not pour more fuel on it.

[theworm[$]]

Well said, Bridgette.
Another thing is that the view in the book is so tied to religion.
If a person is suicidal and doesn't believe in an afterlife - then the idea of eternal damnation is sort of neutralized.
I'm not an expert. I think that if someone is suicidal I would want to get them professional help first, but anything I could do on my own would revolve around trying to make living more appealing - not trying to make dying less appealing.

[Redlass]

OK, it's silly, but I've been letting this thread bug me tonight.

We're long past the point where we say that someone who has leprosy or some other horrid disease is being punished by God. We'd never write a book saying that anyone who died of cancer is damned to eternal hellfire.

So why do we still treat victims of depression and mental illness this way? Do we honestly think that God has so little compassion?

[hockeyman84]

Redlass said

So why do we still treat victims of depression and mental illness this way? Do we honestly think that God has so little compassion?

Millions of people suffer from depression and other mental illness. A small minority attempt suicide. Don't equate the two.

Don't even try to compare dying of cancer with taking your own life. The analogy is so ridiculous that it doesn't merit further response.

[AuntieEmma[$]]

I think whatever works is good. If it helps a teenager to believe that he is in the middle of a battle between demons and angels, and to believe that committing suicide means eternal damnation, then go for it. People are different, and what works for one will be different than what works for another.

I think it's very hard to be a teenager, and that life gets better for almost everybody after they get out of their teens, but that's something that only becomes apparent in retrospect.

My personal belief is that "demons" aren't quite as bad as they appear to be at first glance, and "angels" aren't quite as good -- and that one secret to (relative) peace of mind is to get them to loosen their grip on each other's throats. They don't need to be fighting all the time. But that's the view of an old fart, or of a recovering perfectionist.

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

hockeyman84 said

Don't even try to compare dying of cancer with taking your own life. The analogy is so ridiculous that it doesn't merit further response.

No, the analogy is not off-base. Suicide is a result of mental illness, and yet mental illnesses are treated as though the sufferer had some sort of personal moral defect. Many of the things people say about those with mental illnesses we wouldn't say if they had a non-mental illness, such as cancer. Depressed people are told to "cheer up" and "get over it," which people don't say to people with cancer. Manic people are told to "settle down" and "learn self-discipline," which people wouldn't say to someone with Parkinson's. People with ADHD are told to "pay attention" and "control yourself," which people wouldn't say to someone with epilepsy.

Depression and other serious mental illnesses are the result of a physical condition and can be treated by addressing the physical problem; how is giving someone serotonin reuptake inhibitors to restore chemical balance in the brain any different from giving someone chemotherapy to shrink a tumor? (And to really complicate matters, we could use the example of brain tumors causing suicidal depression...)

[theworm[$]]

Hockeyman - you are new here and I welcome you, and I hope you don't see anything that I say in this post as an attack on you. We always welcome new members.
I totally agree with MJ and Redlass.
Yes - many people suffer from depression and don't attempt suicide. That doesn't mean that suicide is not a manifstation of the disease and it should not be viewed as a sin.
Many people don't attempt suicide because they have loved ones who intervene, or they have doctors who can help and can prescribe medications to correct a chemical imbalance.
Depression is a physical problem caused by a chemical ihbalance in the brain. Untreated it can lead to suicide - just as untreated diabetes can lead to gangrene.
Suicide is a tragedy - not a sin.

[emeleel]

I believe God is the final judge on whether any one particular suicide is a sin, and I believe he's a just and fair God who won't condemn someone who is truly mentally out of whack. But I do believe that fully knowledgeable suicide is a sin - it's self-murder. But we can't really judge most people, so we have to just struggle on the best we can if we know someone who suicides, and hope for the best out of the whole situation.

[drmomentum[$]]

hockeyman84 said

Don't even try to compare dying of cancer with taking your own life. The analogy is so ridiculous that it doesn't merit further response.

Chemicals say the darndest things.

-JP

[AuntieEmma[$]]

I think that living with suicidal impulses is like being a captain of a ship that is sailing through waters filled with icebergs. The important thing is to get past the iceberg-filled patch and out into clear waters, and the captain should use anything that works to help him safely navigate around the icebergs.

Teenagers may not realize that there is clear water ahead -- when they hit the iceberg patch they may think that the whole ocean is just like that -- but if they can hang on and get themselves past the icebergs that surround them at the moment, they will eventually be able to relax their vigilance.

In my opinion, the notion that one HAS to look at depression through a medical-model lens, and that all other ways of looking at it are invalid, is as much based on sheer BELIEF as any other worldview.

I realize this is an unconventional view, and one that many people here vehementaly disagree with. But my views stem from when I was a psych major at Berkeley, at a time when the field of psychology was shifting. The department was oriented towards experimental psych (departments at different schools are oriented towards different things), and Freud had long since been discarded, but there was still some question about what to do about things that weren't observable in an experimental setting -- they had to be ignored, but did their existence also have to be denied?

Anyway, this was at a time before Prozac had been invented, and the conventional wisdom of the time was that schizophrenia and what was then called manic-depression were biologically-based illness which required medical treatment, but that the standard treatment for the other disorders (from which, btw, homosexuality had just been removed from the list) were various kinds of talking and behavioral therapies.

But the shift in the field that I observed was that there was a growing excitement about the idea that ALL mental disorders, not just the psychoses, might be understood, and treated, in strictly biological terms.

I took a year of bio-psych classes, and worked in a bio-psych lab (dodging the precursors of PETA there, who would break in to "liberate" the bunnies and the puppies but never the far more numerous, though less cute, rats and pigeons).

And there was a lot to this approach ....

BUT

It wasn't all based on pure reason, as its proponents in the present often believe.

There were other things going on, pushing this shift in worldview.

There was a pecking order of departments in the university. At the top -- in both prestige and funding -- was physics. Then came chemistry. Then biology. The social sciences and the humanities trailed sadly behind. I could see it in my professors -- there was a palpable "hard sciences" envy. Psychology straddled the social and biological science groups, and the faculty yearned to climb up the prestige ladder into the better, harder-science neighborhoods, and leave all traces of their ghetto social-science roots behind.

That was one factor, which fueled a change in worldview within the university (which leads the general-population worldview by several years). Later, after Prozac was introduced, and it became much cheaper to prescribe medication then to offer talk therapy, the economics of the situation sparked a more widespread change in beliefs. Medication became the favored treatment because it was cheaper -- insurance companies started refusing to pay for extended talk therapies, driving many therapists out of business -- but a widespread belief arose that it was the favored treatment because it was better -- making a virtue out of necessity.

Anyway, I don't expect anyone to agree with me, but we've had these discussions before so I wanted to explain a little more where my opinions are coming from.

As far as the original poster's idea of believing in damnation and angels/demons -- I say go for it, if it works for you.

Believing in damnation wouldn't have worked for me. Since I had never in my life believed in an afterlife, the idea of damnation wouldn't have held much of an emotional charge. But, perhaps if "Buffy" had been around when I was a teen, the idea of angels and demons battling it out might have had some resonance.

And the thing is that if for someone who isn't me, if for them, the idea that committing suicide would condemn them to damnation would be powerful enough to help them resist any suicidal impulses they might be feeling, then shouldn't that be applauded?

I think that believing in some cosmic battle between good and evil forces is a TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE basis for running a country's foreign policy -- one that seduces leaders into believing that the hoped-for ends justify the dishonesty of their means, and one that can easily lead to perpetual warfare. Total, total disaster. But for a teenager to use that same belief as a personal guide to choosing life over death? Can't object to that. Whatever gets one past the icebergs.

[AuntieEmma[$]]

mjfrombuffalo said

how is giving someone serotonin reuptake inhibitors to restore chemical balance in the brain any different from giving someone chemotherapy to shrink a tumor?

What about if an analogy was made to high blood pressure, rather than to cancer?

Blood pressure runs along a continuous spectrum. Unlike cancer, where you either have it or you don't, a diagnosis of "high blood pressure" is somewhat arbitrary. Some cut-off point has to be picked for diagnostic purposes, but the difference between those a bit over and a bit under the line isn't that signficant.

High blood pressure is a physical condition, and it can be easily measured with physical instruments. The tendency for someone to get high blood pressure is heavily influenced by their genes. It can be treated successfully with medication.

But ... it can also often be successfully treated with changes in diet, and/or changes in exercise, and/or changes in belief systems which help people to experience less stress when dealing with problems.

I think that analogy fits depression better than cancer does. Cancer, out of all the diseases, seems to be one of the most physical in the sense that once the disease sets in, then drug/radiation/surgical interventions are the only ones that work (except that social support has been shown to extend life expectancy in people after the cancer has been treated.) A lot of other disorders, I think, are more responsive to a psychological or belief-based approach than cancer is.

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

True dat, Auntie. But I was not interested in getting into all of that at 5:38am and was only responding to the part where cancer was dismissed as an analogy entirely, which seemed to dismiss the entire medical side of mental illness and/or how mental illness is often not seen as a real "illness" but a personal failing instead.

[AuntieEmma[$]]

Ok. To me it seems the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction -- where depression is seen as something that can ONLY be treated by certified professionals, preferably with medication, and where an individual is NEVER able to help themselves. So I was reacting to that general worldview -- which I think, the original poster aside, has become overwhelmingly the conventional wisdom -- more than just specifically to what you wrote.

[drmomentum[$]]

AuntieEmma said

Ok. To me it seems the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction -- where depression is seen as something that can ONLY be treated by certified professionals, preferably with medication, and where an individual is NEVER able to help themselves. So I was reacting to that general worldview -- which I think, the original poster aside, has become overwhelmingly the conventional wisdom -- more than just specifically to what you wrote.

The enormous number of self-help books available would be evidence that plenty of people believe that individuals can help themselves with depression.

And, BTW - cancer does exist on a continuum. Everyone has a certain cancer risk, and people can reduce and increase their risk of an eventual positive cancer diagnosis.

As with depression, cancer and high blood pressure, the effective ways to treat/mitigate/or avoid any of those with any certainty is with the help of the medical profession. And that includes advice that you yourself might follow, which has been vetted through medical research.

It's true that even medicine is fraught with weak science. However, we wouldn't know that cholesterol can lead to problems (and adjust our eating accordingly) without science and medicine getting involved in the process somewhere. Otherwise, it's just guesswork.

-JP