#I think my brain just committed free

Hospital admission is therefore not usually indicated. They may try it again the very next time they become drunk or high, or never again in their lifetime. The remorse is usually genuine, and whether or not they’ll ever attempt suicide again is unpredictable. Once sobered and calmed, these people usually feel intensely ashamed. Often related to drugs and alcohol, some people become maudlin and impulsively attempt to end their own lives. Untreated or poorly treated psychosis often requires hospital admission to a locked ward until the voices lose their commanding power. Psychosis, too, is treatable, and usually must be for a schizophrenic to be able to function at all. Schizophrenics are just as likely to talk freely about the voices commanding them to kill themselves as not, and also give honest answers about thoughts of suicide when asked directly. The worldwide incidence of schizophrenia is 1% and often strikes otherwise healthy, high-performing individuals, whose lives, though manageable with medication, rarely fulfill their original promise. Psychosis is much harder to mask than depression-and arguably even more tragic. Malevolent inner voices often command self-destruction for unintelligible reasons. If you suspect someone might be depressed, don’t allow your tendency to deny the possibility of suicidal ideation prevent you from asking about it. Despite making both parties uncomfortable, inquiring directly about suicidal thoughts almost always yields an honest response. Often people suffer with it silently, planning suicide without anyone ever knowing. Because depression is often treatable, we should all seek to recognize its presence in our close friends and loved ones.

They shouldn’t be blamed for falling prey to such distorted thoughts any more than a cardiac patient should be blamed for experiencing chest pain. The state of depression warps their thinking, allowing ideas like “everyone would all be better off without me” to make rational sense. The pain of existence often becomes too much for severely depressed people to bear. Severe depression is always accompanied by a pervasive sense of suffering as well as the belief that escape from it is hopeless. This is without question the most common reason people commit suicide. They’re not as intuitive as most think.Īt the most basic level, people try to kill themselves for one of six reasons:

For the sake of those reading this who might have been left behind by someone’s suicide, what follows is a description of how physicians are trained to think about the reasons people kill themselves. If some in-between state existed, some other alternative to death, I suspect many suicidal people would take it.

#I think my brain just committed free

People who’ve survived suicide attempts have reported wanting not so much to die as to stop living so they could free themselves from pain, a strange dichotomy but a valid one nevertheless. The one question everyone who’s known someone who’s killed him- or herself has asked without exception, that they ache to have answered more than any other, is simply: why? Why did their friend, child, parent, spouse, or sibling take their own life? Even when a note explaining the reasons is found, lingering questions usually remain: yes, they felt enough despair to want to die, but why did they feel that? A person’s suicide often takes the people it leaves behind by surprise (only intensifying survivor’s guilt for failing to see it coming). Suicide often devastates those left behind: pain mixed with guilt, anger, and regret makes for a bitter drink, the taste of which can take many months or even years to wash out of some mouths.

Though many of us don’t know anyone who’s killed him- or herself, many of us know people left behind by the suicide of someone close to them.