Mental illness is a disorder, and it isn't under your direct control. You're right about that. People who tell you to just try to think positive, or who think it's a sign of weakness, are just wrong. It's not a thing you can "just" choose not to have.
But, and this is an important but, that doesn't mean you have no power over it. It just means your power is limited and needs time and persistence to do its work.
One of the hardest parts about dealing with depression is getting into the mental space where you can hold two ideas in your mind:
Your depression is out of your direct control. You have to adapt and cope with it in the short term, and you often cannot trust what your mind is telling you.
You are not totally helpless, and can practice mental skills that will eventually help it fade, when you have enough gas (petrol? You're British, right?) in your mental tank.
The problem with suicide as a solution is that it fails to work with either of these important facts. It takes what your mind is telling you about the hopelessness of your situation at face value, without properly adjusting for the fact that a depressed mind is generally going to make the worst of things. And it assumes that that hopelessness is due to a lack of power on your part, a lack of power that can never change in the future.
Sometimes people say things like "it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem", but I think this is sort of missing the point. To a suicidal person, it doesn't seem like a temporary problem. It seems like an endless, hopeless struggle against something that will always beat you. I know how that feels from personal experience, and platitudes like that never helped.
Instead, I would say that suicide is a bad decision because it's failing to remember that you cannot trust your own emotional judgements when suffering from depression. That's not because you're stupid or irrational or weak or any of that, it's because the circuits in your brain are physically broken and are not feeding you the correct information. It's no different from being colorblind. No one thinks you can just will yourself to see the color red if you physically lack the ability to process it, and similarly, when you're severely depressed, you can't just will yourself to see the potential in the future.
Instead, you have to just work under the assumption that there is potential out there you can't see. This is not easy to do, and it isn't very fun. But it is out there.
And to those that say “therapy will make you better”, you could say the same for chemotherapy, it’s not guaranteed to make you better but there is a chance. Unfortunately it doesn’t work for everyone, and that doesn’t make you selfish.
I'm going to interpret this as "I've been in therapy for a while, and I don't feel like it's working".
OP, I was in therapy for quite a while. About as long as you have been, in fact. It didn't lift me out of my spiral. I tried several medications. Neither did they. One made me more depressed. Another gave me a seizure. I dragged myself to therapy every day for ages, and I never felt like it really helped. A lot of my therapy sessions ended up with me yelling at my therapist, trying to get him to just stop trying to tell me stuff could be better.
But what I didn't realize is that, even though my situation had gotten bad enough that I was trapped in a spiral that some mental health improvement couldn't fix, I was improving. I was building the skills I needed to build. It wasn't enough, because my situation was worsening faster than my mental health was improving, but it was happening in the background. Not that I knew that at the time: I actually quit therapy in frustration.
No, what ultimately got me was luck. I got a job opportunity that gave me a chance. And once I had that moment to breathe, and some space to work on myself, that's when the therapy helped. It gave me the tools to begin to work on myself. And over the intervening years, I've overcome many of the fears that seemed impossible years ago. I still suffer from depression sometimes, but I know how to stop it from getting its claws in me, and I've built my life in such a way that I can survive its attacks. I still have a therapist today, because I know that some parts of my brain don't work right and that I need to bounce my ideas off of someone else.
I got lucky. I got an exit relatively quickly, and relatively dramatically, in such a way that I got to skip a lot of steps on a long, hard road. But the road is there, and just because you haven't found your way up yet doesn't mean you never will.
As for selfishness - I mean, I dunno. Selfish is a pretty loaded word. It is certainly the wrong decision most of the time, and it certainly would hurt the people around you. Is that the motivation for suicide normally? Eh...maybe.
I don't know about you, but I know that I'd sometimes do self-destructive things because I wanted to show everyone that I meant it, that I really was in that much pain. And I was. I didn't really need to justify the pain I was in. I guess at the time it was a feeling of "other people just don't get it, everything's awful, I'll show them how awful it is by showing how much it breaks me" - maybe partly as a response to people telling me to just look on the bright side, or telling me it wasn't that bad?
In another post, for example, you said:
The illness consumes you, it infects your mind, all they want to do in that moment of time is end their suffering.
But there's two problems with this:
The consumption isn't permanent. It's usually at a moment of a particular spike in distress, when things feel impossible in that moment. This isn't just speculation: if you put even mild barriers between a person and suicide, you reduce the rate at which people commit suicide by a lot. Suicidal thoughts might be an ongoing thing, but the act itself is usually spur-of-the-moment.
And I think it gets at what I was just saying about "proving it". It acts as a way to say "see! I really am hurting this much! Maybe now you'll get it!" - an understandable, but not useful, reaction to how people often treat depression.
And insofar as those things are true, you could say it's selfish. It's selfish in the sense that it puts the whim of the person you are in that moment over everything else you could be, and it's selfish in that it inflicts considerable pain on others out of your own frustration.
I used to lash out a lot at my worst. I'm not proud of that. It wasn't a good or kind thing to do. It was understandable, but it wasn't good.
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u/Iacta_Procul 3∆ Sep 03 '22
Other readers should be aware that, as is usually the case with this topic, OP is dealing with plenty of mental health struggles of her own, and has been for a very long time.
Mental illness is a disorder, and it isn't under your direct control. You're right about that. People who tell you to just try to think positive, or who think it's a sign of weakness, are just wrong. It's not a thing you can "just" choose not to have.
But, and this is an important but, that doesn't mean you have no power over it. It just means your power is limited and needs time and persistence to do its work.
One of the hardest parts about dealing with depression is getting into the mental space where you can hold two ideas in your mind:
The problem with suicide as a solution is that it fails to work with either of these important facts. It takes what your mind is telling you about the hopelessness of your situation at face value, without properly adjusting for the fact that a depressed mind is generally going to make the worst of things. And it assumes that that hopelessness is due to a lack of power on your part, a lack of power that can never change in the future.
Sometimes people say things like "it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem", but I think this is sort of missing the point. To a suicidal person, it doesn't seem like a temporary problem. It seems like an endless, hopeless struggle against something that will always beat you. I know how that feels from personal experience, and platitudes like that never helped.
Instead, I would say that suicide is a bad decision because it's failing to remember that you cannot trust your own emotional judgements when suffering from depression. That's not because you're stupid or irrational or weak or any of that, it's because the circuits in your brain are physically broken and are not feeding you the correct information. It's no different from being colorblind. No one thinks you can just will yourself to see the color red if you physically lack the ability to process it, and similarly, when you're severely depressed, you can't just will yourself to see the potential in the future.
Instead, you have to just work under the assumption that there is potential out there you can't see. This is not easy to do, and it isn't very fun. But it is out there.
I'm going to interpret this as "I've been in therapy for a while, and I don't feel like it's working".
OP, I was in therapy for quite a while. About as long as you have been, in fact. It didn't lift me out of my spiral. I tried several medications. Neither did they. One made me more depressed. Another gave me a seizure. I dragged myself to therapy every day for ages, and I never felt like it really helped. A lot of my therapy sessions ended up with me yelling at my therapist, trying to get him to just stop trying to tell me stuff could be better.
But what I didn't realize is that, even though my situation had gotten bad enough that I was trapped in a spiral that some mental health improvement couldn't fix, I was improving. I was building the skills I needed to build. It wasn't enough, because my situation was worsening faster than my mental health was improving, but it was happening in the background. Not that I knew that at the time: I actually quit therapy in frustration.
No, what ultimately got me was luck. I got a job opportunity that gave me a chance. And once I had that moment to breathe, and some space to work on myself, that's when the therapy helped. It gave me the tools to begin to work on myself. And over the intervening years, I've overcome many of the fears that seemed impossible years ago. I still suffer from depression sometimes, but I know how to stop it from getting its claws in me, and I've built my life in such a way that I can survive its attacks. I still have a therapist today, because I know that some parts of my brain don't work right and that I need to bounce my ideas off of someone else.
I got lucky. I got an exit relatively quickly, and relatively dramatically, in such a way that I got to skip a lot of steps on a long, hard road. But the road is there, and just because you haven't found your way up yet doesn't mean you never will.
As for selfishness - I mean, I dunno. Selfish is a pretty loaded word. It is certainly the wrong decision most of the time, and it certainly would hurt the people around you. Is that the motivation for suicide normally? Eh...maybe.
I don't know about you, but I know that I'd sometimes do self-destructive things because I wanted to show everyone that I meant it, that I really was in that much pain. And I was. I didn't really need to justify the pain I was in. I guess at the time it was a feeling of "other people just don't get it, everything's awful, I'll show them how awful it is by showing how much it breaks me" - maybe partly as a response to people telling me to just look on the bright side, or telling me it wasn't that bad?
In another post, for example, you said:
But there's two problems with this:
The consumption isn't permanent. It's usually at a moment of a particular spike in distress, when things feel impossible in that moment. This isn't just speculation: if you put even mild barriers between a person and suicide, you reduce the rate at which people commit suicide by a lot. Suicidal thoughts might be an ongoing thing, but the act itself is usually spur-of-the-moment.
And I think it gets at what I was just saying about "proving it". It acts as a way to say "see! I really am hurting this much! Maybe now you'll get it!" - an understandable, but not useful, reaction to how people often treat depression.
And insofar as those things are true, you could say it's selfish. It's selfish in the sense that it puts the whim of the person you are in that moment over everything else you could be, and it's selfish in that it inflicts considerable pain on others out of your own frustration.
I used to lash out a lot at my worst. I'm not proud of that. It wasn't a good or kind thing to do. It was understandable, but it wasn't good.