Thank you for the post, raganwald. It's always good to have a reminder, no matter how many times it may have been said before. I personally really appreciate it.
This point is also relevant with New Year's Eve coming up.
Invite a couple of extra people to your New Year's Eve party whom you might not have thought of inviting, and you might do more good than you think.
It's also worth mentioning that being alone is perfectly fine, but when people become lonely, it's something that needs to be addressed. It's all a state of mind, after all.
I'm not planning to do anything for NYE myself. I don't particularly even want to be around my family as that can really be not fun at all, further isolation is actually a better option out of those two.
A cursory examination will likely not demonstrate loneliness. If I am lonely, then I will be happy when I'm in the presence of any of my friends, and so I'll appear happy and just fine to them. I'll even feel happy, in case they ask me how I am. Loneliness is thus peculiarly difficult to diagnose except deliberately.
[I suppose that once you know this, you might try to detect loneliness as "being really happy to see you" or something. Obviously you might find false positives (being happy for other reasons), or false negatives (if they don't feel you're a very close friend). Still, it's a starting point.
The cure, of course, is to continue to be with your friend for as long as he wants (to the degree possible), let him interact with you, and encourage him to share his feelings and his doings with you. (But no pressure. Encouragement is a friend who's happy to be with you and happy to hear anything you have to say without giving unasked-for criticism, not one who asks you hard questions like "How are you?" Such a question can be helpful to establish that you're interested or willing to listen, but it can also be difficult and annoying to answer, so don't press if he stumbles on it.)
This is kind of a natural resolution, isn't it? I've said that, in response to seeing that your friend wants to be with you, you should continue to be with your friend; and that you should encourage him to share things that he probably would like to share with you (in a way that isn't unpleasant or difficult). This is kind of "duh, that's how to be a good friend", and "that's how to make good conversation, at least in this situation". But it's probably helpful to have things like this written down; not everyone has figured out or internalized every part of it by himself.]
Hey, no worries. I think it's worth asking people to think about the people they know and ask themselves "when's the last time I had a good/meaningful conversation with that person?"
That's the flipside to your post i think. It's not enough to tell those in despair "don't give up hope". We should reach out and find out how those around us actually are.
It gives me a US toll-free number. They probably only show it to people for whom it probably wouldn't be an international call, so if you're outside the US or using a proxy, that would explain it.
Getting the numbers for different countries and making sure that they're current might be tricky, so I don't know how hard this would be, but I'll pass the request on.
Wonderful thought and worthwhile effort. And I see that Facebook is also making similar efforts. I'm glad to see that.
My meta-thought about this is how do you make this proactive instead of passive? If you don't visit raganwald or Facebook, how will you get any encouragement this Christmas season?
I've often thought that some corners of the Internet could benefit from a virtual chaplain who could approach members of their online community if they suspected something was wrong. Or they could be a low threat pre-suicide (or other issue) conversation and make themself very approachable for those moving in that direction to try to steer them onto more healthy directions.
Is this a good idea, or is it just my inner pastor thinking out loud?
I don't think it's that easy to tell, especially not on the internet. A better question might be, how do you reach out to people suffering in silence and convince them it is okay to talk? (An anonymous online suicide hotline which doesn't report cases to the authorities might help, but I suspect it would be trolled.)
I just heard this on NPR this morning, so I may not have the specifics: Apparently, FB will provide a link that somebody can click if one of their friends writes something that friend thinks indicates their friend may be having suicidal thoughts, and their friend will get a message for a real-time chat with someone from a suicide prevention place.
And your point about it not being easy to tell is very true. This is why the thought about the virtual chaplain. People would hopefully carry enough real-world positive thoughts about chaplains into their virtual dealings to feel comfortable "talking" with an online chaplain. If a community had a designated chaplain, that person would be known to the other members of the community and anyone with issues would be encouraged to have confidential communication with that person. (Chaplains being licensed religious ministers are usually permitted by the law to keep the contents of conversations private ... except in a few very specific cases such as child abuse mandatory reporting situations.)
Ok, that was a little scary as a title considering the URL was raganwald's blog. I had to click it fast to ensure that all was safe. Perhaps a better title, atleast on HN is in order?
Snopes suggest it falls slightly over the holiday from 34 per million people to 30 per million people and then rises to 41 per million people at New Year’s.
It might be a myth, but but snopes' 2 obscure references to some "studies" that cover a tiny region of the world are hardly compelling evidence.
I want more proof either for or against this notion.
Snopes stories have the same problem that urban legends have: people are quick to believe them without checking it more, and for the same reason, feeling superior to those who don't know (the myth|the debunking).
Snopes tries to combat this by having fake stories as well. They are all segregated into The Repository Of Lost Legends(TROLL) section of the website though.
A quick Google search does seem to confirm this and at reputable sources such as Psychology Today and the Mayo Clinic. However that should not be a reason to dismiss increased awareness especially as an outreach to those experiencing depression and suicidal thoughts. In other words, it's always a good time to talk about it and to try to help. If the holidays increase awareness and get people talking about it I don't see that as a bad thing even if there isn't a statistical increase in suicide.
It really doesn't matter if it's a myth if you feel like that. The pressures that you can feel when depressed and surrounded by family create bad situations that might result in an attempt later, once everyone is gone, or simply a really sad holiday. Frankly, neither of these is an acceptable outcome. This is the 21st century and a human being shouldn't need to feel scared and alone anymore.
I've noticed a lot of people feeling rather dysphoric lately. Myself, I always feel very strange around mid Oct-mid Dec, I think due to the change in seasons and my natural cycle of brain chemistry (which isn't ideal). I'm not concerned about the holidays in particular, but when you do have a drab family or social life, it's hard not to feel confronted by that at Christmas and the New Year.
The economic situation as affected many people negatively, especially trying at a time that one hopes to have extra money for their family. I'd believe that we have more than an average share of despondence these days.
From: Mitch Altman
Date: Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 12:59 PM
Subject: [Noisebridge-discuss] Geeks & Depression meetup
To: NoiseBridge Discuss
Geeks & Depression meetup
Tuesday, 6-December, 7:30pm
No Starch Press, 38 Ringold Street, San Francisco, CA
94103
(near Civic Center BART Station)
Let's have a meetup where geeks can talk about depression
and suicide. You are not alone. Share your story, if you
like. Share a friend's story. Or just hang out and
listen. Let's make it OK to talk about these things so
that we don't feel so alone with our feelings of being
alone and depressed or suicidal.
This is not a support group -- none of us are trained
professionals, but we can get together in a safe,
confidential space to talk about depression and suicide
-- an important part of life for so many of us geeks.
Mitch.
So it's already happened I guess. Anyone know how it went?
I know many counterexamples of people in various states who have received health insurance coverage even after seeking treatment for depression. The problem of denial of coverage for "preexisting conditions" is much broader than that, anyway. Insurance companies have been playing that game for so long with so many different disease conditions that regulation is increasingly denying the companies the scope to write their contracts in that manner.
This is important, and startup founders are especially vulnerable.
The expectations, both from the world and founders themselves, are often impossibly high - afterall there can be only one facebook and one Google. Failure in startups isn't the same as failure in a corporate job. Startups are so much harder that if you make it to the first line of code you've already beat 90% of the people that want to do a startup. If you launch you've beat 99%. If you actually become ramen profitable you're a superstar in my eyes.
The problem of suicide and depression among startup founders is more pronounced than you might think, both because of the high expectations, but also because the founder is the one who needs to always be positive, egg others on, and never show weakness. Often while constantly doubting his (or her) own abilities and chances of success. This is incredibly hard and can end in catastrophe if you don't talk to someone about it. It even happened for a ycombinator company (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859117).
Remember to enjoy the journey - it's fun, and if you fail you'll be held in extremely high regard amongst fellow entrepreneurs and HN'ers for having tried. Most people just dream, the people that actually try are stars.
If you have any questions, or just want to talk please contact me. My mail is in my profile.
Suicidal ideation is a process starting with falling short of expectations then blaming yourself for the shortfall. You start incorrectly rationalizing reasons why everything is your fault and how nothing can get better. Negativity permeates every thought. Your world breaks down into tiny logical blocks and you rationalize why everything is hopeless.
The only way out is to break the chain of elevating mental isolation and negativity. It's easier to stop it in the nascent stages. Try not to blame yourself. The world is a big place and we have so much to do.
> The only way out is to break the chain of elevating mental isolation and negativity.
How exactly to do that is the tricky part, though (and not just tricky for individuals, but the subject of much debate in psychiatry). Possibilities include pharmacological intervention, therapy, or some sort of change in circumstances. The latter is a really large set of options, but also poorly understood: there are semi-regular reports of people completely changing outlook after significant changes in circumstances (e.g. changing careers), but it's very hard to come up with rigorous evaluation of the success of that "treatment option", because it's not very easy to run a controlled study, and not always an available option.
He argues that most depression is just severe learned helplessness caused by your own pessimistic inner explanations of why events happened. He makes a good case for it & suggests techniques to build better explanatory habits. I haven't finished the book yet but so far it's quite compelling.
My won feelings about helplessness learning to play Go parallel feelings if helplessness in my life trying other things where it felt like I had no idea what I was doing and no control over the outcome:
Obviously since you posted this 21 minutes ago I haven't exactly had the time to get into it seriously, but reading that inspired me to check out Learned Optimism and just reading the first chapter it speaks to my personal struggle. Thanks.
"Remember to enjoy the journey - it's fun, and if you fail you'll be held in extremely high regard amongst fellow entrepreneurs and HN'ers for having tried. Most people just dream, the people that actually try are stars."
Just because most of us can accept failure as a part of founding a company and doing business in a capitalist system, that does not necessarily mean those around us have the same tolerances or understanding. It is within that context, and the pressures applied on entrepreneurs by external influences, that most feel suicide is the only way out when they fail or feel they are on the brink of failure.
While none of the start-ups I've been involved with as a co-founder, or first dozen employees, have been personally successful financially, I have enjoyed the experiences, learnt from them and I can even have a sense of humour about the situation when things go wrong. I can't say the same for all of my colleagues who have lost spouses, family separation, second businesses or incurred costs & significant family disruption because we had relocated to another country and the business failed soon after we arrived. As a (now) non-drinker, I've sat with them in bars or a park as they drowned their pains in alcohol, and wondered if there is something I can say that would brighten them up, help them out and make them want to live until at least the next afternoon, when we have to start over again on the road to recovery. Usually its finding a new project for them to work on or being able to spend time with their family in a more relaxed environment (neither are always readily available).
My failures with start-ups, while disappointing, are among the least of the problems I've faced in my life. So far its been relatively easy for me to deal with it. Watching my colleagues for signs they aren't able to cope with the situation has been a task that I maintain, to help my friends and our businesses, but also to make sure I don't also accidently fall into the same trap.
But people need to learn to accept (and even appreciate) their own failures.
One of my big realizations in my life was that all the crap I had gone through, from the bullying in grade school to being assaulted by a street gang, to being the victim of some pretty serious domestic violence at the hands of a very violent girlfriend had enriched my life in ways I could no longer describe, and that I am a stronger person who sees the world in ways that others often can't for having gone through them. I haven't ever had the luxury of ignoring the necessity for self-improvement, and therefore I am a better person for having gone through it all.
I try to teach my kids that failure is an event, never a person, and that it is a necessary stage on the road to success.
mixmax, these are very reassuring words for someone at a very vulnerable point in their startup. I tried, its positive, be positive and something will work fine. Or even a more realistic realization if you are failing too that it is fine to fail.
But I think the hardest problem we all founders face is to find the person who can share the views and motivate the right way. Most of the time, someone consoling would also be irritating, you just want to crib (mostly) and you will get over it and start working the next day.
It is almost ironically, sometimes, you just know what you want to hear and you are just waiting for someone to come and tell that so that you are fine.
The problem is not able to comprehend how everything would turn out as there would be tens of big and small issues at hand any given day and getting clarity is a big part of not feeling negative.
I have been fighting with all the bad vibes in office offlate and it is terrible especially as a single founder with a 7 ppl team. We haven't launched our product - it has been 1 year since our first engineer. It is already negative as you don't have anything out there and now you put in pressure things are going to break worse, ppl don't want to put in extra hours. It is hard to pump in positive energy. Fearing I will give feedback wrong way or push people too hard at this time I became reclusive. Few people own up, leaving them on their own track helps but it is almost a problem as you got to pull it off as a team and for that I have to speak up, bring them together with lots of energy. It is a hard time right now.
Posts like these are dangerous. If someone feels horrible, seeing "You may feel like you are alone and nobody is as bad a person as you are" just makes the person feel worse.
You can't shove detached, inexperienced logic in the face of someone with temporarily broken brain chemistry.
I've never been entirely sure. A while ago I made http://suicidescale.com/ but the wording still feels awkward to me. You have to strike a balance between explaining and understanding without sounding condescending.
Explaining the temporary condition can help so people know they aren't alone (knowing you are one of millions who have had the same exact thought processes is a wake up call).
Mentioning the processes can be caused by certain foods and medications in some people seems like a good idea too. ("Feeling suicidal? Did you just eat twelve pancakes with half a gallon of syrup? All the sugars have screwed you up for a while. Sleep it off. Did you just start a new antibiotic and now you want to jump off a bridge? Sleep it off. Call your doctor to get different meds. Your brain will reset.")
Thank you so much for making that site. I've never come across such an accurate description of the symptoms of depression. I can relate to a lot of what's written there and it really helps put things into perspective. Meditating, exercising, and spending time with friends has helped me feel a lot better.
I just checked your website. I'm in the step 5. And, yes, I now feel this post is very dangerous because I never thought of suicide. Worse. I have recently dropped of colleague and don't have any friends right now. (didn't talk with a human for something like 15-20 days). Any quick remedies? I'm feeling more anxious.
I've being in your shoes. One of the _most_ effective thing for me was to talk to a mental health professional - it was by far the best investment I've made in myself in the last several years. After 5 sessions I was able to resolve many anxiety, guilt, worries and other issues.
My biggest mistake was postponing the decision to talk to somebody for several months out of false pride, thinking I'm able to handle it myself.
As vtail said, professional help is the long term treatment. If you need a quick fix, shrink your mind down to simple tasks using internet drugs: cuteoverload, reddit, hulu, tvtropes, HN, plan a trip to japan (doesn't matter if you even go), http://symphonyofscience.com/videos.html , ...
For me, two things help: reminding myself nothing matters as much as I think it matters and setting a medium-term goal. Our decisions can be anything and it's fine. The world--universe--is a big place. Take risks. Nothing worthwhile is judging you. So, build something new. Meet people. If you make a fool of yourself, it doesn't matter at all. Let other people wonder why you're impervious to their hostility. You've seen the truth. In the grand scheme of things, we can't even be seen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field
The world is yours to do with as you please. Take advantage of it.
Social contacts are more important that you might think. I used to think that I'm introvert, but nowadays I've discovered that I need a daily dose of real life social interaction.
Problem here is that when you finally meet someone to chat with, you're probably way too desperate to get that feeling that someone cares about you. It might be hard not to talk only about your self. That's how it goes for me at least. And people smell that despair far away. My advice is: remember to force yourself to ask questions when you chat.
Internet relay chat is good place to rehearse social interaction, but it's bad supplement in the long run.
Having been in your situation, the things I found helpful for a quick fix were exercise and food. It doesn't matter how much or what. If I am in a slump and feeling like it is all too much I force myself to do some exercise. A chin-up, a push-up, go for a run or a swim. If I am feeling really bad I will make myself do one push-up, on my knees. or just kneel on the floor and do a negative repetition. That's usually enough to get me started on doing something. Then I will go and eat some food. Or more likely, go to the shops and buy some food to cook. Then eat something. For me doing a little bit of exercise and then eating often makes enough of a difference that my misery is manageable.
There is some evidence that exercise is helpful for others in dealing with depression, e.g. [1] (A review paper) Anecdotally, this seems particularly the case if you are at all ADHD.
Long term I agree with all the other posts pointing out that seeking professional treatment is the best option. The pride factor was a huge problem for me and still is. I treat it like research. Psychiatrists and Psychologists, are experts in there field who I pay to explain options for treatment an methods for assessment and monitoring. Thankfully this has only happened once, but if they can't explain the different options and why the course of action they recommend is the best I find a different doctor.
"didn't talk with a human for something like 15-20 days"
I'm not an expert, but try going to a public place, maybe a museum where you'll be forced to interact at least with the ticket guy. Or even a mall, and maybe ask some questions about some product ("does it come in blue?"). I'm not saying it's a solution, but it might get you an encouraging quick fix for some human interaction, to give you some energy to do other stuff.
Hi raganwald. Your post might be dangerous. I am not an expert. It is worth further research. You can start with the following sections on Wikipedia to give you a gist of why it might be dangerous and then research further:
Yes, suicidal thoughts are the result of an unhealthy brain. Many creative people are a little bit bipolar, experiencing alternating periods of extreme productivity (hypomania) and low productivity (mild depression). Prolonged stress can make the lows much worse than normal.
Bottom line: If you have suicidal thoughts, you should consult a psychologist. They have experience helping professionals fix their own brain chemistry.
Suicide and mental illness need to been seen as conditions for which people need care and support rather than marginalization. Thank you for posting this.
Ive associated suicide as correlated with too much logic. It takes a litle bit of delusion deep in the core of your being to assign value, meaning and purpose to the process of moving molecules from a high energy state to lower energy states. Which is all we are doing. Convincing a logical person that delusion is needed is a tough sell.
Ive had the experience of trying to talk some normality into a suicidal person. Its like two kids on a carnival ride and one is queasy and hates it and wants to get off. Every turn and moment is filled with a desire to get off. what does the kid having fun on the ride say to the one who wants off? It comes down to "stop feeling the way you do". the misrable one has to figure out the source of the pain and hijack a feedback loop happening in the subconscious mind.
Counterpoint: it takes a little bit of delusion to seek some kind of "ultimate justification" to the naturally pleasuable and fulfilling experience that is life.
My point is only: you can't break the symmetry with logic alone. Ultimately your priors/axioms/experiences come into play.
I found that Albert Camus' philosophy of Absurdism provided less depressing insights on Man's "existential crisis" that other existential philosophies:
According to Camus, one's freedom – and the opportunity to give life meaning – lies in the recognition of absurdity. In acknowledging the absurdity of seeking any inherent meaning, but continuing this search regardless, one can be happy, gradually developing his or her own meaning from the search alone.
It's what keeps me going. I can't control what happens after I die but I can control what happens in this life. So I'm going to make my purpose in this life ---making an impact now. Even if it's ultimately meaningless in the universe's timeframe, so be it.
For the record, logical, analytic, probabilistically correct thinking is only a way of reaching goals. The goals themselves cannot be established by means of logic, only deconflicted/clarified/etc. To think otherwise is illogical.
On the latter point, that's a pretty major dispute in philosophy and mathematics. The axiomatic Hilbert-style approach probably has the upper hand in mathematics, but a Russell-style logicist approach that sees foundations themselves as subject to rational analysis is still a major position, and among philosophers, the idea that axioms are arbitrary and rationality only applies past that is probably the minority view (though existentialists hold a view somewhat like that). Not that that's necessarily practical advice.
There are specific video materials prepared for psychiatric nurses on how to communicate with people who have delusional belief systems or other problems with thinking.
Avner, divorce is terrible but please believe me, you will get through it. Probably you can't imagine how, but life is full of surprises, and despite all the pain and loss you're experiencing now, the mystery of life is that you will end up wiser, stronger and happier. We don't get to see the future, yet it happens.
If you like literature, it might help to try to view your situation as the hero's journey.
Find some things that give you comfort, and just hang in there. For me, it was music that got me through the dark days.
Immerse yourself, escape for small amounts of time, and find things to sustain you -- mentally, emotionally, physically. Reach out to your family and/or friends. Just endure any way you can, and you will come out on the other side of this.
Marriage creates a very deep and important link between two people, but once one of the two sides no longer want to continue, it is better to look forward: you will not lost all the good things about your marriage, they are inside you, but you can discover that you can be so happy, with a different partner, again.
It happened to me in the past, I felt lost, now I'm happy again with my new partner. Time is an important factor, don't be impatient, and focus again on yourself for a while.
I wish I could see marriage this way. After being with my girlfriend for almost 7 years, we married. Turns out, a few days before the wedding she started an affair with the leader of her theatre group, whom she invited with the group to our wedding apero, to play some theatre plays for us. Two months later, she spilled the beans, and so much shit has happened since, that I can't look at a couple without thinking which one is cheating the other or if they are cheating their partners together. Living in a country where there is no apparent social consequence for adultery has pushed me to the point where I don't want anything to do with what marriage or relationships represent. I left the country I grew up in to come here for this girl, and I'll be leaving without getting the divorce most people would want. I can't face it, and don't give a rat's ass about all of that anymore. Just getting my life back, and finding some inner peace again is all that matters.
I've also left suicide as an option open, but I've got one plan ahead of that which is just to stand up and walk away, loose ends untied.
My point is, the meaning that most people take for granted from an intimate relationship with someone, for me personally, has died. I'm no longer willing to sacrifice so much for someone else, because it took so much from everyday since. The trauma steals your life because your mind simply isn't capable of thinking of anything else anymore.
The conflict of loving someone and at the same time hating that part of them that destroyed you, is a paradox that makes it impossible to be blind to the reality that you can no longer trust anyone with your life.
I'll be glad to get out of this heartless country and back into the sunshine, where people have the balls to speak their mind and call a bastard a bastard, and a bitch a bitch.
You remind me of a line from a TV show (I think an episode of "Quantum Leap") where a woman has just been dumped by her married lover (or something along those lines) and someone talks her out of committing suicide by telling her something to the effect that if she kills herself over him, that would just send him the message she "couldn't live without him" and feed his ego and is that really what she wants to "say" to him?
Well, the frustrating thing about love, even after betrayal, is that your biological make up makes you believe you need that person. It took me a long time before I lost hope and decided even feeling that way wasn't worth being with that person. You can only be walked over so much before there's no other option but to say fuck it, I've had enough.
As for killing myself, to cause her pain. It just doesn't work, because I don't get to see what effect it has. And she'll get over it far too quickly, anyway.
Not to put you down, but I seriously doubt you are as acquainted with relationship drama as I am. It can be gotten past. Below is the link to my blog, where I have spent the past few months "anonymously" talking about my love life, debugging my own wetware, blah blah blah. It is specifically the link to the archive. I suggest you start at the beginning and go through it in chronological order (edit: Though the beginning is kind of slow and things don't pick up until mid June, I suggest you bear with it).
Consider it a Christmas gift (because I have so far mostly tried to keep this off HN -- I really don't need 500 men hitting on me). However, I have added a donate button and I have a t-shirt in mind I want to create. Given my current situation (which I know you know about since you replied here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3350035), any suggestions on how to monetize it are welcome. I think it's a good read. I'm not asking for charity (if you get value out of reading it and donate, hey, that's not charity. Comics do that all the time). I just historically have never managed to get much monetary value back for what I put out there and I would like to change that.
I appreciate you offering the blog to read, and I've skimmed some, but the several mentions of infidelity are simply salt for my wounds. I have an absolutely furious anger towards infidelity, for which I won't ever again be made to apologize.
EDIT: I appreciate your background, and also that you offered the blog in good faith.
Remember that you have all the options in the world. If life is only be worth living with a fresh start, sell your apartment, take one suitcase, and travel to Paris or London or Australia. Your life is yours to do what you wish, not what others expect. Live in whatever way makes life worthwhile.
If you ever want someone to talk to, you can email me at aantny@gmail.com. I can probably host you for a night if you need to crash in Israel.
Wow, cool offer :) Australia's my next destination. The place I used to call home and will again soon. It's my light at the end of the tunnel, for the moment.
Nope, Switzerland. The people here don't have the concept of having your back. They figure, if it doesn't affect their person directly, they're better off keeping to themselves. The neutrality of the country matches the way they deal with day-to-day problems within the country. This is an over generalisation, because there are some wonderful people here, like everywhere, but the general attitude that I've seen is the one I've described. If you don't fit the standard mould, or can't fake it, you won't be very successful here, and the standard mould is extremely conservative.
One of the important lessons I learnt growing up in Australia was that you have to be there for your mates, even if you have to put your body on the line. I've seen what can happen when you don't and I'll never allow that again, if I can help it.
Yes, I meant that in the sense you understood. That lady's behavior was really a below average case. I believe, that on an average people are not so bad. So I believe that our friend, deserves a better hand in future.
Actually, if I did, it wouldn't even be for this female, but simply to get relief from the emotional and mental torment that I have to endure most days. Turns out I'm a fighter, and I intend to make it, but when things go down far enough, you just never know, because things feel bad enough that it becomes a serious consideration. Right now, it's not an option. I know that I'll quit my job and flat next month, and head back home 4 months later (everything has 3 months notice in this country).
It is sad to have lost so much. And I know people have been through much worse, and right now there are other people that are going through ten kinds of hell, and I can even understand them a little.
When the pain was really bad, one thing that I thought I could really understand well and empathise with was a parent that loses his or her child. You can't understand what it's like unless you go through it yourself. And the reality is, that that sort of trauma changes everything. Who you are diverges so much that it's impossible to merge back into the main line. You're completely forked.
Actually, if I did, it wouldn't even be for this female, but simply to get relief from the emotional and mental torment that I have to endure most days
Looks like you are already feeling better. From the other comment, I came to know that you have managed to get over the dependency. So now hopefully, it should only get better. But even the journey to recovery has its down days.
Turns out I'm a fighter, and I intend to make it, but when things go down far enough, you just never know, because things feel bad enough that it becomes a serious consideration. Right now, it's not an option. I know that I'll quit my job and flat next month, and head back home 4 months later (everything has 3 months notice in this country).
Yes you are a fighter, as you have chosen to. Give a good fight. And please remember (as you already know) that a big component of these kinds of fights is test of your patience. God willing, you will win.
And please remember that you are not alone. There are others perhaps facing pains similar to what you are facing. And there are a whole lot of _good_ people who care, for goodness sake.
>a big component of these kinds of fights is test of your patience
This is a good insight. At some point you manage to carry on despite all the bad feelings, and you're simply dragging yourself through the last bit of crap that's holding you back. I recognise that my patience is limited, so I've set myself a goal that I can attain before it runs out (getting out of here and back to a sunny country).
It's frustrating to know that many people said, while I was going through the worst of it, that going back to Australia, back home, would be running away from my problems. One thing I learnt during it all was that everyone gives different advice. You're so vulerable, and no matter what people say, you often follow it. It took me at least one year, if not two, to not take advice too seriously, except that which I gave myself. It's nice to get some control back, even though the things I can't control (my thoughts and feelings) still make life difficult.
It's been good to just vent a little even if it's to strangers and in public, though mostly anonymous.
What I find difficult is that I don't really know many people that are willing to simply listen.
Mostly people brush off how you are feeling with "everything heals with time", but all you need is "yes, you're feeling absolutely rotten right now. I understand." It's the people that really can relate that stop ignoring you're current situation, as if it didn't matter because something better will be there eventually.
So much more to vent, but I'll save it for someone else :)
Home stretch. Just 2.5 more weeks, and I can quit my job and then the rest is just logistics.
> Living in a country where there is no apparent social
> consequence for adultery has pushed me to the point
> where I don't want anything to do with what marriage
> or relationships represent.
I find it sad that for many the essence of the relationship boils down to whom you sleep or don't sleep with.
It has a lot to do with trust. Without trust, how can a relationship work?
Also, do I want to find out twenty years later that I raised the child of another man? No, I don't.
Thirdly, getting blood tests that may turn out positive through no fault of my own is down right fucked up.
And fourthly, it fucking hurts to be betrayed like that, regardless of how you judge the morals.
Why is rape bad? Not because sex is bad, or forcing someone else to do something might be considered bad (parents force their children to do things all the time), but because it fucks the victim up. Cause and effect.
Through observation it's easy to see that a person experiences extreme pain through the infidelity of his partner. Maybe some don't feel a thing, but I did.
What frustrates me is that people see another causing this damage to another, and they don't give a shit. That's the crux of my problem. Complete and utter apathy for the suffering of another human being. Simply another form of complicity.
wow. that is very honest of you avner. dude, keep smiling :) and don't fucking check out. i don't care about your responsibilities. you are more important then all of those and then some. i mean, i have no idea what you're going through, besides what was stated, but i do know that you are more important than anything else in your world (unless you have kids) then they come first, then you ;)
if you live in SF, i'd love to take you out for a drink; sometimes the simple pleasures (a drink, a toke) and a complete stranger to talk with can help..
Don't use your responsibilities as a reason to hang in there. There are better reasons to stay. You have your whole life ahead of you. I know that sometimes in all the craziness of life you can forget why you're still here but the reason is simply to live. I read a post here a few weeks ago about a guy who saved up a few dollars, got out of his home and just travelled the world for a few months. He worked on some projects while he was away but his main goal was simply to get out there and see the world. I thought it was beautiful and a reminder as to why we're really here.
Get a change of scenery. Do something you've never done before or have always wanted to. Remind yourself why you're alive. I promise there's more than a few excellent reasons to stay here (as in alive). You just lost sight of them, that's all.
Edit: I'd like to add that divorce is very close to the top of the most stressful events a person can ever experience and I think it even trumps a death in the family if I remember right. It's normal for you to feel so defeated because of this but always remember that this bad state is not permanent.
Always remember that by suicide you are not only really killing yourself but also the awesome being that is inside you (Yes the voice in your head).LISTEN TO IT.DONT KILL IT.IT KNOWS THE ANSWERS ALREADY
Dont look outward for satisfaction and happiness.TRUE AND FULFILLING HAPPINESS ALWAYS COMES FROM THE INSIDE.
Also there is this awesome plant called Marijuana to help you talk to your inner being if you guys are not friends anymore!
Whenever I find myself having similar thoughts I reread Willa Cather's story, "Paul's Case", here's the relevant part, the very end:
"He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, his lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands."
Think about the "vastness of things left undone": Have you chatted with a homeless person in winter? Have you read Anna Karenina? Have you watched The Kid? Have you traveled to a foreign city and got completely lost? Have you held the hand of a starving child in Somalia or at least looked at a picture of her and wept? Have you written a letter to Santa? Have you kissed every (and I mean every) square inch of a woman's body? Have you sneaked in and slept among the ruins at Machu Picchu? Have you fallen in love with a woman who's monolingual in a language you don't speak? Have you tried to understand general theory of relativity? Have you tried to explain GTR to a bright 9-year-old kid over coco?
I could go on. These are all the things that come to mind that I haven't done. One day I plan to do at least some of them. Think about this.
Okay, so the last few years I've had time and means to travel, and I'd like to comment somewhat on a perspective I gained while doing so. The list you gave- I've done all of those things. Well, change Machu Picchu to Pompeii and Somalia to the Congo. I realize your list was not comprehensive- but let me realize the spirit of your post and say I've done a large subset of the "things I'd like to do before I die," save perhaps going into space or winning a Nobel prize and few others.
I made a pact with myself when I was miserable in high-school and my most suicidal, that I would give life a chance and see if things got better as I did more and more things I'd dreamed about and that people told me were worth living for as you've done now. If I did those things and was still unhappy, I felt I should be justified in ending my own life having given it fair chance.
Well, there was a moment, I rememember it in detail, where I was hang-gliding near Interlaken in Switzerland. A man near me said something to the order of "this is the time of our lives, huh!" And I realized then that not only was I still quite unhappy in this most excellent of situations, but that I still wanted to kill myself and indeed had never stopped wanting to kill myself. Not at the Louvre, not in Tokyo, not when succeeding financially, romantically, or in academics.
There was a quote in the Brother's Karmazov which has always troubled me, though I can't find it at the moment, when Alyosha tells a child that he "will always be an unhappy man" and the child says he knows. I believe myself to be fundamentally broken somehow genetically, and I feel that I no longer have any rational reason to expect to ever feel content as a person or free of the suicidal impulse. I will always be an unhappy man.
I can only assume there are others like me in this realization, and to them your words will seem hollow, cliche, and unrelatably foreign. To them what you've said is no different from "but you have so much to live for"- they know that and it doesn't matter. If such a person is out there and is now reading this, all I can say is, well, me too. I keep going somehow, who knows how or why, and I guess all things considered sometimes it really isn't so bad. If I can't ever silence the demons telling me to end it all, I can at least make noise somewhere else that they don't seem so loud. Not a happy result by most measures, but that's the way it is.
This resonates with me unfortunately well. Note that happiness has definite genetic links - twin studies show that it is a somewhat heritable trait, and some mechanisms have actually been found as to how it's heritable (for example, see http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/genes_economics_and_happiness.pdf).
I feel terribly sorry that you feel this way. I don't want to mess with this kind of stuff on something this important but, speaking from my own experience, and I do understand this feeling very well, I'd say that this is evidence that the sadness and ideation comes from inside and that the road to resolving it comes from working on that rather than outside things.
I've come to realise this quite strongly myself over the years as various things succeeded/failed, that what I thought would help it didn't, and that all that helps is to face the depression and actively find ways to fight it. I've found schema-based therapy very effective, for example.
I really hope you find a way to resolve these issues, or at least ways of making it better.
If you want to talk (hope this doesn't sound awfully patronising) you can find my email address in my profile.
For many people, what you say rings true, but it's dangerous to imply that that these feelings are purely a product of someone's thinking and that they can fix them on their own. There are people who, no matter how much they sit down and think things through, try and sort out their problems, etc, are going to feeling depressed -- likely due to chemical imbalances and structural differences in the brain. Thinking about suicide might be how this manifests.
Telling someone they can think themselves or "figure themselves out" to not being homosexual, schizophrenic or transgender seems crazy to many people, but not crazy when we say the same about depression. Pushing "think about it more! sort our your life!" as The Solution can be dangerous in the case where deferring more radical treatment is necessary or prudent, and the mentality that "I can think/will my way out of this" is a frequent excuse or cause for noncompliance with medication in some patients who actually do need it to not be a danger to themselves, or others.
I'm not implying the poster is such a case, or that such treatment shouldn't be tried, but it can and will fail in certain cases, and it's easy for others and the patient to justify "well I just need to try harder" or to push blame when that's deferring necessary treatment.
"There are people who, no matter how much they sit down and think things through, try and sort out their problems, etc, are going to feeling depressed"
Although you're probably right, it's also dangerous to promote that viewpoint. A depressed person accepting themselves as inevitably and irreversibly depressed is not productive, even if that's the case. It's not analogous to being gay where you can accept it and live a happy life.
I suppose accepting that you're permanently depressed could help you cope with it, but I'd be scared of having people assume thats the case before exhausting all other options.
You're wrong about not being able to live happily ever after: It's never accepting you'll be forever unhappy -- it's accepting you can't be without aid or intervention (e.g. medication, therapy, etc). I never stated that they're doomed to feel depressed, just that they're doomed to feel depressed if they don't do something other than sit and think. Depression tends to lead to a lot of rumination anyways, so it probably will seem pretty ridiculous to them to be told to be more introspective.
To clarify, I put those (schizophrenia, homosexuality, transgender) as examples of brain structure and wiring (just like clinical depression) and mentioned homosexuality explicitly because it seems less stigmatized than mental illness currently. A gay person can accept being gay and live a happy life, but they can't think themselves into being straight if they try hard enough. An individual diagnosed with major depressive disorder can accept they are clinically depressed and require treatment, then take the treatment and live a happy life, but they can't think themselves into not requiring outside aid to be in a non-depressed state. Society is a lot more accepting of the gay person than the depressed one though.
I didn't mean to imply that it can just be fixed by the person working on their own, rather that you need to face the depression itself rather than go down the road of trying other, outside, things in an attempt to indirectly fix the feelings themselves.
Of course medication/therapy/even acceptance of a chemical imbalance are not off the table at all.
A big problem with depression is that it makes you feel very guilty, unnecessarily, so I really want to make clear that I didn't want to imply somebody should feel that it's somehow their fault at all.
In many ways a large part of it is getting outside help. I really do recommend that, and have found that extremely helpful myself.
I am very much like you. Have you considered, given your minimal value of anything, that the costs associated with recreational drugs don't apply to you? I started (ab)using marijuana this year (daily). It makes life worth it for me. At the very least it's worth considering as an alternative to death.
Its easy to hide. Most the people in my life don't know. You can vaporize to minimize the health effects (also bad breath). If you do it regularly enough the cognitive deficit is less severe. Mostly just occasional memory loss. Again, nothing that you seem to care about anyway.
All three of you are incredible, wonderful, collections of atoms, the chances of whose formation and resultant animation may have been a brilliant fluke in a huge universe.
Your years are 120 or less, and then the universe will reclaim you as its own. For the universe, the span of your life should have been not even the fluttering of an eyelash before a blink. From a cosmic perspective, the existence of our whole galaxy was set to be one giant quantum fluctuation - the birth and death of a mere grain of matter, falling from one eon to another.
But then something incredible, something unexplainable, happened. Inanimate matter came forth from the deep waters. It grew legs, it started to paint on cave walls, not yet aware of the implications of what it was doing. (Have you ever wondered - of all the things the most significant cluster of particles in the whole universe could do, why would they choose to paint?) We started to reproduce. We started to communicate, to love, to build, to live! There is nothing else like us in the vast cosmos, and there may never be again.
The Milky Way should have be one passing glow of light, but somehow this humble galaxy became greater than the remainder of creation. The wondrous flash of light as our galaxy passes through existence will be most glorious moment that the universe ever experiences. You alone - a lonely sentient creature - would be that blinding flash of light even if the rest of us had never existed. The wonder of you, even as you contemplated an end to your solitary existence, would fill space long after every sun died and time itself drew to an end. In such a universe, you alone would have been notable. The fact of your existence is more incredible than the largest sun or the most massive black hole. Your glory - the glory of us all - will fill the universe forever, a single proud memory in the vast emptiness of space.
We tend to take our existence for granted, but it is an incredible fact - a miracle which all the religions on Earth were born, or given to us, in order to explain. Who would have thought? Who could have guessed that this tiny backwater planet on a spiral arm of the Milky Way would end up defining the vast cosmos forever?
Now, here is the important part: All the dead matter in the cosmos - every particle of the sun, the galaxy, and the vast everything - would give it up to be you. Sagittarius A* would disappear in an instant, if it could change places. It would give 13.2 billion years of existence for your measly 120 years of life.
Your life, unfortunately, will some day draw to an end. You know that, your atoms know that. Perhaps you are tempted to end it earlier, but no mistake could be more grave. I know not what you believe, but even if there is heaven or hell, there wont be anything like now. Let your atoms live. They have eternity itself to be inanimate.
A handful of misfiring neurons has no right to bring you to an end. The world is blinding. If your neurons can't see, you must do everything you can to fix them. Depression has easy medical fixes. Being treated for depression, fixing such a tiny flaw, may be the hardest challenge you ever face - but it is minor in the grand perspective.
Lastly, I leave the cosmos behind and appeal to you. Whoever you are, however you came into existence, and no matter what your purpose is, you are capable of understanding deep philosophical arguments and complex equations. I have none of that for you, merely a saying often heard on HN or in rejection therapy groups: Never say no. Ask yourself what is necessary to make life worth it. If you need a vacation to Hawaii to make life enjoyable again, take the next plane to Hawaii. If you cannot live in a meaningless world, leave for the mountains of India, where you may seek enlightenment in silence among fellow travelers in the sanctity of a Buddhist monastery. The parent posts' comment on marijuana is right on, but free will can do more than justify life - it can make it as brill...
I used to suffer from depression - including suicidal thoughts starting in middle school up through high school. I used to abuse drugs to escape for a couple hours at a time every day. After a near death experience while tripping on a high dose of dextromethorphan, I realized I needed to talk to someone. I spoke to my parents, who put me in rehab. There I met a man who spoke much like you did. He didn't tell me I needed to stop doing drugs, or tell me that I needed to live. He didn't He gave me his impression, a glimpse, into what he felt like living in this universe. He had a minor in physics and would explain to me in detail how everything worked - how lucky we are to be alive. It worked. I wake up each day realizing how lucky I am to be in existence, how all of us are lucky to be in existence. I appreciate everything in life, whether its good or bad, because I understand, to some degree, we are all a lucky arrangement of atoms and when we die our atoms move on to someone or something else.
I feel like this sometimes, but usually when I'm doing something that I'm really into (I mountain bike, snowboard, wakeboard, road bike, swim, climb, kayak, hike, powerkite, jet-ski, water ski, water tube, motorcycle, and hopefully soon fly, white-water raft, autocross or rally, and skydive) I'm not thinking about being sad, but I definitely get sad during great moments.
I was at the Grand Canyon a few summers ago and I just sat on the edge out past where the fences are where only a few sad kids dare to go. I'd be lying if I said I didn't think at least a few times about jumping, even if it was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen. I felt like the canyon itself was a metaphor for my life in a way; huge, full of possibility, complex, but still far from inhabitable.
The helicopter ride just before that was crazy fun, though. It was something like $240 and it was worth every penny (I was making about $140 a week at the time working in retail). I can't put into words how it felt to have my first view of the canyon be from inside a flimsy carbon fiber helicopter that was trying to tear itself apart going over the edge of the canyon at what felt like a 90* angle and jumping from ~200ft above the national forest to about a mile up above the canyon floor. I highly recommend it, if you ever have the chance.
I figure that there will be more moments in the future like that too, and I guess that's what I live for, just to see everything there is to see. My 9 day for-no-real-reason-with-nothing-planned vacation to San Francisco was also great, and I met more awesome people DOING STUFF there in a week than I have here (Detroit/Metro area, Michigan) in years, which is why I'm moving out there in a few months.
I probably have many more stories about majestic woods that I've biked and hiked through, hidden passages on rivers in a kayak, etc. but what I'm getting at is that life is an adventure, so go explore, because the worst thing you can do is live a boring life and die old without having done anything (risky|exciting|challenging|scary). Talk to the girl. Go to that party even though you're already in bed. Apply for that perfect long-shot work-from-home job. The worst failure is not even trying.
Martin Seligman, who has been mentioned above, also has a book "Authentic Happiness" which you might find interesting. As he points out, and you have experienced, inborn predisposition is the biggest factor in happiness.
However there are other big factors which you can partially control. You've probably already discovered some of them.
I think you would like the book because Seligman recognizes the fundamental difficulty of the problem. As you may have guessed, Seligman himself is predisposed to unhappiness.
I've experienced something similar, not as bad as you. But, some things have helped me. I'm sorry if this is somewhat cliche, but based on my own thought and decisions I've continued my faith in Jesus and God from my childhood, and this is also consoling.
On the other side, I've almost if not completely become an atheist at one point, and even then I realized that suicide was too final a choice for how little I knew about reality. In fact, atheism also consoled me, in that the thought that nothing lay beyond death meant I needn't fear death, nor anything in life, at least rationally (instinctual fear remains).
Finally, starting from an atheist perspective, that I didn't need to fear life, I realized I was searching for something that I haven't found yet, and that is a large part of why I've felt bad. Suicide again was too final and inadequate an answer to that desire inside of me. My desire and ignorance of reality give me hope I will find what I am seeking, and even the seeking is fulfilling to a degree.
But the problem with serious depression is that you lose interest in even the things you used to love, let alone things you could love. You find it hard to find meaning in even the most meaningful things. The things you have done become meaningless. The things you could do in the future don't even cross your mind.
You become horribly short-sighted and pessimistic. The key is regaining a fair perspective on life, which is on par with "finding meaning" -- something many spend their whole life trying to do. It's no easy quest. There's no easy answer.
I'm never sure what to say to friends who are depressed, besides what's cliche.
Hang in there, Avner! I'm also in the middle of a divorce which would have seemed like a very bad joke had someone told me about it 9 months ago, but that's life.
I don't have any good advice, I can tell you a couple of things that I'm currently doing that sort of help me go through this pit of despair.
First of all, I'm trying to leave my past life behind me, that is I try to connect with my future ex wife and her parents and friends as little as possible, and when I do I do it only for "administrative" reasons (like collecting my books from our apartment and stuff like that).
Second, and I don't know if this applies to you, I'm lucky enough to have smart co-workers who kind of understand what I'm going through and they always try to cheer me up. That makes me feel guilty about displaying my depression at work, so that for the duration of the 8-9 hours of daily work I try my best to be a normal human being, reacting to jokes, small chatter during the cigarettes break etc. I don't know if medically speaking this is the best take on the situation, but at least I get to "cheat" on that feeling of emptiness for around a third of the day.
Third (even though I think the counting doesn't matter anymore), I've tried to set up some tasks for me to accomplish in the near and medium term. For example for the upcoming holidays I plan to finish one of my personal projects which would be of really valuable help for at least a dozen of people, and during the winter months I plan to put enough money on the side to buy me a VW second-hand van, so that I'll go around the country when summer comes.
And last, before this becomes too awkward of an answer, I've given myself "proud-of-myself" points for not opening that wine bottle that has been sitting on the kitchen table for 2 months, since I moved out of my former apartment. Maybe you can find something similar to cheer you up and make you feeling proud of yourself, it doesn't have to be big.
Yeah... keping off alcohol was the first thing that occured to me. It has been fve months and I am still walking dead. Does anybody know how long hefore it starts to go away?
I guess I can only really say hang in there. I was divorced before 25 and embarrassed about it, and there were times when I really struggled with wondering whether I had done the right thing to break something that was mediocre but not horrible to find a happier future for both of us. Within about 18 months, I had met someone new that pushed me and inspired me, and we travelled the world for a full year, through 20+ countries and varying experiences. About 8-9 years later, we're married, have built a new house and I can barely even remember that time during and after the divorce. Stay busy and social. Time alone mulling it over is often difficult.
Hang in. I commend your coping mechanism too. I'm in what sounds like a similar situation, and its the hardest thing I've ever dealt with.
I've thought about suicide in my past, but since then have lost friends to suicide and other senseless reasons. I know somehow now that it is definitely not The Way, regardless of remaining responsibilities.
There is just too much awesome shit in the world to leave early, and suicide is a decision that will prevent you from realizing that forever.
It sounds like you could use someone to talk to. Catch me on Skype any time, my account is "alandipert". Or e-mail/Jabber me at alan@dipert.org.
Instead of saying "good luck," I will say: I don't know you, but I care about you, and would hate to know you went this way. Talk to someone you trust, or me, if you feel it coming on. It's not worth it.
Once the responsibilities have been carried out, consider the option of just walking away, if it's an option, instead of offing yourself. It's just one of many options. I wrote a post a bit further down. Probably my situation is similar but also very different, but it has also dragged me down far enough that I was short before doing the same as you several times already.
I've struggled at work for two years, just trying to survive. Days go by where I'm totally useless and am unable to produce anything (days add up to months, etc). It's an added stress knowing that the personal problems you are having might lose you your job if you don't somehow fight and pull through.
I'm fortunate that I have the option, which I intend to use, of in a reasonably short amount of time (3-4 months), can cancel everything and leave the country to return back home.
I've also recognised the things I enjoy doing, even if I'm incapable of doing them at the moment, I'm fighting for the day when I'll be free of the mindfuck going on right now, and will be able to focus on those things again.
If it ever gets moments before killing myself again, I'm going to buy a plane ticket back home with my credit card, and leave everything behind. I'll face the consequences later when I'm mentally healthy again. Right now, I'm fighting through those things that I need to do, so that I can leave without too many loose ends. I can't tie them all up, but most.
I have to say I am not envious of what you are going through.
On the personal side, I can just say this. I have been through horrific times in my life. I will say that I have always found that I have come out of these things changed, more confident, stronger, but with some submerged baggage that has had to be dealt with. Not only will you get through it, but if you keep your eyes open for opportunities, ways will open for you when you most need them, and you will come out a stronger, perhaps even happier, person as a result.
So what? There are people who'd like to help you. So what? When I have suicidal thoughts, I don't care in the least about other people who could help me.
Posts like this are helpful, of course, to raise the awareness of the problem, for other people. But when I, as a person thinks about suicide at the moment, look at this page, I just think: so what? and close the browser tab.
Exactly! That is one of the odd things about how people couch this. They always talk about coming to them for help. It has to be an intervention, not an offer for help. If my goal is to remove my cranium with a shotgun, and you have just offered to "help" (prevent me from achieving that goal), why in the hell would I ever seek your help? If someone comes to you for help they aren't seriously considering anything, buy them a beer and let them bitch, help them get in to see a shrink.
I concur. That is why I hate some of these types of blog posts. Even if you talked to someone those that are determined will do what they please. You can give them a 30sec elevator pitch of why not to, but ultimately leave them be as long as they aren't physically hurting others.
People who have seriously contemplated know whether or not they are happy and weighed the options. At some point you say screw it. If you have goals or aspirations, dreams and can't achieve them then why keeping doing mediocre crap and be miserable. That is settling for 2nd..3rd etc. among other crap going on in their lives.
I hate people that think they have a right to decide for others what I want to do with my life. Maybe consider the fact that the person weighed available options and that is their choice and hope that they find another route.
I made the following comment on a previous thread about suicide and think it also applies to this discussion:
Both depression/suicide and dietary habits run in families and reoccur over multiple generations.
Low serum cholesterol has been shown to be a suicide risk factor. [1]
Get you cholesterol tested and try adding more good fats to your diet like oily cold-water fish (think salmon and sardines), butter, eggs (including the yolk!), and coconut milk/oil. You should aim for a low LDL and a high HDL number.
I think that manic-depression is extremely common among startup entrepreneurs. The emotional roller-coaster one goes through when trying to create a company exacerbates any bipolar tendencies that might already be there. The great news is that when one is in the state of hypomania they are often at your most creative and productive. Read this description from a well-known, UK-based charity in the UK:
"When I'm in a manic phase, I feel as though I am capable of anything and everything. This can be an amazing feeling, but I sometimes get frustrated and angry with people. Ideas flow constantly and quickly, as if my brain is on fast-forward. Everything happening in the world has significance in my life. But when I'm depressed, it's as if I'm completely crushed and living in slow motion. I feel capable of nothing.
"
http://www.mind.org.uk/help/diagnoses_and_conditions/bipolar...
Really important stuff. Man, Raganwald, thanks so much for this blog post.
I think one important thing for anyone who's struggling to remember is that however you're feeling, it's not permanent. It's temporary. It will change. It might feel like things are never going to get better, but they will. It might feel like you're never going to feel better, but you will. You just have to hold tight to that fact, and trust it, even if it seems impossible. Then, six months or a year or three years from now, you'll be so glad that you hung on.
I recently learned that a former student of mine committed suicide, and I think about him all the time. I wish I could have told him all this while he was alive.
If you want to talk in private about things, email me. phzbox at gmail.com. I know life is not supposed to be easy, but sometime it helps to be listened to.
There is an organization called bluehackers, that tries the help the hacker-minded (aka hn-style) crowd with, to deal with those days: http://bluehackers.org/ If it saves one life, it's worth it.
Let's not forget about the civic duty to call 911 if you suspect that your friend or your neighbor is suicidal. Emergency medicine has experts that can help much more than National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
This is the problem with how we deal with suicide. People seem to think its their "duty" to take the right to end your life away from you. Police and emergency services will go as far as tie you up and lock you in a padded cell to take this right away.
What we need to is make it clear that suicide is your right. Treatment should be completely voluntary at all times. I would wager that the possibility of being restrained for days or weeks prevents many people from seeking help that could actually have made a difference.
No, it isn't your civic duty to take the right to suicide away from someone. It's your duty as a friend and a human being to be a non-judgmental ear and shoulder. But in the end you have to respect their rights as an autonomous being.
That might be true for some people but not everyone. Do you take into account situation where someone can get treatment and change ones mind? Since you, a non-medical professional, cannot make that judgment it's better to use as a rule to always call.
Emergency visits are not about locking someone away but about figuring out a best treatment. Whether a person will follow the treatment or not that's a different story but at least someone was there for them, to listen, to help, and with means and experience to do it.
This is a good thing to post. It's uncomfortable to talk about, but it needs to be done, so thank you, raganwald.
That said, if I can offer just a small critique: I always found the sentiment of "Just talk to someone" to be insufficient, because even if other people might understand, sometimes you don't feel like they should have to understand. If I'm too weak to handle my circumstances myself, you'll reason, it would just make me an even worse person if I dumped that burden on somebody else. I think it's important to convey to depressed people that somebody wants to help, because that isn't necessarily obvious when even you don't like you.
(Again, I don't mean to bash on raganwald's post by any means. It's just a perspective that I think it's easy to forget when you're not in that mindset.)
Thank you! I am not a professional and there’s no particular reason that what I write is going to be helpful, and as others have pointed out, such appeals might sometimes be harmful.
In the end, my moral dilemna feels like the “Politician’s Fallacy:”
- Something must be done.
- This is something.
- Therefore we must do it.
But doing the wrong thing is often worse than doing nothing at all.
Oh, to be clear, I'm not a professional either. I've just known a few people with bad depression and that was something they struggled with — the feeling that getting help was a bad thing.
This feels like one of those comments that I'm going to write with good intentions and come away with one downvote and no replies. Still;
Your post is CYA advice. It's the socially acceptable least you could do - to encourage talking to a professional. not to imply that you owe more, or practically that you could do more, but...
You want to do something
You are afraid of making it worse
Those constraints lead to a nonpost. Who is adult and hasn't heard of a suicide hotline? Why is financial advice to always spread your investments to minimise catastrophic risk in the conmments of a site encouraging people to go all-in on a startup life? Because its nuance free and safe advice, at worst it can't hurt you for recommending it.
If you've been folowing my internet writing since 2004, you will notce that I have done many related things. It's a false *-chotomy to think that there is only one post you can make and that threfore it s critical that it be the one best possible post, and just do that.
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[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 429 ms ] threadInvite a couple of extra people to your New Year's Eve party whom you might not have thought of inviting, and you might do more good than you think.
It's also worth mentioning that being alone is perfectly fine, but when people become lonely, it's something that needs to be addressed. It's all a state of mind, after all.
A cursory examination will likely not demonstrate loneliness. If I am lonely, then I will be happy when I'm in the presence of any of my friends, and so I'll appear happy and just fine to them. I'll even feel happy, in case they ask me how I am. Loneliness is thus peculiarly difficult to diagnose except deliberately.
[I suppose that once you know this, you might try to detect loneliness as "being really happy to see you" or something. Obviously you might find false positives (being happy for other reasons), or false negatives (if they don't feel you're a very close friend). Still, it's a starting point.
The cure, of course, is to continue to be with your friend for as long as he wants (to the degree possible), let him interact with you, and encourage him to share his feelings and his doings with you. (But no pressure. Encouragement is a friend who's happy to be with you and happy to hear anything you have to say without giving unasked-for criticism, not one who asks you hard questions like "How are you?" Such a question can be helpful to establish that you're interested or willing to listen, but it can also be difficult and annoying to answer, so don't press if he stumbles on it.)
This is kind of a natural resolution, isn't it? I've said that, in response to seeing that your friend wants to be with you, you should continue to be with your friend; and that you should encourage him to share things that he probably would like to share with you (in a way that isn't unpleasant or difficult). This is kind of "duh, that's how to be a good friend", and "that's how to make good conversation, at least in this situation". But it's probably helpful to have things like this written down; not everyone has figured out or internalized every part of it by himself.]
That's the flipside to your post i think. It's not enough to tell those in despair "don't give up hope". We should reach out and find out how those around us actually are.
My meta-thought about this is how do you make this proactive instead of passive? If you don't visit raganwald or Facebook, how will you get any encouragement this Christmas season?
I've often thought that some corners of the Internet could benefit from a virtual chaplain who could approach members of their online community if they suspected something was wrong. Or they could be a low threat pre-suicide (or other issue) conversation and make themself very approachable for those moving in that direction to try to steer them onto more healthy directions.
Is this a good idea, or is it just my inner pastor thinking out loud?
What Facebook effort are you referring to?
(I work at Facebook, but am not involved in this feature.)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397551,00.asp
And your point about it not being easy to tell is very true. This is why the thought about the virtual chaplain. People would hopefully carry enough real-world positive thoughts about chaplains into their virtual dealings to feel comfortable "talking" with an online chaplain. If a community had a designated chaplain, that person would be known to the other members of the community and anyone with issues would be encouraged to have confidential communication with that person. (Chaplains being licensed religious ministers are usually permitted by the law to keep the contents of conversations private ... except in a few very specific cases such as child abuse mandatory reporting situations.)
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/suicide.asp
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/suicide.asp
Snopes suggest it falls slightly over the holiday from 34 per million people to 30 per million people and then rises to 41 per million people at New Year’s.
I want more proof either for or against this notion.
Snopes stories have the same problem that urban legends have: people are quick to believe them without checking it more, and for the same reason, feeling superior to those who don't know (the myth|the debunking).
Edit: typo and formatting
The economic situation as affected many people negatively, especially trying at a time that one hopes to have extra money for their family. I'd believe that we have more than an average share of despondence these days.
Forwarded message
From: Mitch Altman Date: Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 12:59 PM Subject: [Noisebridge-discuss] Geeks & Depression meetup To: NoiseBridge Discuss
Full text:
So it's already happened I guess. Anyone know how it went?Mitch's Google Group for the meetups is here: http://groups.google.com/group/geeksanddepression
It looks like the health care reform of 2010 prevents insurance companies from denying you coverage due to pre-existing conditions (starting in 2014): http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0324/Health-care-...
Spoken as someone who knows.
The expectations, both from the world and founders themselves, are often impossibly high - afterall there can be only one facebook and one Google. Failure in startups isn't the same as failure in a corporate job. Startups are so much harder that if you make it to the first line of code you've already beat 90% of the people that want to do a startup. If you launch you've beat 99%. If you actually become ramen profitable you're a superstar in my eyes.
The problem of suicide and depression among startup founders is more pronounced than you might think, both because of the high expectations, but also because the founder is the one who needs to always be positive, egg others on, and never show weakness. Often while constantly doubting his (or her) own abilities and chances of success. This is incredibly hard and can end in catastrophe if you don't talk to someone about it. It even happened for a ycombinator company (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859117).
Remember to enjoy the journey - it's fun, and if you fail you'll be held in extremely high regard amongst fellow entrepreneurs and HN'ers for having tried. Most people just dream, the people that actually try are stars.
If you have any questions, or just want to talk please contact me. My mail is in my profile.
Suicidal ideation is a process starting with falling short of expectations then blaming yourself for the shortfall. You start incorrectly rationalizing reasons why everything is your fault and how nothing can get better. Negativity permeates every thought. Your world breaks down into tiny logical blocks and you rationalize why everything is hopeless.
The only way out is to break the chain of elevating mental isolation and negativity. It's easier to stop it in the nascent stages. Try not to blame yourself. The world is a big place and we have so much to do.
How exactly to do that is the tricky part, though (and not just tricky for individuals, but the subject of much debate in psychiatry). Possibilities include pharmacological intervention, therapy, or some sort of change in circumstances. The latter is a really large set of options, but also poorly understood: there are semi-regular reports of people completely changing outlook after significant changes in circumstances (e.g. changing careers), but it's very hard to come up with rigorous evaluation of the success of that "treatment option", because it's not very easy to run a controlled study, and not always an available option.
A good start might be with the book "Learned Optimism" from Martin Seligman — http://www.amazon.com/Learned-Optimism-Change-Your-Mind/dp/0....
He argues that most depression is just severe learned helplessness caused by your own pessimistic inner explanations of why events happened. He makes a good case for it & suggests techniques to build better explanatory habits. I haven't finished the book yet but so far it's quite compelling.
https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-05-...
My won feelings about helplessness learning to play Go parallel feelings if helplessness in my life trying other things where it felt like I had no idea what I was doing and no control over the outcome:
https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-10-...
Again, I don’t know if any of this is helpful when someone is at the point of contemplating ending their own life.
This post suggests to me that maybe it's not such a great idea after all.
Just because most of us can accept failure as a part of founding a company and doing business in a capitalist system, that does not necessarily mean those around us have the same tolerances or understanding. It is within that context, and the pressures applied on entrepreneurs by external influences, that most feel suicide is the only way out when they fail or feel they are on the brink of failure.
While none of the start-ups I've been involved with as a co-founder, or first dozen employees, have been personally successful financially, I have enjoyed the experiences, learnt from them and I can even have a sense of humour about the situation when things go wrong. I can't say the same for all of my colleagues who have lost spouses, family separation, second businesses or incurred costs & significant family disruption because we had relocated to another country and the business failed soon after we arrived. As a (now) non-drinker, I've sat with them in bars or a park as they drowned their pains in alcohol, and wondered if there is something I can say that would brighten them up, help them out and make them want to live until at least the next afternoon, when we have to start over again on the road to recovery. Usually its finding a new project for them to work on or being able to spend time with their family in a more relaxed environment (neither are always readily available).
My failures with start-ups, while disappointing, are among the least of the problems I've faced in my life. So far its been relatively easy for me to deal with it. Watching my colleagues for signs they aren't able to cope with the situation has been a task that I maintain, to help my friends and our businesses, but also to make sure I don't also accidently fall into the same trap.
One of my big realizations in my life was that all the crap I had gone through, from the bullying in grade school to being assaulted by a street gang, to being the victim of some pretty serious domestic violence at the hands of a very violent girlfriend had enriched my life in ways I could no longer describe, and that I am a stronger person who sees the world in ways that others often can't for having gone through them. I haven't ever had the luxury of ignoring the necessity for self-improvement, and therefore I am a better person for having gone through it all.
I try to teach my kids that failure is an event, never a person, and that it is a necessary stage on the road to success.
But I think the hardest problem we all founders face is to find the person who can share the views and motivate the right way. Most of the time, someone consoling would also be irritating, you just want to crib (mostly) and you will get over it and start working the next day.
It is almost ironically, sometimes, you just know what you want to hear and you are just waiting for someone to come and tell that so that you are fine.
The problem is not able to comprehend how everything would turn out as there would be tens of big and small issues at hand any given day and getting clarity is a big part of not feeling negative.
I have been fighting with all the bad vibes in office offlate and it is terrible especially as a single founder with a 7 ppl team. We haven't launched our product - it has been 1 year since our first engineer. It is already negative as you don't have anything out there and now you put in pressure things are going to break worse, ppl don't want to put in extra hours. It is hard to pump in positive energy. Fearing I will give feedback wrong way or push people too hard at this time I became reclusive. Few people own up, leaving them on their own track helps but it is almost a problem as you got to pull it off as a team and for that I have to speak up, bring them together with lots of energy. It is a hard time right now.
Hoping the system copes.
You can't shove detached, inexperienced logic in the face of someone with temporarily broken brain chemistry.
For a more thorough understanding see http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb4345/is_7_32/ai_n291...
Explaining the temporary condition can help so people know they aren't alone (knowing you are one of millions who have had the same exact thought processes is a wake up call).
Mentioning the processes can be caused by certain foods and medications in some people seems like a good idea too. ("Feeling suicidal? Did you just eat twelve pancakes with half a gallon of syrup? All the sugars have screwed you up for a while. Sleep it off. Did you just start a new antibiotic and now you want to jump off a bridge? Sleep it off. Call your doctor to get different meds. Your brain will reset.")
My biggest mistake was postponing the decision to talk to somebody for several months out of false pride, thinking I'm able to handle it myself.
For me, two things help: reminding myself nothing matters as much as I think it matters and setting a medium-term goal. Our decisions can be anything and it's fine. The world--universe--is a big place. Take risks. Nothing worthwhile is judging you. So, build something new. Meet people. If you make a fool of yourself, it doesn't matter at all. Let other people wonder why you're impervious to their hostility. You've seen the truth. In the grand scheme of things, we can't even be seen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field
The world is yours to do with as you please. Take advantage of it.
Problem here is that when you finally meet someone to chat with, you're probably way too desperate to get that feeling that someone cares about you. It might be hard not to talk only about your self. That's how it goes for me at least. And people smell that despair far away. My advice is: remember to force yourself to ask questions when you chat.
Internet relay chat is good place to rehearse social interaction, but it's bad supplement in the long run.
Having been in your situation, the things I found helpful for a quick fix were exercise and food. It doesn't matter how much or what. If I am in a slump and feeling like it is all too much I force myself to do some exercise. A chin-up, a push-up, go for a run or a swim. If I am feeling really bad I will make myself do one push-up, on my knees. or just kneel on the floor and do a negative repetition. That's usually enough to get me started on doing something. Then I will go and eat some food. Or more likely, go to the shops and buy some food to cook. Then eat something. For me doing a little bit of exercise and then eating often makes enough of a difference that my misery is manageable.
There is some evidence that exercise is helpful for others in dealing with depression, e.g. [1] (A review paper) Anecdotally, this seems particularly the case if you are at all ADHD.
Long term I agree with all the other posts pointing out that seeking professional treatment is the best option. The pride factor was a huge problem for me and still is. I treat it like research. Psychiatrists and Psychologists, are experts in there field who I pay to explain options for treatment an methods for assessment and monitoring. Thankfully this has only happened once, but if they can't explain the different options and why the course of action they recommend is the best I find a different doctor.
1. http://www.annals-general-psychiatry.com/content/7/1/13
I'm not an expert, but try going to a public place, maybe a museum where you'll be forced to interact at least with the ticket guy. Or even a mall, and maybe ask some questions about some product ("does it come in blue?"). I'm not saying it's a solution, but it might get you an encouraging quick fix for some human interaction, to give you some energy to do other stuff.
- Journalism codes for reporting on matters related to suicide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide#Journalism_code...
- Social proof model for explaining copycat suicides: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide#Social_proof_mo...
- Cialdini's book, Influence: the psychology of persuasion, references some scientific studies on this subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide#cite_note-isbn0...
Bottom line: If you have suicidal thoughts, you should consult a psychologist. They have experience helping professionals fix their own brain chemistry.
Hence the large number of densely written words needed by existentialist philosophy and its associates, to attempt to justify it...
My point is only: you can't break the symmetry with logic alone. Ultimately your priors/axioms/experiences come into play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism
According to Camus, one's freedom – and the opportunity to give life meaning – lies in the recognition of absurdity. In acknowledging the absurdity of seeking any inherent meaning, but continuing this search regardless, one can be happy, gradually developing his or her own meaning from the search alone.
For the record, logical, analytic, probabilistically correct thinking is only a way of reaching goals. The goals themselves cannot be established by means of logic, only deconflicted/clarified/etc. To think otherwise is illogical.
http://www.psychiatricwellness.com/videos.htm
So, I closed HN and went to talk to ACTUAL physically present people.
If you like literature, it might help to try to view your situation as the hero's journey.
Find some things that give you comfort, and just hang in there. For me, it was music that got me through the dark days.
Immerse yourself, escape for small amounts of time, and find things to sustain you -- mentally, emotionally, physically. Reach out to your family and/or friends. Just endure any way you can, and you will come out on the other side of this.
2) exercise/sports.
3) take a break and go to hawaii or some place you like and have some fun with family and friends.
4) start dating. have fun.
5) if it becomes worse pls. seek professional help.
It happened to me in the past, I felt lost, now I'm happy again with my new partner. Time is an important factor, don't be impatient, and focus again on yourself for a while.
I've also left suicide as an option open, but I've got one plan ahead of that which is just to stand up and walk away, loose ends untied.
My point is, the meaning that most people take for granted from an intimate relationship with someone, for me personally, has died. I'm no longer willing to sacrifice so much for someone else, because it took so much from everyday since. The trauma steals your life because your mind simply isn't capable of thinking of anything else anymore.
The conflict of loving someone and at the same time hating that part of them that destroyed you, is a paradox that makes it impossible to be blind to the reality that you can no longer trust anyone with your life.
I'll be glad to get out of this heartless country and back into the sunshine, where people have the balls to speak their mind and call a bastard a bastard, and a bitch a bitch.
As for killing myself, to cause her pain. It just doesn't work, because I don't get to see what effect it has. And she'll get over it far too quickly, anyway.
Consider it a Christmas gift (because I have so far mostly tried to keep this off HN -- I really don't need 500 men hitting on me). However, I have added a donate button and I have a t-shirt in mind I want to create. Given my current situation (which I know you know about since you replied here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3350035), any suggestions on how to monetize it are welcome. I think it's a good read. I'm not asking for charity (if you get value out of reading it and donate, hey, that's not charity. Comics do that all the time). I just historically have never managed to get much monetary value back for what I put out there and I would like to change that.
http://www.novemberwest.com/blog/archive/
Peace and happy holidays. I'm going to go to work now.
Ouch..
I hope you enjoy the blog and I hope it helps you get through this.
Logging off now as my shift is starting. I don't typically post from work.
EDIT: I appreciate your background, and also that you offered the blog in good faith.
Remember that you have all the options in the world. If life is only be worth living with a fresh start, sell your apartment, take one suitcase, and travel to Paris or London or Australia. Your life is yours to do what you wish, not what others expect. Live in whatever way makes life worthwhile.
If you ever want someone to talk to, you can email me at aantny@gmail.com. I can probably host you for a night if you need to crash in Israel.
One of the important lessons I learnt growing up in Australia was that you have to be there for your mates, even if you have to put your body on the line. I've seen what can happen when you don't and I'll never allow that again, if I can help it.
It is sad to have lost so much. And I know people have been through much worse, and right now there are other people that are going through ten kinds of hell, and I can even understand them a little.
When the pain was really bad, one thing that I thought I could really understand well and empathise with was a parent that loses his or her child. You can't understand what it's like unless you go through it yourself. And the reality is, that that sort of trauma changes everything. Who you are diverges so much that it's impossible to merge back into the main line. You're completely forked.
Looks like you are already feeling better. From the other comment, I came to know that you have managed to get over the dependency. So now hopefully, it should only get better. But even the journey to recovery has its down days.
Turns out I'm a fighter, and I intend to make it, but when things go down far enough, you just never know, because things feel bad enough that it becomes a serious consideration. Right now, it's not an option. I know that I'll quit my job and flat next month, and head back home 4 months later (everything has 3 months notice in this country).
Yes you are a fighter, as you have chosen to. Give a good fight. And please remember (as you already know) that a big component of these kinds of fights is test of your patience. God willing, you will win.
And please remember that you are not alone. There are others perhaps facing pains similar to what you are facing. And there are a whole lot of _good_ people who care, for goodness sake.
This is a good insight. At some point you manage to carry on despite all the bad feelings, and you're simply dragging yourself through the last bit of crap that's holding you back. I recognise that my patience is limited, so I've set myself a goal that I can attain before it runs out (getting out of here and back to a sunny country).
It's frustrating to know that many people said, while I was going through the worst of it, that going back to Australia, back home, would be running away from my problems. One thing I learnt during it all was that everyone gives different advice. You're so vulerable, and no matter what people say, you often follow it. It took me at least one year, if not two, to not take advice too seriously, except that which I gave myself. It's nice to get some control back, even though the things I can't control (my thoughts and feelings) still make life difficult. It's been good to just vent a little even if it's to strangers and in public, though mostly anonymous.
What I find difficult is that I don't really know many people that are willing to simply listen.
Mostly people brush off how you are feeling with "everything heals with time", but all you need is "yes, you're feeling absolutely rotten right now. I understand." It's the people that really can relate that stop ignoring you're current situation, as if it didn't matter because something better will be there eventually.
So much more to vent, but I'll save it for someone else :)
Home stretch. Just 2.5 more weeks, and I can quit my job and then the rest is just logistics.
Also, do I want to find out twenty years later that I raised the child of another man? No, I don't.
Thirdly, getting blood tests that may turn out positive through no fault of my own is down right fucked up.
And fourthly, it fucking hurts to be betrayed like that, regardless of how you judge the morals.
Why is rape bad? Not because sex is bad, or forcing someone else to do something might be considered bad (parents force their children to do things all the time), but because it fucks the victim up. Cause and effect.
Through observation it's easy to see that a person experiences extreme pain through the infidelity of his partner. Maybe some don't feel a thing, but I did.
What frustrates me is that people see another causing this damage to another, and they don't give a shit. That's the crux of my problem. Complete and utter apathy for the suffering of another human being. Simply another form of complicity.
if you live in SF, i'd love to take you out for a drink; sometimes the simple pleasures (a drink, a toke) and a complete stranger to talk with can help..
Get a change of scenery. Do something you've never done before or have always wanted to. Remind yourself why you're alive. I promise there's more than a few excellent reasons to stay here (as in alive). You just lost sight of them, that's all.
Edit: I'd like to add that divorce is very close to the top of the most stressful events a person can ever experience and I think it even trumps a death in the family if I remember right. It's normal for you to feel so defeated because of this but always remember that this bad state is not permanent.
Dont look outward for satisfaction and happiness.TRUE AND FULFILLING HAPPINESS ALWAYS COMES FROM THE INSIDE.
Also there is this awesome plant called Marijuana to help you talk to your inner being if you guys are not friends anymore!
"He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, his lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands."
Think about the "vastness of things left undone": Have you chatted with a homeless person in winter? Have you read Anna Karenina? Have you watched The Kid? Have you traveled to a foreign city and got completely lost? Have you held the hand of a starving child in Somalia or at least looked at a picture of her and wept? Have you written a letter to Santa? Have you kissed every (and I mean every) square inch of a woman's body? Have you sneaked in and slept among the ruins at Machu Picchu? Have you fallen in love with a woman who's monolingual in a language you don't speak? Have you tried to understand general theory of relativity? Have you tried to explain GTR to a bright 9-year-old kid over coco?
I could go on. These are all the things that come to mind that I haven't done. One day I plan to do at least some of them. Think about this.
I made a pact with myself when I was miserable in high-school and my most suicidal, that I would give life a chance and see if things got better as I did more and more things I'd dreamed about and that people told me were worth living for as you've done now. If I did those things and was still unhappy, I felt I should be justified in ending my own life having given it fair chance.
Well, there was a moment, I rememember it in detail, where I was hang-gliding near Interlaken in Switzerland. A man near me said something to the order of "this is the time of our lives, huh!" And I realized then that not only was I still quite unhappy in this most excellent of situations, but that I still wanted to kill myself and indeed had never stopped wanting to kill myself. Not at the Louvre, not in Tokyo, not when succeeding financially, romantically, or in academics.
There was a quote in the Brother's Karmazov which has always troubled me, though I can't find it at the moment, when Alyosha tells a child that he "will always be an unhappy man" and the child says he knows. I believe myself to be fundamentally broken somehow genetically, and I feel that I no longer have any rational reason to expect to ever feel content as a person or free of the suicidal impulse. I will always be an unhappy man.
I can only assume there are others like me in this realization, and to them your words will seem hollow, cliche, and unrelatably foreign. To them what you've said is no different from "but you have so much to live for"- they know that and it doesn't matter. If such a person is out there and is now reading this, all I can say is, well, me too. I keep going somehow, who knows how or why, and I guess all things considered sometimes it really isn't so bad. If I can't ever silence the demons telling me to end it all, I can at least make noise somewhere else that they don't seem so loud. Not a happy result by most measures, but that's the way it is.
I've come to realise this quite strongly myself over the years as various things succeeded/failed, that what I thought would help it didn't, and that all that helps is to face the depression and actively find ways to fight it. I've found schema-based therapy very effective, for example.
I really hope you find a way to resolve these issues, or at least ways of making it better.
If you want to talk (hope this doesn't sound awfully patronising) you can find my email address in my profile.
Telling someone they can think themselves or "figure themselves out" to not being homosexual, schizophrenic or transgender seems crazy to many people, but not crazy when we say the same about depression. Pushing "think about it more! sort our your life!" as The Solution can be dangerous in the case where deferring more radical treatment is necessary or prudent, and the mentality that "I can think/will my way out of this" is a frequent excuse or cause for noncompliance with medication in some patients who actually do need it to not be a danger to themselves, or others.
I'm not implying the poster is such a case, or that such treatment shouldn't be tried, but it can and will fail in certain cases, and it's easy for others and the patient to justify "well I just need to try harder" or to push blame when that's deferring necessary treatment.
Although you're probably right, it's also dangerous to promote that viewpoint. A depressed person accepting themselves as inevitably and irreversibly depressed is not productive, even if that's the case. It's not analogous to being gay where you can accept it and live a happy life.
I suppose accepting that you're permanently depressed could help you cope with it, but I'd be scared of having people assume thats the case before exhausting all other options.
To clarify, I put those (schizophrenia, homosexuality, transgender) as examples of brain structure and wiring (just like clinical depression) and mentioned homosexuality explicitly because it seems less stigmatized than mental illness currently. A gay person can accept being gay and live a happy life, but they can't think themselves into being straight if they try hard enough. An individual diagnosed with major depressive disorder can accept they are clinically depressed and require treatment, then take the treatment and live a happy life, but they can't think themselves into not requiring outside aid to be in a non-depressed state. Society is a lot more accepting of the gay person than the depressed one though.
Of course medication/therapy/even acceptance of a chemical imbalance are not off the table at all.
A big problem with depression is that it makes you feel very guilty, unnecessarily, so I really want to make clear that I didn't want to imply somebody should feel that it's somehow their fault at all.
In many ways a large part of it is getting outside help. I really do recommend that, and have found that extremely helpful myself.
Its easy to hide. Most the people in my life don't know. You can vaporize to minimize the health effects (also bad breath). If you do it regularly enough the cognitive deficit is less severe. Mostly just occasional memory loss. Again, nothing that you seem to care about anyway.
Your years are 120 or less, and then the universe will reclaim you as its own. For the universe, the span of your life should have been not even the fluttering of an eyelash before a blink. From a cosmic perspective, the existence of our whole galaxy was set to be one giant quantum fluctuation - the birth and death of a mere grain of matter, falling from one eon to another.
But then something incredible, something unexplainable, happened. Inanimate matter came forth from the deep waters. It grew legs, it started to paint on cave walls, not yet aware of the implications of what it was doing. (Have you ever wondered - of all the things the most significant cluster of particles in the whole universe could do, why would they choose to paint?) We started to reproduce. We started to communicate, to love, to build, to live! There is nothing else like us in the vast cosmos, and there may never be again.
The Milky Way should have be one passing glow of light, but somehow this humble galaxy became greater than the remainder of creation. The wondrous flash of light as our galaxy passes through existence will be most glorious moment that the universe ever experiences. You alone - a lonely sentient creature - would be that blinding flash of light even if the rest of us had never existed. The wonder of you, even as you contemplated an end to your solitary existence, would fill space long after every sun died and time itself drew to an end. In such a universe, you alone would have been notable. The fact of your existence is more incredible than the largest sun or the most massive black hole. Your glory - the glory of us all - will fill the universe forever, a single proud memory in the vast emptiness of space.
We tend to take our existence for granted, but it is an incredible fact - a miracle which all the religions on Earth were born, or given to us, in order to explain. Who would have thought? Who could have guessed that this tiny backwater planet on a spiral arm of the Milky Way would end up defining the vast cosmos forever?
Now, here is the important part: All the dead matter in the cosmos - every particle of the sun, the galaxy, and the vast everything - would give it up to be you. Sagittarius A* would disappear in an instant, if it could change places. It would give 13.2 billion years of existence for your measly 120 years of life.
Your life, unfortunately, will some day draw to an end. You know that, your atoms know that. Perhaps you are tempted to end it earlier, but no mistake could be more grave. I know not what you believe, but even if there is heaven or hell, there wont be anything like now. Let your atoms live. They have eternity itself to be inanimate.
A handful of misfiring neurons has no right to bring you to an end. The world is blinding. If your neurons can't see, you must do everything you can to fix them. Depression has easy medical fixes. Being treated for depression, fixing such a tiny flaw, may be the hardest challenge you ever face - but it is minor in the grand perspective.
Lastly, I leave the cosmos behind and appeal to you. Whoever you are, however you came into existence, and no matter what your purpose is, you are capable of understanding deep philosophical arguments and complex equations. I have none of that for you, merely a saying often heard on HN or in rejection therapy groups: Never say no. Ask yourself what is necessary to make life worth it. If you need a vacation to Hawaii to make life enjoyable again, take the next plane to Hawaii. If you cannot live in a meaningless world, leave for the mountains of India, where you may seek enlightenment in silence among fellow travelers in the sanctity of a Buddhist monastery. The parent posts' comment on marijuana is right on, but free will can do more than justify life - it can make it as brill...
I used to suffer from depression - including suicidal thoughts starting in middle school up through high school. I used to abuse drugs to escape for a couple hours at a time every day. After a near death experience while tripping on a high dose of dextromethorphan, I realized I needed to talk to someone. I spoke to my parents, who put me in rehab. There I met a man who spoke much like you did. He didn't tell me I needed to stop doing drugs, or tell me that I needed to live. He didn't He gave me his impression, a glimpse, into what he felt like living in this universe. He had a minor in physics and would explain to me in detail how everything worked - how lucky we are to be alive. It worked. I wake up each day realizing how lucky I am to be in existence, how all of us are lucky to be in existence. I appreciate everything in life, whether its good or bad, because I understand, to some degree, we are all a lucky arrangement of atoms and when we die our atoms move on to someone or something else.
Cheer's to you good sir!
I was at the Grand Canyon a few summers ago and I just sat on the edge out past where the fences are where only a few sad kids dare to go. I'd be lying if I said I didn't think at least a few times about jumping, even if it was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen. I felt like the canyon itself was a metaphor for my life in a way; huge, full of possibility, complex, but still far from inhabitable.
The helicopter ride just before that was crazy fun, though. It was something like $240 and it was worth every penny (I was making about $140 a week at the time working in retail). I can't put into words how it felt to have my first view of the canyon be from inside a flimsy carbon fiber helicopter that was trying to tear itself apart going over the edge of the canyon at what felt like a 90* angle and jumping from ~200ft above the national forest to about a mile up above the canyon floor. I highly recommend it, if you ever have the chance.
For the curious:
Before you dip in: http://pics.seanp2k.com/phx/DCP_5441+%28Large%29_exposure.JP... & http://pics.seanp2k.com/phx/DCP_5430+%28Large%29_exposure.JP...
During: http://pics.seanp2k.com/phx/DCP_5495+%28Large%29_exposure.JP... & http://pics.seanp2k.com/phx/DCP_5496+%28Large%29_exposure.JP...
After: http://pics.seanp2k.com/phx/DCP_5578+%28Large%29_exposure.JP... & http://pics.seanp2k.com/phx/DCP_5545+%28Large%29_exposure.JP...
I figure that there will be more moments in the future like that too, and I guess that's what I live for, just to see everything there is to see. My 9 day for-no-real-reason-with-nothing-planned vacation to San Francisco was also great, and I met more awesome people DOING STUFF there in a week than I have here (Detroit/Metro area, Michigan) in years, which is why I'm moving out there in a few months.
I probably have many more stories about majestic woods that I've biked and hiked through, hidden passages on rivers in a kayak, etc. but what I'm getting at is that life is an adventure, so go explore, because the worst thing you can do is live a boring life and die old without having done anything (risky|exciting|challenging|scary). Talk to the girl. Go to that party even though you're already in bed. Apply for that perfect long-shot work-from-home job. The worst failure is not even trying.
And I know how hard trying is.
However there are other big factors which you can partially control. You've probably already discovered some of them.
I think you would like the book because Seligman recognizes the fundamental difficulty of the problem. As you may have guessed, Seligman himself is predisposed to unhappiness.
> I've done a large subset of the "things I'd like to do before I die"
At least you have a concept of the things you like, somehow.
On the other side, I've almost if not completely become an atheist at one point, and even then I realized that suicide was too final a choice for how little I knew about reality. In fact, atheism also consoled me, in that the thought that nothing lay beyond death meant I needn't fear death, nor anything in life, at least rationally (instinctual fear remains).
Finally, starting from an atheist perspective, that I didn't need to fear life, I realized I was searching for something that I haven't found yet, and that is a large part of why I've felt bad. Suicide again was too final and inadequate an answer to that desire inside of me. My desire and ignorance of reality give me hope I will find what I am seeking, and even the seeking is fulfilling to a degree.
But the problem with serious depression is that you lose interest in even the things you used to love, let alone things you could love. You find it hard to find meaning in even the most meaningful things. The things you have done become meaningless. The things you could do in the future don't even cross your mind.
You become horribly short-sighted and pessimistic. The key is regaining a fair perspective on life, which is on par with "finding meaning" -- something many spend their whole life trying to do. It's no easy quest. There's no easy answer.
I'm never sure what to say to friends who are depressed, besides what's cliche.
I don't have any good advice, I can tell you a couple of things that I'm currently doing that sort of help me go through this pit of despair.
First of all, I'm trying to leave my past life behind me, that is I try to connect with my future ex wife and her parents and friends as little as possible, and when I do I do it only for "administrative" reasons (like collecting my books from our apartment and stuff like that).
Second, and I don't know if this applies to you, I'm lucky enough to have smart co-workers who kind of understand what I'm going through and they always try to cheer me up. That makes me feel guilty about displaying my depression at work, so that for the duration of the 8-9 hours of daily work I try my best to be a normal human being, reacting to jokes, small chatter during the cigarettes break etc. I don't know if medically speaking this is the best take on the situation, but at least I get to "cheat" on that feeling of emptiness for around a third of the day.
Third (even though I think the counting doesn't matter anymore), I've tried to set up some tasks for me to accomplish in the near and medium term. For example for the upcoming holidays I plan to finish one of my personal projects which would be of really valuable help for at least a dozen of people, and during the winter months I plan to put enough money on the side to buy me a VW second-hand van, so that I'll go around the country when summer comes.
And last, before this becomes too awkward of an answer, I've given myself "proud-of-myself" points for not opening that wine bottle that has been sitting on the kitchen table for 2 months, since I moved out of my former apartment. Maybe you can find something similar to cheer you up and make you feeling proud of yourself, it doesn't have to be big.
Hang in there!
Also, Reddit Suicide Watch was helpful to me: http://www.reddit.com/r/suicidewatch
I've thought about suicide in my past, but since then have lost friends to suicide and other senseless reasons. I know somehow now that it is definitely not The Way, regardless of remaining responsibilities.
There is just too much awesome shit in the world to leave early, and suicide is a decision that will prevent you from realizing that forever.
It sounds like you could use someone to talk to. Catch me on Skype any time, my account is "alandipert". Or e-mail/Jabber me at alan@dipert.org.
Instead of saying "good luck," I will say: I don't know you, but I care about you, and would hate to know you went this way. Talk to someone you trust, or me, if you feel it coming on. It's not worth it.
-Alan
I've struggled at work for two years, just trying to survive. Days go by where I'm totally useless and am unable to produce anything (days add up to months, etc). It's an added stress knowing that the personal problems you are having might lose you your job if you don't somehow fight and pull through.
I'm fortunate that I have the option, which I intend to use, of in a reasonably short amount of time (3-4 months), can cancel everything and leave the country to return back home.
I've also recognised the things I enjoy doing, even if I'm incapable of doing them at the moment, I'm fighting for the day when I'll be free of the mindfuck going on right now, and will be able to focus on those things again.
If it ever gets moments before killing myself again, I'm going to buy a plane ticket back home with my credit card, and leave everything behind. I'll face the consequences later when I'm mentally healthy again. Right now, I'm fighting through those things that I need to do, so that I can leave without too many loose ends. I can't tie them all up, but most.
On the personal side, I can just say this. I have been through horrific times in my life. I will say that I have always found that I have come out of these things changed, more confident, stronger, but with some submerged baggage that has had to be dealt with. Not only will you get through it, but if you keep your eyes open for opportunities, ways will open for you when you most need them, and you will come out a stronger, perhaps even happier, person as a result.
People who have seriously contemplated know whether or not they are happy and weighed the options. At some point you say screw it. If you have goals or aspirations, dreams and can't achieve them then why keeping doing mediocre crap and be miserable. That is settling for 2nd..3rd etc. among other crap going on in their lives.
I hate people that think they have a right to decide for others what I want to do with my life. Maybe consider the fact that the person weighed available options and that is their choice and hope that they find another route.
Both depression/suicide and dietary habits run in families and reoccur over multiple generations.
Low serum cholesterol has been shown to be a suicide risk factor. [1]
Get you cholesterol tested and try adding more good fats to your diet like oily cold-water fish (think salmon and sardines), butter, eggs (including the yolk!), and coconut milk/oil. You should aim for a low LDL and a high HDL number.
[1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/...
"When I'm in a manic phase, I feel as though I am capable of anything and everything. This can be an amazing feeling, but I sometimes get frustrated and angry with people. Ideas flow constantly and quickly, as if my brain is on fast-forward. Everything happening in the world has significance in my life. But when I'm depressed, it's as if I'm completely crushed and living in slow motion. I feel capable of nothing. " http://www.mind.org.uk/help/diagnoses_and_conditions/bipolar...
I think one important thing for anyone who's struggling to remember is that however you're feeling, it's not permanent. It's temporary. It will change. It might feel like things are never going to get better, but they will. It might feel like you're never going to feel better, but you will. You just have to hold tight to that fact, and trust it, even if it seems impossible. Then, six months or a year or three years from now, you'll be so glad that you hung on.
I recently learned that a former student of mine committed suicide, and I think about him all the time. I wish I could have told him all this while he was alive.
Thanks again for this post.
What we need to is make it clear that suicide is your right. Treatment should be completely voluntary at all times. I would wager that the possibility of being restrained for days or weeks prevents many people from seeking help that could actually have made a difference.
No, it isn't your civic duty to take the right to suicide away from someone. It's your duty as a friend and a human being to be a non-judgmental ear and shoulder. But in the end you have to respect their rights as an autonomous being.
Emergency visits are not about locking someone away but about figuring out a best treatment. Whether a person will follow the treatment or not that's a different story but at least someone was there for them, to listen, to help, and with means and experience to do it.
http://samroweis1972-2010.blogspot.com/
I miss you, Sam.
That said, if I can offer just a small critique: I always found the sentiment of "Just talk to someone" to be insufficient, because even if other people might understand, sometimes you don't feel like they should have to understand. If I'm too weak to handle my circumstances myself, you'll reason, it would just make me an even worse person if I dumped that burden on somebody else. I think it's important to convey to depressed people that somebody wants to help, because that isn't necessarily obvious when even you don't like you.
(Again, I don't mean to bash on raganwald's post by any means. It's just a perspective that I think it's easy to forget when you're not in that mindset.)
In the end, my moral dilemna feels like the “Politician’s Fallacy:”
- Something must be done.
- This is something.
- Therefore we must do it.
But doing the wrong thing is often worse than doing nothing at all.
Your post is CYA advice. It's the socially acceptable least you could do - to encourage talking to a professional. not to imply that you owe more, or practically that you could do more, but...
You want to do something
You are afraid of making it worse
Those constraints lead to a nonpost. Who is adult and hasn't heard of a suicide hotline? Why is financial advice to always spread your investments to minimise catastrophic risk in the conmments of a site encouraging people to go all-in on a startup life? Because its nuance free and safe advice, at worst it can't hurt you for recommending it.
But what else can you do? Shrugs helplessly.