On Suicide

Trigger warning, morbid topic ahead, obviously. If you have any suicidal ideations, please stop reading past this point. This article (which I ironically wrote few days after yet another "darkest point of my life" until now) will voice my thoughts on an issue that not enough people are willing to voice anything remotely opinionated about due to its controversy; suicide and its prevention. Go ahead to whatever search engine you use and write something about "suicide," and I'll guarantee you that the least thing you'll get shoved in your face is a bunch of useless suicide prevention hotlines from Reddit bot copypasta on every single post (which I'll talk about later on) as well as some articles about emotional support and "online therapy."

Suicidal Mentality

There's this popular quote by David Foster Wallace (who ironically killed himself in 2008) that perfectly describes the mentality of a suicidal person. The gist of it is that a bystander watching a terrified person defenestrating himself to his death can no more understand the terror and stress that has pushed him to make such a decision, than he can understand the perspective of someone who has been driven to suicide. It's one thing to look out of a window and contemplate how anyone could bring himself to jump out of it, and a completely different experience to be in a burning building, driven beyond your wits, and seeing the deadly jump as a quick and painless respite from a more terrible fate of being burned alive.

Alongside birth, death is arguably the most universal life experience there is, and suicide is just one of the myriad of ways that it can arrive when it inevitably comes for someone. Death takes away everything that one has, including the suffering. There's a reason that using alcohol, drugs, and fictional media (animanga or Hololive for example) to "escape" is so widespread. I think that says everything so I'm not going to discuss this any further. As Mark Twain, the "greatest U.S. humorist," puts it: "Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born a hundred million years, and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together."

Platitudes

Almost all shitty platitudes come from people with zero knowledge about suicide, and most of them worsen the wound if contemplated by said suicidal person they're communicating with, whose mentality sees no reason to stay alive as seen above.

"Permanent solution"? As if someone wants a temporary solution to their problem if a permanent one was possible. Imagine hiring someone to repair a leak in your roof and being told that you're better off if they seal the hole up with a substance that needs to be replaced every month, instead of permanently repairing it.

"Temporary problem"!? You have absolutely no idea what issues said person is suffering from. What if they have debilitating life-long chronic pain, cancer, or depression? What if they've lost everyone that ever cared about them and are too broken to ever care about others again? Or perhaps they've just been driven to utter hopeless nihilism from having to occupy a world filled with whims and desires?

Who are you to predict said person's future and assume absolute knowledge about his issues and backgrounds? A deity or perhaps yet another dumbass whose entire belief system about life stems from Hollywood movies and slice-of-life anime?

What about you? What's in your head to disregard the feelings of anyone suffering from suicidal ideations and depressive mental issues? What's in your head to imply that emotional or mental anguish doesn't count as real pain, but only a delusion? The most ridiculous part of this claim is that it can be stretched as an argument about just about anything that can plague a person: "Oh, your family died? You're just experiencing unpleasant exchanges of sodium and potassium ions across the cell membrane at an anatomical level of your brain as a result of your evolutionary bonding instincts! Just be happy instead!"

I almost lost one of my friends because of this reasoning. Even though there's likely quite a few suicidal people who don't have anyone that would even notice their agony, this platitude is even more myopic than the suicide attempt itself; no one is expected to remain in a relationship with someone purely to avoid causing them heartbreak, nor to not quit their job because their co-workers would be inconvenienced, nor to not move to another state or country because their friends would miss them. It's interesting that no one ever argues that it's selfish for a person to want someone they supposedly love to continue suffering in order to spare their feelings.

Surely, anyone no matter his religious status may experience some sort of suicidality. Whilst the religious person will surely overcome the agony with faith in Allah and the Last Day then with finding solutions alternative to what Allah forbade, the average suicidal person who seriously considers killing himself most likely has no foundations in faith (as in the Islamic faith) and is thus lacking in religiosity or in understanding its importance in life. If people truly had faith in Islam like the oppressed Muslim populations worldwide, they wouldn't even think of suicide as an escape from how dark life gets, because they know for sure that the Problem of Evil isn't a problem for them, and that there certainly exists another life and a bountiful recompense to what they endure in this one.

Suicide rates (per 100,000) according to religion.

It's quite telling, as we can see from the charts above, that Islam is the least religion correlated with suicidality whilst disbelief (or lack of belief) in it is at least hundreds of times more prevalent in suicide rates (because Islam is the truth and everything else is falsehood obviously :3). However, to try to drag a suicidal person so that he believes that the suicide attempt isn't really worth from a religious standpoint is stupid, because this kind of faith requires a very long time to construct (often taking years for most people), and considering that his personal belief revolves around: "I don't want to live and I want to kill myself," it's an emergency that requires a quickly achieved temporary remedy rather than a permanent one that may take so long that the person would kill himself from the boredom of anticipation. Therefore, arguing with a suicidal person from a viewpoint that stems from religious belief isn't a great idea (especially if it comes in a pressurizing, terrorizing, and threatening tone), and it's best saved for later when he at the very least feels more comfortable or better about himself.

Since the suicidal person (who lacks faith in Islamic concepts of life and death as seen above) believes that no one can actually consents to being born and being thrust into society, this is akin to arguing that someone who was forcibly conscripted into a military organization is morally obligated to fight for them because said organization provided them with combat materials and training.

Solution

While I did suffer from suicidal thoughts at the darkest spots of my life, I never had any personal experiences with suicide hotlines, thankfully. However, I did listen to a plethora of horror stories from people who attempted to use their services, which all came to the same conclusion; these hotlines are often staffed by unqualified and emotionally bland volunteers who do no more than spout the above platitudes from a basic script, hang up on suicidal people, demean their feelings, and (even worse) call the police on them, which can lead to them being involuntarily committed due to suspicion of suicidal ideations, leading to the government trying to "help" them by restraining, drugging, abducting, then saddling them with insurmountable amounts of medical debt (if they don't have health insurance), forcing them to spend the rest of their life working on paying the debt and making their lives even more miserable. This is one of the many reasons suicidal people almost never use these hotlines.

The reason it's impossible to have a logical discussion on the topic of suicide is because most people approach it from an utterly selfish point of view where suicide is even more taboo than child molestation. While all people believe that remedy and medicine should do everything possible to reduce suffering, as soon as the treatment involves death, everyone suddenly lose their minds and keep spouting the above platitudes, denying a solution that could cure suffering, according to the suicidal person's mentality, because of someone else's personal moral objections to it instead of actually trying to understand the person's feelings and making him feel better, supported, and cared about.

I believe that the prevalence of the act would decrease drastically if it wasn't something completely taboo to talk about. A lot of suicides could have been prevented if only the victim had someone that they felt that they could talk to about their problems without risking being committed against their will or receiving nothing but meaningless platitudes invented by a society that is too afraid to ever truly discuss the subject in a meaningful way that the suicidal person can relate to. People with suicidal intents need to be able to get actual help and support and feel that they're understood, not be given false promises and clichés, fed with religious narratives they lack belief in, or be told that they're "cowardly" or "selfish" then be locked up like a convict. Abandoning rational discussion in favor of demonization never solves any problem. It only pushes them under the rug where they steadily get worse.