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If Jeff says that he equates suicide with rage quitting a game, I'm prepared to believe that he believes it. But I don't and I don't even think it's a compariso

If Jeff says that he equates suicide with rage quitting a game, I'm prepared to believe that he believes it. But I don't and I don't even think it's a comparison that's useful. Perhaps he means it sincerely, but my experience with someone close to me committing suicide and the research I have done since then--including research prompted by feedback from HN to posts I have written--is that it can be dangerous to try to "reason" with a suicidal person. "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into" is something I often say about bigots, sexists, and so on, but it applies to depressed people as well. You don't come back from the brink because of life lessons, or essays on the internet, or the love of a small child. Or this comment. I won't even try to explain how being so depressed that you kill yourself is nothing like deciding that you don't want to "play the Internets" any more. The metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress. I liken depression to AIDS of the emotional immune system. When we're healthy, we have ways of handling stress. We have good days and bad days, but they fall within a certain manageable range because our body musters compensation for our emotions. The depressed person can be triggered by something bad and spiral into an extreme mood. If we use my metaphor to explain why someone facing a lot of jail time would commit suicide, the jail time is like pneumonia: Something serious but beatable by a person with a healthy immune system and social support. But not beatable by someone with a compromised immune system, and deadly to someone whose immune system actually attacks himself in response to certain kinds of stress. Long ramble here, but we can't talk people out of AIDS or Cancer or even the Common Cold. Good spirits and support have been proven to be very helpful, but not as a substitute for proper treatment or for understanding that if you are contemplating ending your own life, you are sick but what you have can be treated PROVIDED YOU AND YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK TREAT DEPRESSION AS A SERIOUS ILLNESS THAT CAN BE TREATED. I am not telling Mr. Atwood to retract his remarks. But I am saying that I do not support trying to talk someone out of suicide by comparing it to rage quitting a game or walking away from the Internet. I do support everything he is saying about the ridiculous injustice in the plea bargain system.

thrdOriginal 14y ago
I agree: his is not a very useful comparison. I think David Foster Wallace gives the most accurate comparison I've read, and I always want to show it to those lucky souls who have never had to deal with this type of depression: The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
- raganwald 14y ago
  Wow. Thank you for sharing that.
  - lisper 14y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5048260 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5048260
- vacri 14y ago
  That's a very good way of putting it. One thing people don't realise is that depression screws with your perception of the value of things, maybe a little, maybe a lot. Trying to logically balance things like a mathematical equation is not a useful way of looking at things when discussing depression.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    The major characteristic of severe clinical depression is that it takes away enjoyment from all manner of activities that used to be enjoyable. People who haven't experienced it or who have never been close to someone in the depths of depression are unlikely to be able to comprehend it.
- zipdog 14y ago
  I like DFW's quote. I also like a point made by Nick Hornby in 'A long way down' that sometimes it is not because they don't want to live anymore, its because they want to live so much, but are being prevented from living by things beyond their control.
- cllns 14y ago
  I had a blog post sitting in my drafts folder about Aaron Swartz and David Foster Wallace. It was waiting to make it perfect, but I don't think it ever will be. Thanks for this post, causing me to tidy it up and publish it. Here it is, for those interested: http://swapcase.net/post/41144052777/aaronsw-and-dfw http://swapcase.net/post/41144052777/aaronsw-and-dfw
tomp 14y ago
> But it is another thing entirely to play the final move and end your own life. To declare the end of this game and all future games, the end of ragequitting itself. (Emphasis Jeff's).
lmkg 14y ago
> The metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress. I liken depression to AIDS of the emotional immune system. As someone who has dealt with (and eventually overcame) clinical depression in the past, this is the metaphor that I use as well. Willpower a necessary tool any time you're trying to make a change to yourself; depression is an affliction of the will.
Swizec 14y ago
As a person who very much was on the brink of suicide at one point (or rather many points) ... you very much do reason yourself out of it. I decided that I'm simply too curious about what happens next to ever do it. Has helped ever since and eventually the thoughts faded away ... now suicide is merely a passing curiousity that momentarily pops into mind as a "Y'know, I wonder what it'd be like to just swerve into that truck coming down the opposite lane right now. There isn't actually anything stopping me from doing it ..." Reason, it's a powerful tool.
- raganwald 14y ago
  I can't speak to your own experience. But I can advance another explanation for what those words may connote. Sometimes our body does something, and our brain tries to "make sense of it" by inventing a casual relationship where none existed. For example, if we are cranky, we sometimes mistakenly explain our mood by saying that people around us are rude, or that drivers in traffic are selfishly blocking us. It is sometimes difficult to think that we're cranky "just because." Some people have a biochemical explanation for their depression and their biochemistry changes over time. It could be that their brains fix themselves, and as they get better, their reason improves. But if you ask them, "what happened?" They say it was their reason. In my own case, I have often claimed that I can improve my mood with endorphins through exercise and adrenaline sports like rock climbing. But others around me say that I have cause and effect backwards, that when I'm depressed I avoid exercise and when I get better, I start exercising again!
  - Swizec 14y ago
    That's a good point. I was told that you first have to get better enough to decide to get better completely, or something like that. Depression is a tricky thing. The most valuable skill I ever learned is being able to mentally catch it early and reverse the thought processes before they become a problem.
    - raganwald 14y ago
      I think everything you're saying is right, and in fact you may have gotten yourself better through your mental habits. I have learned some "interventions" through practice, I think of them as habits like hand washing. You can't wash away a cold infection, but you can get it off your hands before you touch your face, so hand washing is an incredibly important way to fight the common cold. All the little things help, from teaching yourself to intervene when a mood starts to swing negative, to challenging negative explanations and beliefs, to working on core beliefs, to drugs, endorphins, everything.
roflc0ptic 14y ago
This is a great comment. If I could nitpick a little bit: You wrote "the metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress." As far as I can tell, this isn't a metaphor. I think is a pretty good description of what happens. For those of you lucky enough to have gotten through your life so far without wanting to end it, it's probably hard to understand what suicidal ideation is like. Jesse Bering, a very well spoken evolutionary psychologist, wrote an article about what it feels like to want to kill yourself. This is far and away the best description of being suicidal I have ever read. As someone who's been on and off with suicidal ideation for the last decade, the words Atwood uses don't really resonate with me. This article really, really does. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2010/10/20/being-suicidal-what-it-feels-like-to-want-to-kill-yourself/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2010/10/2... Lastly, to anyone who deals with this: if at all possible, don't let the death urge win. Your depression lies to you. Don't trust it to have your best interests in mind.
- raganwald 14y ago
  Thank you for "coming out" and sharing your experiences.
gfodor 14y ago
In other words, this is Atwood being Atwood: posting overly-simplistic, ignorant observations in a manner that manages to be only subtly wrong and hence dangerous. To a wide audience. That is receptive to his viewpoints. It's harsh but over the last decade or so every, single damn time I read Atwood's blog I walk away shaking my head. The popular posts usually end up with him writing some sort of apology or retraction. Fortunately usually this is about something not nearly as serious an issue as suicide. (Though his posts on computer security are also notorious for causing proliferation of views that may actually cause real damage.) When he posts stuff I don't think he intends these things but often I sadly see knowledgable people have to scramble and waste their time "cleaning up" after him by posting responses and getting those responses through the filter.
- raganwald 14y ago
  I would never post an over-simplistic, ignorant observation in a manner that manages to be only subtly wrong and thus dangerous. I go for completely wrong! http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-the-fuck http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-the-fuck
  - gfodor 14y ago
    Ha. Well, if its any consolation, I don't see that post falling into the "dangerous" category. At worst you get nowhere at best you convince people to go work on diabetes software. Worst case for some of Atwood's posts is complete security breakdown at your favorite startup whose CTO is an avid reader of Coding Horror.
benatkin 14y ago
I'm glad (and hope you're right) that he doesn't understand it, because to me that means he wasn't really that far gone. He's got one hell of an active mind, as evidenced by how prolific he is. I think he may have been having an identity crisis of sorts.
- raganwald 14y ago
  Both of my children were extremely poor sleepers in infancy. My daughter still wakes up in the middle of the night. Everyone has this advice and that advice about how to get children to sleep, but none of it worked for us. In the end, we were sleep deprived for very long periods of time, and we both became very seriously depressed. When we started to sleep again, our moods improved. It's ridiculous to toss guesses out into the Internet like talking heads on Fox News, but for the purposes of educating people who may find themselves in a similar situation, someone can easily become suicidal through post-partum depression, and it can affect both men and women. There are various risk factors, one of which is sleep.
  - lostlogin 14y ago
    Combined with health issues that can occur during birth (and a 9month spell of vomiting all day everyday), exactly the same here. Some things are worse, but the depression is lifting now, 2 years on. Proper sleep is so important.
Karunamon 14y ago
"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into" The metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress. I liken depression to AIDS of the emotional immune system. This is a very profound way of thinking about depression, and I thank you for sharing it.
mynameishere 14y ago
I think the metaphor is bad, but applicable in some cases. I remember a video (I won't link to it) in which a guy was arrested after a shoot-out with the police. In the police station the security camera shows him sitting alone at a table. He pulls out a gun from his baggy pants and shoots himself. That is really, really similar to a game-style ragequit. I don't think the guy was a typical depression case. He was cornered, screwed bad forever, and pressed "quit".
Retric 14y ago
Not everyone that commits suicide was depressed. /Rage Quit is arguably a type of suicide but there are plenty of others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%90%E1%BB%A9c_self-immolation.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%... Seppuku Many cultures have promoted it for one reason or another http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku http://rt.com/news/india-ritual-suicide-sati/ http://rt.com/news/india-ritual-suicide-sati/ Some native american cultures had the idea of the elderly walking into the snow when they became burdensome.
- raganwald 14y ago
  Thank you.
notactuallyme 14y ago
> You don't come back from the brink because of life lessons, or essays on the internet, or the love of a small child. It depends on the person, and their depression. The last item on your list did it for me.
- raganwald 14y ago
  I'm very glad to hear this. Thank you for sharing your experience.
mithacker 14y ago
Fatwood made the stupidest analogy I've ever heard next to Paul Graham's comparison of 9/11 to buffer overflow: http://www.paulgraham.com/hijack.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hijack.html
chris_wot 14y ago
Thank you. This was a very insightful comment, and I'm glad you said it. Sorry if this is a little valueless, but this is a topic that touches my life and I feel I need to do something more than just upvoting you.

thrdOriginal 14y ago

I agree: his is not a very useful comparison. I think David Foster Wallace gives the most accurate comparison I've read, and I always want to show it to those lucky souls who have never had to deal with this type of depression: The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

raganwald 14y ago
Wow. Thank you for sharing that.
- lisper 14y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5048260 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5048260
vacri 14y ago
That's a very good way of putting it. One thing people don't realise is that depression screws with your perception of the value of things, maybe a little, maybe a lot. Trying to logically balance things like a mathematical equation is not a useful way of looking at things when discussing depression.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  The major characteristic of severe clinical depression is that it takes away enjoyment from all manner of activities that used to be enjoyable. People who haven't experienced it or who have never been close to someone in the depths of depression are unlikely to be able to comprehend it.
zipdog 14y ago
I like DFW's quote. I also like a point made by Nick Hornby in 'A long way down' that sometimes it is not because they don't want to live anymore, its because they want to live so much, but are being prevented from living by things beyond their control.
cllns 14y ago
I had a blog post sitting in my drafts folder about Aaron Swartz and David Foster Wallace. It was waiting to make it perfect, but I don't think it ever will be. Thanks for this post, causing me to tidy it up and publish it. Here it is, for those interested: http://swapcase.net/post/41144052777/aaronsw-and-dfw http://swapcase.net/post/41144052777/aaronsw-and-dfw

tomp 14y ago

> But it is another thing entirely to play the final move and end your own life. To declare the end of this game and all future games, the end of ragequitting itself. (Emphasis Jeff's).

lmkg 14y ago

> The metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress. I liken depression to AIDS of the emotional immune system. As someone who has dealt with (and eventually overcame) clinical depression in the past, this is the metaphor that I use as well. Willpower a necessary tool any time you're trying to make a change to yourself; depression is an affliction of the will.

Swizec 14y ago

As a person who very much was on the brink of suicide at one point (or rather many points) ... you very much do reason yourself out of it. I decided that I'm simply too curious about what happens next to ever do it. Has helped ever since and eventually the thoughts faded away ... now suicide is merely a passing curiousity that momentarily pops into mind as a "Y'know, I wonder what it'd be like to just swerve into that truck coming down the opposite lane right now. There isn't actually anything stopping me from doing it ..." Reason, it's a powerful tool.

raganwald 14y ago
I can't speak to your own experience. But I can advance another explanation for what those words may connote. Sometimes our body does something, and our brain tries to "make sense of it" by inventing a casual relationship where none existed. For example, if we are cranky, we sometimes mistakenly explain our mood by saying that people around us are rude, or that drivers in traffic are selfishly blocking us. It is sometimes difficult to think that we're cranky "just because." Some people have a biochemical explanation for their depression and their biochemistry changes over time. It could be that their brains fix themselves, and as they get better, their reason improves. But if you ask them, "what happened?" They say it was their reason. In my own case, I have often claimed that I can improve my mood with endorphins through exercise and adrenaline sports like rock climbing. But others around me say that I have cause and effect backwards, that when I'm depressed I avoid exercise and when I get better, I start exercising again!
- Swizec 14y ago
  That's a good point. I was told that you first have to get better enough to decide to get better completely, or something like that. Depression is a tricky thing. The most valuable skill I ever learned is being able to mentally catch it early and reverse the thought processes before they become a problem.
  - raganwald 14y ago
    I think everything you're saying is right, and in fact you may have gotten yourself better through your mental habits. I have learned some "interventions" through practice, I think of them as habits like hand washing. You can't wash away a cold infection, but you can get it off your hands before you touch your face, so hand washing is an incredibly important way to fight the common cold. All the little things help, from teaching yourself to intervene when a mood starts to swing negative, to challenging negative explanations and beliefs, to working on core beliefs, to drugs, endorphins, everything.

roflc0ptic 14y ago

This is a great comment. If I could nitpick a little bit: You wrote "the metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress." As far as I can tell, this isn't a metaphor. I think is a pretty good description of what happens. For those of you lucky enough to have gotten through your life so far without wanting to end it, it's probably hard to understand what suicidal ideation is like. Jesse Bering, a very well spoken evolutionary psychologist, wrote an article about what it feels like to want to kill yourself. This is far and away the best description of being suicidal I have ever read. As someone who's been on and off with suicidal ideation for the last decade, the words Atwood uses don't really resonate with me. This article really, really does. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2010/10/20/being-suicidal-what-it-feels-like-to-want-to-kill-yourself/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2010/10/2... Lastly, to anyone who deals with this: if at all possible, don't let the death urge win. Your depression lies to you. Don't trust it to have your best interests in mind.

raganwald 14y ago
Thank you for "coming out" and sharing your experiences.

gfodor 14y ago

In other words, this is Atwood being Atwood: posting overly-simplistic, ignorant observations in a manner that manages to be only subtly wrong and hence dangerous. To a wide audience. That is receptive to his viewpoints. It's harsh but over the last decade or so every, single damn time I read Atwood's blog I walk away shaking my head. The popular posts usually end up with him writing some sort of apology or retraction. Fortunately usually this is about something not nearly as serious an issue as suicide. (Though his posts on computer security are also notorious for causing proliferation of views that may actually cause real damage.) When he posts stuff I don't think he intends these things but often I sadly see knowledgable people have to scramble and waste their time "cleaning up" after him by posting responses and getting those responses through the filter.

raganwald 14y ago
I would never post an over-simplistic, ignorant observation in a manner that manages to be only subtly wrong and thus dangerous. I go for completely wrong! http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-the-fuck http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-the-fuck
- gfodor 14y ago
  Ha. Well, if its any consolation, I don't see that post falling into the "dangerous" category. At worst you get nowhere at best you convince people to go work on diabetes software. Worst case for some of Atwood's posts is complete security breakdown at your favorite startup whose CTO is an avid reader of Coding Horror.

benatkin 14y ago

I'm glad (and hope you're right) that he doesn't understand it, because to me that means he wasn't really that far gone. He's got one hell of an active mind, as evidenced by how prolific he is. I think he may have been having an identity crisis of sorts.

raganwald 14y ago
Both of my children were extremely poor sleepers in infancy. My daughter still wakes up in the middle of the night. Everyone has this advice and that advice about how to get children to sleep, but none of it worked for us. In the end, we were sleep deprived for very long periods of time, and we both became very seriously depressed. When we started to sleep again, our moods improved. It's ridiculous to toss guesses out into the Internet like talking heads on Fox News, but for the purposes of educating people who may find themselves in a similar situation, someone can easily become suicidal through post-partum depression, and it can affect both men and women. There are various risk factors, one of which is sleep.
- lostlogin 14y ago
  Combined with health issues that can occur during birth (and a 9month spell of vomiting all day everyday), exactly the same here. Some things are worse, but the depression is lifting now, 2 years on. Proper sleep is so important.

Karunamon 14y ago

"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into" The metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress. I liken depression to AIDS of the emotional immune system. This is a very profound way of thinking about depression, and I thank you for sharing it.

mynameishere 14y ago

I think the metaphor is bad, but applicable in some cases. I remember a video (I won't link to it) in which a guy was arrested after a shoot-out with the police. In the police station the security camera shows him sitting alone at a table. He pulls out a gun from his baggy pants and shoots himself. That is really, really similar to a game-style ragequit. I don't think the guy was a typical depression case. He was cornered, screwed bad forever, and pressed "quit".

Retric 14y ago

Not everyone that commits suicide was depressed. /Rage Quit is arguably a type of suicide but there are plenty of others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%90%E1%BB%A9c_self-immolation.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%... Seppuku Many cultures have promoted it for one reason or another http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku http://rt.com/news/india-ritual-suicide-sati/ http://rt.com/news/india-ritual-suicide-sati/ Some native american cultures had the idea of the elderly walking into the snow when they became burdensome.

raganwald 14y ago
Thank you.

notactuallyme 14y ago

> You don't come back from the brink because of life lessons, or essays on the internet, or the love of a small child. It depends on the person, and their depression. The last item on your list did it for me.

raganwald 14y ago
I'm very glad to hear this. Thank you for sharing your experience.

mithacker 14y ago

Fatwood made the stupidest analogy I've ever heard next to Paul Graham's comparison of 9/11 to buffer overflow: http://www.paulgraham.com/hijack.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hijack.html

chris_wot 14y ago

Thank you. This was a very insightful comment, and I'm glad you said it. Sorry if this is a little valueless, but this is a topic that touches my life and I feel I need to do something more than just upvoting you.