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The point about suicidal thoughts is that the urge to have the thoughts is a symptom of a disease, a phenomenon that is occurring in your brain. And on top of t

The point about suicidal thoughts is that the urge to have the thoughts is a symptom of a disease, a phenomenon that is occurring in your brain. And on top of the other symptoms of the disease these thoughts create their own suffering. My advice is not to try to rationalize the urge. If you ask yourself the question "Why do I have to kill myself?" You will get answers. Bullshit answers, usually, but they don't look that irrational because of your state of mind. And a lot of the suffering is caused by these essentially fruitless discussions. Another key point is to realize the impermanence of the mind and of the self. Though it sounds like a buddhist teaching, everyone who survived suicidal ideation knows this: You enjoy live, then you don't, then you do again. The mind is never static. Finding that reality helps one to get a grip on the seemingly illogical phenomenon on suicidal thoughts.

Dewie3 11y ago
Right, I've had the experience that thoughts can deeply affect my mood and how I feel about life and myself. I wonder, though, why most people seem to simply leave it at that - "some thoughts are bad, be aware of that". Where's any kind of advice on actually dealing with this mind of ours? Sure, we have meditation and mindfulness, and at least meditation seems to be very effective for many things (I don't know enough about mindfulness). But is the mind really such a chaotic and uncontrollable beast that the only alternative is to focus/quiet it (meditation), or to symbolically shrug at the impermanence of its temperament? We tell people to exercise if we want to get stronger, but the mind is seemingly something that we either try to repress in an unhealthy way (alcoholism and friends), just blurt out/vent whatever it has been nagging us with lately ("talking about our feelings"), or meditate/mindfulness. The last alternative seems very promising and healthy, though sorely underutilized by most people, even the "my body is my temple". But I find it strange that there aren't more alternative (and complementary) approaches that are being suggested, like trying to think more constructively ("positive thinking" being a part of this). People who see the mind as a separate and wild beast will probably say that the mind can not be controlled. And I would be inclined to agree. But I think it can be steered to some degree, or at least nudged.
- gopher2 11y ago
  I have found basic cognitive behavioral therapy techniques like the "three column method" to be immensely helpful in dealing with negative thoughts/moods. Especially in combo with meditation. Copy of the book 'Feeling Good' is about 10$ and will teach you how to do it and give lots of good examples in different practical contexts, or just google 'triple column method cognitive therapy'. Steps are generally: write down your automatic thoughts when you are feeling bad, identify how they are irrational or distorted, write down more accurate, balanced, realistic ones -> feeling better.
- bayesianhorse 11y ago
  Mindfulness is not enough. For one thing, being mindful of your breathing won't help you a bit when dealing with unpleasant thoughts. But you can start to become more mindful of these thought, especially when not in a formal meditation. The "observing" of these thoughts alone can improve the situation a lot. Mindfulness training also improves the prefrontal cortex and thus the ability to control impulses and thoughts. The idea is to evolve the ability to choose to have a certain thought or not. Knowing what to do is one thing, doing it is another. Meditation can immensely improve the latter! Meditation is not a sufficient treatment for depression or suicidal thoughts, but it can help to avoid relapses, and it helps to deal with the consequences of recurring depressions.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
  If I tried to quiet my mind or focus it during meditation I would get tense. The idea is to let it focus.
- alexashka 11y ago
  It's a can of worms - there's this notion of freedom of religion for instance. Anybody can think and believe any crazy idea as long as it's a fairly mainstream religion. That's our current state of affairs - we take any ideas seriously as long as many people take them seriously. There's not much other criteria at play. So people live with crazy incompatible ideas that keep causing internal conflict and what vague solution can you propose that'll sell? (Capitalism is the new religion, so things MUST sell :)) Right, 'mindfulness' - in other words, just don't pay attention to the internal conflicts you are continually having - they'll go away on their own. They don't really, but we can't say ok, we have to use logic and sense to approach these things - because then archaic ideas like freedom of religion are going to fall apart. So we are where we are, mindfulness, 'positive thinking' and other sterile methods that don't talk about the real problem - your mind is a big mess and it'll take a while to sort through it. We as a society haven't even started - we're too busy coping with never-ending fuck-ups that stem from people in power not losing their heads for being incompetent. Of course they love it that way, they're at the top of the heap and beyond scrutiny, how convenient. Just don't get caught with hookers and blow.
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deleted 11y ago
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- tptacek 11y ago
  It's important on medical topics to distinguish message board noodling from actual vetted advice. I'm not a doctor but have spoken to doctors about this specific issue, and, like all of us, have access to the actual medical advice available on the Internet. Every piece of advice I can find prominently states: Do not argue with or attempt to invalidate the reasoning of a suicidal person. Listen. Ask questions to gauge intentionality ("do you have a plan? what is your plan?"). Vector them towards professional help. Do not try to fix suicidal people yourself. Suicidal impulses are a medical emergency. This may not directly apply to your comment, but it seems very likely to apply to the thread as a whole.
  - angersock 11y ago
    Do not try to fix suicidal people yourself. This bears repeating--in most places, this is homicide. :|
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    >Do not argue with or attempt to invalidate the reasoning of a suicidal person. Merely saying this may not convince people. They need to know why this completely fails. While suicidal actions are largely impulsive (one reason why guns are a worse threat than other forms of suicide), the individual has spent a long time thinking about it. Nothing you can say will convince them that you have any understanding of their reasoning. To them, you are just like all the others who do not understand them (regardless if they are right or wrong in such an assessment). By listening, you are likely doing something that no one else has done for them. It will often show them that you want to know their reasoning instead of just dismissing it. It may not be enough to stop them, but it often does delay them, hopefully long enough for a professional to get involved and take over.
    - johnward 11y ago
      > (one reason why guns are a worse threat than other forms of suicide) I come from a family of avid hunters and gun owners. I don't personally own a gun. Not because of any political reason but because I don't want the ability to pull the trigger when I'm in my darkest of moods. At least without that I have to think about it long enough to hopefully snap out of it. There are a handful of times if you would have handed me I gun I think I would have pulled the trigger... Then when I look back it seems silly but the cycle repeats. One time I simply couldn't find my car keys and almost rage quite life. The car was in the shop.
smorrow 11y ago
No. Someone may well work out perfectly logically that there's nothing more for them to do in life. And that's their choice. You're pathologising someone just for coming to a certain conclusion. Of course, people might also make emotion-based decisions to kill themselves, which might be a symptom of their depression or whatever, but that doesn't mean that all suicide must be a mistake. You'd kill yourself to keep the Borg or the Alien from getting you, wouldn't you? If you're pro-choice w.r.t. abortions at all, then you should really be pro-choice w.r.t. suicide. If your logic for the first one was "it's their body, so it's their choice", you're inconsistent in your logic if you oppose the second one 100% of the time. > illogical Given that there's no good reason to be alive in the first place, it's perfectly logical. It's only ill-logical if you assume that what's good for the (selfish) genes and what's good for the individual are the same thing, which they're not. Just let people make their own decisions.
- gohrt 11y ago
  You wrote "No" but did not disagree with anything parent wrote.
- bayesianhorse 11y ago
  That's just not the reality. If you look at suicides, you pretty much always see someone who was depressed for a long time. And that disease of depression has been studied in so immense detail, that your point of view about it is plainly wrong. The suffering is clearly immense. And it is clearly temporary for almost all patients, especially with good treatment. It can't be rational to kill yourself to avoid temporary suffering. Of course you can construct situations where it would be more rational. But really, if someone has suicidal thoughts, the assumption that this is an irrational, "insane" idea, is pretty much a no-brainer.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    > That's just not the reality. If you look at suicides, you pretty much always see someone who was depressed for a long time. That's definitely not true. Most people who die by suicide have a mental illness, but not all of them. (And by "had a mental illness" I'm including those people who had an undiagnosed illness.)
NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
> The point about suicidal thoughts is that the urge to have the thoughts is a symptom of a disease, This is wrong. Thinking of it as a "disease" is a misunderstanding, it makes it impossible to truly understand it. Alcoholism might be a disease... excessive alcohol consumption probably doesn't have any benefits. Suicide though? It sort of does. You see, biological organisms aren't programmed to survive... we're programmed to reproduce. And that means not just laying the eggs, but making sure that at least some of the offspring survive. So it became advantageous if a parent (or even uncle/aunt) was psychologically capable of killing themselves or letting themselves be killed. And we're not necessarily talking about throwing yourself in front of a rabid grizzly either. There are all sorts of circumstances (killing yourself so there will be enough food for the other to survive a famine). The psychological machinery is all there for killing yourself. Hard-wired into your brain through countless thousands of generations of people who only lived because a close relative voluntarily died. But evolution isn't intelligent, and it goes with a "what works most of the time" method of keeping a trait or not. And this is probably cross-wired in with quite a few mental illnesses and other questionably-useful traits. It's a malfunction of a (once in a great while) useful tool.
- patrick73 11y ago
  this is the dumbest thing I heard in the day. Congrats.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html On HN, it's anything other than the strict mental health party line on suicide. On other threads, I've seen people looking down on David Foster Wallace, as if they had a prayer of doing in their lives what he did. I upvoted, because interesting comments on this topic are rare.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
    Thanks for the upvote.
- fsloth 11y ago

Dewie3 11y ago

Right, I've had the experience that thoughts can deeply affect my mood and how I feel about life and myself. I wonder, though, why most people seem to simply leave it at that - "some thoughts are bad, be aware of that". Where's any kind of advice on actually dealing with this mind of ours? Sure, we have meditation and mindfulness, and at least meditation seems to be very effective for many things (I don't know enough about mindfulness). But is the mind really such a chaotic and uncontrollable beast that the only alternative is to focus/quiet it (meditation), or to symbolically shrug at the impermanence of its temperament? We tell people to exercise if we want to get stronger, but the mind is seemingly something that we either try to repress in an unhealthy way (alcoholism and friends), just blurt out/vent whatever it has been nagging us with lately ("talking about our feelings"), or meditate/mindfulness. The last alternative seems very promising and healthy, though sorely underutilized by most people, even the "my body is my temple". But I find it strange that there aren't more alternative (and complementary) approaches that are being suggested, like trying to think more constructively ("positive thinking" being a part of this). People who see the mind as a separate and wild beast will probably say that the mind can not be controlled. And I would be inclined to agree. But I think it can be steered to some degree, or at least nudged.

gopher2 11y ago
I have found basic cognitive behavioral therapy techniques like the "three column method" to be immensely helpful in dealing with negative thoughts/moods. Especially in combo with meditation. Copy of the book 'Feeling Good' is about 10$ and will teach you how to do it and give lots of good examples in different practical contexts, or just google 'triple column method cognitive therapy'. Steps are generally: write down your automatic thoughts when you are feeling bad, identify how they are irrational or distorted, write down more accurate, balanced, realistic ones -> feeling better.
bayesianhorse 11y ago
Mindfulness is not enough. For one thing, being mindful of your breathing won't help you a bit when dealing with unpleasant thoughts. But you can start to become more mindful of these thought, especially when not in a formal meditation. The "observing" of these thoughts alone can improve the situation a lot. Mindfulness training also improves the prefrontal cortex and thus the ability to control impulses and thoughts. The idea is to evolve the ability to choose to have a certain thought or not. Knowing what to do is one thing, doing it is another. Meditation can immensely improve the latter! Meditation is not a sufficient treatment for depression or suicidal thoughts, but it can help to avoid relapses, and it helps to deal with the consequences of recurring depressions.
0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
If I tried to quiet my mind or focus it during meditation I would get tense. The idea is to let it focus.
alexashka 11y ago
It's a can of worms - there's this notion of freedom of religion for instance. Anybody can think and believe any crazy idea as long as it's a fairly mainstream religion. That's our current state of affairs - we take any ideas seriously as long as many people take them seriously. There's not much other criteria at play. So people live with crazy incompatible ideas that keep causing internal conflict and what vague solution can you propose that'll sell? (Capitalism is the new religion, so things MUST sell :)) Right, 'mindfulness' - in other words, just don't pay attention to the internal conflicts you are continually having - they'll go away on their own. They don't really, but we can't say ok, we have to use logic and sense to approach these things - because then archaic ideas like freedom of religion are going to fall apart. So we are where we are, mindfulness, 'positive thinking' and other sterile methods that don't talk about the real problem - your mind is a big mess and it'll take a while to sort through it. We as a society haven't even started - we're too busy coping with never-ending fuck-ups that stem from people in power not losing their heads for being incompetent. Of course they love it that way, they're at the top of the heap and beyond scrutiny, how convenient. Just don't get caught with hookers and blow.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 11y ago
It's important on medical topics to distinguish message board noodling from actual vetted advice. I'm not a doctor but have spoken to doctors about this specific issue, and, like all of us, have access to the actual medical advice available on the Internet. Every piece of advice I can find prominently states: Do not argue with or attempt to invalidate the reasoning of a suicidal person. Listen. Ask questions to gauge intentionality ("do you have a plan? what is your plan?"). Vector them towards professional help. Do not try to fix suicidal people yourself. Suicidal impulses are a medical emergency. This may not directly apply to your comment, but it seems very likely to apply to the thread as a whole.
- angersock 11y ago
  Do not try to fix suicidal people yourself. This bears repeating--in most places, this is homicide. :|
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  >Do not argue with or attempt to invalidate the reasoning of a suicidal person. Merely saying this may not convince people. They need to know why this completely fails. While suicidal actions are largely impulsive (one reason why guns are a worse threat than other forms of suicide), the individual has spent a long time thinking about it. Nothing you can say will convince them that you have any understanding of their reasoning. To them, you are just like all the others who do not understand them (regardless if they are right or wrong in such an assessment). By listening, you are likely doing something that no one else has done for them. It will often show them that you want to know their reasoning instead of just dismissing it. It may not be enough to stop them, but it often does delay them, hopefully long enough for a professional to get involved and take over.
  - johnward 11y ago
    > (one reason why guns are a worse threat than other forms of suicide) I come from a family of avid hunters and gun owners. I don't personally own a gun. Not because of any political reason but because I don't want the ability to pull the trigger when I'm in my darkest of moods. At least without that I have to think about it long enough to hopefully snap out of it. There are a handful of times if you would have handed me I gun I think I would have pulled the trigger... Then when I look back it seems silly but the cycle repeats. One time I simply couldn't find my car keys and almost rage quite life. The car was in the shop.

smorrow 11y ago

No. Someone may well work out perfectly logically that there's nothing more for them to do in life. And that's their choice. You're pathologising someone just for coming to a certain conclusion. Of course, people might also make emotion-based decisions to kill themselves, which might be a symptom of their depression or whatever, but that doesn't mean that all suicide must be a mistake. You'd kill yourself to keep the Borg or the Alien from getting you, wouldn't you? If you're pro-choice w.r.t. abortions at all, then you should really be pro-choice w.r.t. suicide. If your logic for the first one was "it's their body, so it's their choice", you're inconsistent in your logic if you oppose the second one 100% of the time. > illogical Given that there's no good reason to be alive in the first place, it's perfectly logical. It's only ill-logical if you assume that what's good for the (selfish) genes and what's good for the individual are the same thing, which they're not. Just let people make their own decisions.

gohrt 11y ago
You wrote "No" but did not disagree with anything parent wrote.
bayesianhorse 11y ago
That's just not the reality. If you look at suicides, you pretty much always see someone who was depressed for a long time. And that disease of depression has been studied in so immense detail, that your point of view about it is plainly wrong. The suffering is clearly immense. And it is clearly temporary for almost all patients, especially with good treatment. It can't be rational to kill yourself to avoid temporary suffering. Of course you can construct situations where it would be more rational. But really, if someone has suicidal thoughts, the assumption that this is an irrational, "insane" idea, is pretty much a no-brainer.
- DanBC 11y ago
  > That's just not the reality. If you look at suicides, you pretty much always see someone who was depressed for a long time. That's definitely not true. Most people who die by suicide have a mental illness, but not all of them. (And by "had a mental illness" I'm including those people who had an undiagnosed illness.)

NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago

> The point about suicidal thoughts is that the urge to have the thoughts is a symptom of a disease, This is wrong. Thinking of it as a "disease" is a misunderstanding, it makes it impossible to truly understand it. Alcoholism might be a disease... excessive alcohol consumption probably doesn't have any benefits. Suicide though? It sort of does. You see, biological organisms aren't programmed to survive... we're programmed to reproduce. And that means not just laying the eggs, but making sure that at least some of the offspring survive. So it became advantageous if a parent (or even uncle/aunt) was psychologically capable of killing themselves or letting themselves be killed. And we're not necessarily talking about throwing yourself in front of a rabid grizzly either. There are all sorts of circumstances (killing yourself so there will be enough food for the other to survive a famine). The psychological machinery is all there for killing yourself. Hard-wired into your brain through countless thousands of generations of people who only lived because a close relative voluntarily died. But evolution isn't intelligent, and it goes with a "what works most of the time" method of keeping a trait or not. And this is probably cross-wired in with quite a few mental illnesses and other questionably-useful traits. It's a malfunction of a (once in a great while) useful tool.

patrick73 11y ago
this is the dumbest thing I heard in the day. Congrats.
jessaustin 11y ago
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html On HN, it's anything other than the strict mental health party line on suicide. On other threads, I've seen people looking down on David Foster Wallace, as if they had a prayer of doing in their lives what he did. I upvoted, because interesting comments on this topic are rare.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
  Thanks for the upvote.
fsloth 11y ago