Well, this discussion shows how some facts can lead to misunderstandings if they are not properly nuanced.
I have read several books on suicide. That was partially because I had suicidal thoughts during my teens and early twenties.
"Man Against Himself" by Menninger enabled me to gain insights that delivered me from ever having such problems again. Suicide is frequently "anger" that one directs at oneself simply because one is unable to direct it at others.
The classic example of this is a child's though:"I'll make my mother/father/parents regret how they have been treating me. I'll kill myself. That will make them feel really guilty."
Once I understood this dynamic, I focused my anger outward by resolving I'd never kill myself without eliminating a few monsters first. At the top of my list for many years was a German Doctor who cut up the brains of homosexuals to eliminate their sexual urges and turned them into vegetables in the process. This guy was publishing papers in medical journals as late as 1971!
All this argument about male and female suicides is faulted by the nuance that females attempt suicide much more frequently than males and have a much higher rate of failure. Males attempt suicide less frequently but succeed much more often.
Suicide attempts are often a dramatic "cry for help". Indeed, my own Mother caught her second husband by attempting suicide (by gas) after he initially refused to marry her.
It just happened that the gas in Plainfield, N.J. was not lethal, a fact which my Mother probably did not know since she was not well read. After the gas flooded the kitchen, my Mother changed her mind and called 911 for help.
The Fire Department kicked in the door and dragged my Mother out onto the front lawn to revive her. The story made page one of the local newspaper. The General (who she had been dating) came home, read the story in the newspaper, rushed to the hospital with a bouquet of flowers in hand and proposed.
A few months later, my Mother was shown draped in furs on the "society page" as a newly-wed off on a Carribean honeymoon. The General had a very high paying job. He kept her in style. They traveled the world together and when he died thirty years later, he left a million-dollar trust fund whose income would go to my Mother for as long as she lived.
Now, were those the actions of a "dumb" person? Dumb like a fox! And while we're discussing statistics, does my Mother's "attempted suicide" put me in that "higher risk" category of people who have had someone in their family commit suicide?
Kevin says:
Until we can control our psychological status well enough, there will always be some kind of 'pain' which will cause suicide, even if the pain is really only a pinprick in comparison to what others' may have experienced and not taken the same action. In this respect, tolerance to pain, of various kinds, is likely determined genetically, and those with low thresholds may tend to think suicide is more attractive than others whose pain thresholds are higher.
This raises differences in our physical bodies Immortalists so frequently ignore. We have different tolerances for pain. (My Mother has a high tolerance according to her doctors.) That means we might find disease and discomfort to be more or less tolerable than others do.
More interesting to me is how hormones and chemical imbalances in our body affect our mental functioning. We all know about bi-polar depression and its suspected basis in bodily chemistry.
I've had experiences with schizophrenic friends/roommates/employees where the administration of various drugs literally brought them back to reality and normality.
We all know that certain drugs like cocaine, ectasy, marijuana and amphetamine can induce euphoria. Others, like alcohol, are supposed to increase depression and/or aggression.
Female to male transexuals find their sexual urges become more intense and the need for instant relief more pressing once they start taking testosterone shots.
Women get cranky during their monthly period.
All of these things show that our minds are intimately connected to our physical bodies. This is something that those who talk about "uploading their minds into computers and/or cyborgs" seem to ignore. (If I've missed something here, please enlighten me.)
Elrond makes a good point about their being a higher incidence of suicide in developed countries. However, I also believe that having an easier physical life gives us the “luxury” or indulging in our own personal “emotional” misery—a failed love affair, public humiliation, loneliness, etc.
Elrond said: “When people aren't spending their time fighting for survival they tend to forget that it is a goal worth fighting for.”
I agree but believe “fighting for survival” is something that so totally occupies one’s attention; you don’t have the time to dwell on suicide. “Keeping busy” cures many things. Indeed, one of the best ways to fight depression is just to go outside and take a long walk.
