[TruckingThrow]

An uncle of mine blew his brains out a couple of years ago after a decade of struggling with mental health issues. I used to get so enraged at him for abandoning his family in that way.

For some reason, your post really brought home to me that maybe what he was seeking was a way out, that he couldn't live with what the person he had become was putting his family through and that maybe he did it because to him that was better for them than sticking around.

Helping me understand that event probably wasn't your intent, but thank you for sharing this, because I think you succeeded.

[sharkweek]

I hope you and your family have been able to find peace or are at least able to work toward it... I am so sorry for your loss.

There's a quote in the novel Infinite Jest that changed my perception on suicide. This passage helped me make some sense of something so terrible. It helped me see that I honestly can't even imagine what's going through the head of someone who is going against every human instinct to otherwise survive.

“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.”

[DoreenMichele]

Our current world mostly doesn't have effective solutions for mental health issues. Given that fact, it's easy to feel like death is the only possible escape.

I know a few things that can be helpful, though it's still a hard row to hoe. But saying I know anything useful often just gets me called crazy by internet strangers -- just more evidence that our own personal hells are all too often compounded by other people.

I hope you can make your peace.

[jayalpha]

"Our current world mostly doesn't have effective solutions for mental health issues. "

This is not true. "Mental health issues" may be a broad field. I guess US prisons are full of such people, some beyond repair. But I know people who got hospitalized because of health issues and they are doing quite well today.

There is help. There are medications and things can normalize.

I have a friend who developed mental issues and, as far as I know, is roaming homeless in Canada. But this must not be the rule.

[0xcde4c3db]

> There is help. There are medications and things can normalize.

They can, but the odds and process aren't the greatest. It's a pretty common experience that people spend years going through different treatment options before they find something that really works. For major depressive disorder, something like 15-20% of patients never find something that works consistently.