Everyone's Suicidal Sooner or Later
Everyone will sooner or later consider suicide as an option, no matter how rosy their life may be. Recall the many rich celebrities that have committed suicide for reasons unknown. It is an inescapable fact of life that we too must consider suicide sooner or later.
By the nature of language and thinking, we must consider suicide as an option under some conditions or no conditions. The only way of not thinking of suicide, sooner or later, would require a Universe with no suicide.
The first act of suicide condemned humanity to ponder suicide for the rest of human history.
Now we work through the logic of suicide simply as a "last resort" hypotheses in some unimaginable world, or we simply look at it to unravel why anyone would end their own life. In doing so we must in some manner place ourselves in the other's shoes for at least a moment. Top
A Social Psychology of Suicide
In social psychology, George Herbert Mead's Philosophy of the Act, the self has internalized objects to place against the sense of self. This occurs as gestures, symbols, and significant symbols become objects to the self, each playing some part in creation of the human mind. Self develops in infancy as the infant takes its place in a Universe of language. In this way as infants grow and understand; these internalized objects serve as internalized reference points. Naturally, "dada" and "mama" become the first internalized objects and significant others. As the self grows so to does its inventory of objects.
For some, a suicide cleanup will follow their final moments, just as a crime scene cleanup will follow the final moments of others who died violenty their final moments. Both require professional cleaning, both are horrific, but suicide leaves us without much genuine explanation. Top
Psychoanalysis and Suicide
In Psychoanalysis, an internalized object exists for similar reasons, as a point of reference, as a sounding board, an "other" for helping to figure out the world we live in. At times this object, the "other," becomes a target as the self seeks to explain misfortune, pain, anxiety, or depression. In some way the self must rid itself of this other or continue to suffer. Ultimately, suicide becomes the one certain means of ridding the self of this other, even at the cost of suicide. (Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide) In this way the self becomes guiltless for whatever ails it and the other becomes the source of self's woes.
Suicide and Shame
There is the theory of shame to help explain suicide. The notion here is that the self suffers too greatly from shame, rightfully of wrongfully imagined. Are the thoughts associated with shame responsible for the feelings of shame? "I am ashamed of what I have done" comes either from the self talking to its self, or from the self's other talking to the self. This is indeed an internalized dialogue.
Figuring out how the self became ashamed of its self or internalized other is more than a semantics game. It becomes a matter of life or death as the victim finds strength enough to destroy the internalized other at any expense, even destruction of the self. In the end, knowledge of shame drives the self beyond its ability to cope with the imagined consequences of surviving. The other (super-ego: psychoanalysis; significant other: Social Psychology) may have become perpetrator or victim of an act too terrible to live with.
The Family's Role in Suicide
What we call a "dysfunctional family" may not be what leads to suicide. In fact, the idea that a family is "dysfunctional" contradicts the meaning of family, in many cases. Pointing out this fact of life becomes important when we realize that suicide occurs in the stereotypical "Ozzy and Harriett" family model.
What we must keep in mind that suicide does "run in some families" for various reasons. For certain, a suicide will announce to survivors that there is failure somewhere on someone's part. This may not be true, but to siblings, children, and parent survivors, there is always doubt. The worse that can happen is that the suicide becomes a model for others.
A tightly nit family with one or more central ideas to focus upon will help suicidal thoughts diminish with caring interaction. In the end, all must come to accept the idea that no one is to blame.
My name is Eddie Evans and I am the web master of suicide cleanup.