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.
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.
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.
I picked Infinite Jest up again about a month ago and had been wading through a lot of articles on DFW as a way of trying to understand his suicide. So that was the context in which Aaron's death came to me. I also saw the connection in Quinn's post and it had me wondering. Thanks for completing the post.
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.
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.
> I think David Foster Wallace gives the most accurate comparison I've read
I first bought a David Foster Wallace book last spring, I was on a lunch break, had entered a book-store, when I read on one of his books' back-covers that it had been written by a brilliant guy who had committed suicide. I wasn't thinking about suicide back then, I think I never did, I was just going through depression and I wanted to genuinely see what made people more depressed than me go the whole way. Suffice is to say that I was feeling like I knew the guy when reading his words, especially when he wrote about depression, like I seem to know and be familiar with all the people who describe what depression feels like.
And to go back to Jeff Atwood's piece, until you haven't experienced depression you cannot really understand what goes through a person's mind in moments like those, and even less so are you entitled to "accuse" the said person for "calling it quits" or whatever. Like I said, I never thought about suicide, but even in my mild depression I sort of could see the black light at the end of the tunnel and people who used to be like me not that long ago just giving it up and deciding to let go.
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.
Yeah, my impression is it can (wrongly) seem like a rational choice among all the options. A friend of a friend recently jumped off the Bay Bridge. Before he did it, he explained that his schizophrenia meds made him mentally dull, bloated and unable to hold a job. In his mind, he was facing a life where either he constantly heard voices or couldn't live on his own, move out of his parents' house and so on. I hope researchers manage to solve this soon without the blunt hammer of current meds.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 ..."
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!
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.
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.
For me, reason has been a wonderful tool in continually circling me back to suicidal ideations. The worst part is when people who are not as strong as I am in logic and philosophy try to reason with me; usually they end up reluctantly agreeing, or worse, refusing to concede but obstinately arguing because they can't own up to it.
As of now, the most effective preventative measure for me has been focus. If I apply myself to thinking about something else, the problem goes away.
Based on the other article it sounds like you're not coping at all, but rather at step 5 of 6:
"What this cognitive shift to concrete thinking reflects, suggests Baumeister, is the brain’s attempt to slip into idle mental labor, thereby avoiding the suffocating feelings that we’ve been describing. Many suicidal college students, for example, exhibit a behavioral pattern of burying themselves in dull, routine academic busywork in the weeks beforehand, presumably to enter a sort of 'emotional deadness' which is 'an end in itself.' When I was a suicidal adolescent, I remember reading voraciously during this time; it didn’t matter what it was that I read—mostly junk novels, in fact—since it was only to replace my own thoughts with those of the writer’s. For the suicidal, other people’s words can be pulled over one’s exhausting ruminations like a seamless glove being stretched over a distractingly scarred hand."
> 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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.