I am going to offer another voice here, potentially against my better judgement.
I have spent half of my life being suicidal. I have attempted suicide twice and contemplated it many more times than I could count. I suffer from several mental illnesses, the most prominent and miserable of which is chronic, debilitating depression. I could write pages on my feelings about the disease, and how it is quite possibly the worst named disease of all, but that's not really the point of this thread. My disease wants me to die. It is a very clever, manipulative, intelligent disease. It's ultimate goal is to kill you. That is one of the first things I want people to understand about my particular form of depression. It is not just a temporary sadness. It will be with me for my entire life. I am also not the only one with this disease - there are many of us, yet when people here the word 'depression,' they think of emotional teenagers under some modicum of stress who want some attention. There are many different forms of this disease, yet so many people view it as one thing, and not a serious thing.
"A permanent solution to a temporary problem"... what I feel like some people need to understand is that the problem is not always temporary. Like I said, I will be suffering from depression for my entire life. It will not go away. It is not curable. Treatable? Yes, absolutely, but not curable. For those with extremely serious forms of depression, treatment isn't always plausible, either... especially in a world where mental illness is so stigmatized, and treatments are not wildly available. The treatments that we do have are largely a guessing game; there is no exact science to it. You can't say, 'take these few pills, come have this exact treatment for x number of days and then you'll be better.' That's not how it works.
It's taken me 12 years to find a treatment that works for me, and I'm one of the lucky ones. It is still an every day struggle. I no longer live every day wishing for the sweet mercy of death, and I am so thankful for that. People tell me that I am strong, that I am so strong for having come this far, for sticking it out, for surviving, and I suppose that that is true... but when I think about others who have suffered the way I have - or have suffered in other, more horrific ways - who weren't so lucky to make it this far, I just can't find it in me to curse them for it. In the end, their disease took their life, and it is tragic.
Not everyone who commits suicide it suffering from chronic depression like me, of course. There are a multitude of other reasons for killing yourself, but none of them should be taken lightly. No one commits suicide 'for attention.' No one in their right mind commits suicide, period. When people call the act of suicide selfish, I want to tell them one thing: on the mind of almost every suicidal person is that by removing themselves from this earth, they are doing the rest of the world a favor. They seem themselves as a burden. By killing themselves, they are not only freeing themselves of this horrible pain, but freeing everyone else from it as well.
Should that make sense to you? If you've never been in that position - no, probably not. I surely wish that most people have not felt that way, because it's a horrible way to feel. I recognize that there are some people that commit suicide out of spite, but those are few and far between. Mostly these are people who are suffering, often from invisible illnesses that no one else seems to understand. With a world of people who tell you just to 'get over it,' that 'others have it worse,' that it's 'all in your head,' it can be incredibly hard to keep living. You hurt so much... you just want relief.
In closing, I want to ask you one thing:
If suicide is selfish, isn't it also selfish to expect someone suffering so deeply to continue living just so you don't have to feel the pain of their passing? We are all selfish. It's in our nature.
