Perspective on Suicide

I've been wanting to share something that helped me summarize how I feel about suicide. David Foster Wallace, the late celebrated novelist, wrote:

“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.” 

--David Foster Wallace

I truly believe that people who commit suicide do not want to die. A policeman working at the Golden Gate Bridge said that after talking to the very few people who have survived the jump off the bridge, he found that each person said the same thing. They admitted that the second they jumped, they knew they had made the wrong decision. They knew that they wanted to live. This is why suicide is preventable - it's about ending pain, not ending life.

I have felt myself metaphorically standing on the edge of a high-rise, terrified to jump, but more terrified of the flames. Depression and anxiety encompass, consume, and destroy a soul like a fire. 

It is easy for a person who has not felt those flames to say, "Didn't they love their family? Didn't they want to see the ocean again? Didn't they want to experience love and laughter?" Yes, they did. Of course the suicidal person didn't want to leave their family, or any of the good things about life. We have to understand that in the mind of a suicidal person, they have already lost all of those things in the flames.

These are two paintings depicting "The Falling Man," which was the name given to one of the people who jumped from the burning Twin Towers on September 11th. This man did not jump because he didn't care about his family. He jumped because it was the only way not to feel the burning fire, and he had to make a terrifying choice.

I, too, would have jumped if it hadn't been for the people who helped me put out the flames and taught me how to fight fires myself. If you are compassionate, educated, supportive, and nonjudgmental, YOU can help someone do the same.