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AlteredState01 said:
What bothers me is the fact that, when one decides to take their "exit", they are most often considered "selfish" for NOT considering the people in their lives.

Frankly, I don't want my family to have to continually suffer the consequences of my illness.

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We're all inter-related but everyone does what they have to do. I ask why, if one kills one's self and is dead, why they care what other people are going to think afterwards?

But to your frankly concern; you're trying to control what other people feel and think by deciding whether someone else is "suffering" from the consequences of your illness and whether they want to or not. Given the choice between having you alive and ill and "my" suffering trying to support/help you and you dead, I'd choose to suffer myself. That's what you're trying to take control of and it's not yours to control. That's what is selfish, though in a merely misguided sense.

I am in charge of what I consider to be my suffering. I am in charge of whether I love you and want you here with me and it does look like selfishness to a lot of people when someone who does not want to be here with us tells us that.

"I want to die" often feels to the person hearing it that that person has failed in some way to love enough or care enough or help enough, etc. to make a difference. "I want to die" implies the person saying it cares enough about living to tell me in case I can help them with their pain. Otherwise, why talk about it? People who succeed suicidally often leave no clues as to their intent. They "give up". Talking is an attempt at dialog, at communication but not everyone is real good at that. I use to express my suicidal interests most often when I had no other words to ask for help. But think of those words!

They're a threat to life. Anyone living is going to feel threatened by them and feeling threatened makes us feel anxious and angry and a whole lot of other stirred up, "natural" feelings. Unless one is a mental health worker or someone who has worked hard with one's own experiences and feelings, the reaction is often "knee-jerk". Someone is depressed, what do we not want to hear? "Cheer up". Mouse was talking about how she expressed her anxiety to her doctor and he told her to "Just relax". "I want to die" is going to get a variety of replies from those around us but those who have never felt that way or don't know how to respond are going to be scrambling for anything they can find :-) Some will throw religion, guilt, selfishness, etc. at one. It's the knee-jerk, "Don't do that!" response.

Life is painful. I didn't like hearing that from my T, it wasn't the "comfort" I wanted. But death is not an "answer" to pain or life. When someone breaks their leg, the doctors don't amputate to stop the pain. <font color="red">Potential Trigger </font> My husband was in a whole leg cast nearly a year when, at 16, he stepped on a piece of glass and severed the small nerves in the bottom of his foot. He almost didn't learn to walk again, had to force himself through the pain. He's 64 now and I have to massage his foot every night to make the pain go away for a little while; they didn't have micro-surgery yet in 1959.

There's absolutely no telling what tomorrow will bring. I would have argued with that 10-25 years ago, said that one could have a pretty good chance of knowing but I don't go there anymore because I've had too many "miracles" happen in the last 20-25 years. The older I get the more grateful I am that I stuck with the pain, kept trying, kept stuffing the bedspread in my mouth when I screamed in psychic pain and "invented" living, moving furniture with evil intent that would have pushed me out the window to my death if I had gotten off the bed (nevermind that the bed is a piece of furniture, I didn't think of that :-)

"When is enough, enough?" is one of those questions we can never know the answer to, can debate it all we want and have an opinion of but, since we can't know the future, we can't even resolve it anymore than we can know how the world actually was "created" or what happens when we die.

What helped me was Edna St. Vincent Millay's long poem, "The Suicide". It's online here: http://tinyurl.com/37t3vs or I'm sure libraries probably have it. She captures the "problem" well as seen by her first stanza:

"Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!
Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!
And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me,
I have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly
That I might eat again, and met thy sneers
With deprecations, and thy blows with tears, --
Aye, from thy glutted lash, glad, crawled away,
As if spent passion were a holiday!
And now I go. Nor threat, nor easy vow
Of tardy kindness can avail thee now
With me, whence fear and faith alike are flown;
Lonely I came, and I depart alone,
And know not where nor unto whom I go;
But that thou canst not follow me I know."