[StarLife]

I'm going to try very hard to make this post without referencing any specific religion. But I don't think I can say what I must say without alluding to certain beliefs that everyone knows certain religions have. I will leave it to the mods to decide.

This post has to do with an ongoing battle I've had for many years with the conundrum of suicide. I was raised in a religion that believes suicide is possibly the worst offense against God one can make, and is certainly a one-way ticket to an afterlife in which you do not want to find your soul.

During periods of mania. I have definitely gone through the textbook experiences of believing that I was the most influential religious figure in the history of the world, as well as all the other figures surrounding this mythology. Since I first became manic 7 years ago, there has been an ebb and flow in terms of my believing in this faith. But, it seems that when the mania dies, so does my belief.

I became non-religiously spiritual around 9 years ago. It was then that I read the book The Untethered Soul, which has been the most spiritually influential book I have ever read.

Since living through at least 9 waves of depression and mania over the last 7 years, there have been many times when I have just wanted to die. I have spent months praying to God every night to just take me away, to just make me never wake up. And yes, I have had suicidal ideations. I have many times pictured myself doing something - “the right way”, to quote the movie The Craft – vertically, not horizontally. Sometimes I'm in a bathtub, sometimes not. Funnily enough I never picture

Possible trigger:

overdosing on pills

or anything else.

But I have never attempted suicide. I have never even cut myself. The reason why is not my religious upbringing, but a passage in The Untethered Soul that put such an impression on me that I have told myself over and over again I can never do it.

In the book, and I'm paraphrasing here because I don't have the text in front of me, there is a story about a woman who attempted suicide and traveled to the spirit realm. While there she spoke to the universal spirit/all that is and it knew that she had tried to commit suicide. She explained that her life was so painful that she thought it was the only way out. It said to her, (and this is a quote) “Don't you know that this is the worst thing you could have done?” The book went on to explain that while you are alive your soul is learning and growing based on the experience of your previous life and is preparing you for the next stage of your spiritual evolution in the next life. It explained that the reason that suicide is so bad for your soul is the fact that you did not fulfill your karmic destiny by living through your previous life, and you will therefore be condemned to have to learn the same karmic lessons in your next life. I read this to mean that you will have to live a future existence that is just as painful, if not more so, than your present one.

I have since drummed it into my head that no matter how bad things get, I cannot commit suicide. I had come to believe in reincarnation several years before reading the book. It was the only way I could explain the massive inequality between those who have wonderful lives and those who have really painful ones.

So here I am, having been though years of long and agonizing depressions, with no option of a way out. Only the determination to continue living through the pain. At this point it is hard for me to even contemplate making myself better, if that's even possible. In my depressions, there is nothing I can do to pull myself out. I merely have to wait until the depression is spontaneously lifted through no work of my own.
My posts so far have been pretty long. I'm not very good at being concise. Twitter is very hard for me!

If anyone else has these feelings or beliefs I would love to hear from you.

Thank you for reading.

[Skeezyks]

Hello StarLife: I'm glad you have found something to support you in your effort to carry on with your life. I send warm thoughts your way with the hope that you will be able to find deep peace in your life.

[(JD)]

Good choice to not suicide. Work on not even entertaining the thought, don't post the word or write it or think it but block it with "No!" or "Not now!"

The more I study the brain, and the newest brain science, the more I am convinced of what I believe and read in The Book... however, the science is real regardless of whether one believes in God or not.

Your brain has no opinion of it's own.
Depression, regardless of the cause, can be relieved and even dispensed with by retraining the brain.

Because the brain has no opinion of it's own, it gets it's information from YOU, your mind --what you think and tell yourself (and what you listen to from others).

The brain creates chemicals for the body in response to what it has been told.

Easy enough so far, right?

To have the brain correct the chemicals... we need to correct our thinking and give the brain positive, good thoughts! (Truly mind over matter! but in a different mind set than what we used to think about "psychosomatic"!!!) It's a good thing!!!

"They" (the experts) used to think that a negative thought needed to be changed within 30 seconds but now they have realized that we have 48 hours to counter and change a negative input to the brain to make it a positive one. (Negative input creates actual physical toxic "tree like" pathways...of dead brain cells. Positive renews these and builds healthy "trees".)

It takes a whole lot longer to change the negative than it does to make it though. But by spending 7 minutes a day on good, positive thoughts, happy thinking, imaginations of future good etc... for 21 days you WILL see good results.

To permanently change out the bad with the good it takes 3 cycles of 21 days each... but a small price to pay rather than be depressed the rest of our lives, right?

Dr Caroline Leaf has studied this stuff for 30 years and these latest findings are since the last 2-3 years, even this year finding! Dr Martin Seligman is a forerunner of the positive thinking to remove depression, as well. ((I was in one of his studies).

You can find relief. IMO it is God Who created our marvelous brains to function this way, and to be controlled by our thinking. It's just so easy to be negative and appears tougher to be positive, but we can change that too!

Good wishes. Think LIFE! Think a good, happy life in near future!

[StarLife]

Skeez and JD, thank you so much for your replies. I did not get as many responses as I would have liked, and I can only guess that that is because either nobody has the same beliefs as those I posted, or nobody wants to talk that much about suicidal feelings and ideations. That is why your responses me so much to me.

JD, back in May right before I was hospitalized for mania, I checked out 9 self help books from the library. Some of them were incredibly helpful. I looked into one of them called Hardwiring Happiness. Its biggest point is that we should spent several minutes several times a day looking back on our happiest times and really let the emotion sink in. His theory is that in this way, we are training ourselves to concentrate much more on positive feeling rather than negative ones and therefore build a neural pathway strengthening our positive feeling.

I do try this method, but it can be difficult because I also have a long of negative feelings associated with my happiest times. For example so many of my best times were spent with my two best friends who for 4 years were also my roommates. Since they are a couple, they asked me to move out when they were ready to get married.
After moving out 2 and a half years ago, I have only seen them once and only gotten phone calls on my birthday. They basically dropped me. I may never know why, but I'm guessing it is because they had to put me in the hospital so many times and see me go through so many depressions. Now, when I think of the wonderful birthdays and Christmases I spent with them, those feelings are associate with the feeling of abandonment.

Thank you so much for the good advice.

[(JD)]

I think we all have at least some of those types of memories... I know I do as I had an abusive spouse who moved me 28 times in 26 years---whenever I began to make friends and establish myself.... I had to learn to look back at all those "goodbyes" as leaving that segment of life and moving on to the next.... not abandonment. It's a mindset, again... and one that is fraught with negative intrusions... but we can overcome the negative and seek only the good...and in most all situations there is a sliver of some good or benefit..even if it was something we learned never to allow again.

[Aviza]

That essentially is what my mom told me. Which is why, suicide I won't do no matter how much I want it to end. However, you're explanation has opened my eyes more. Thank you.

StarLife,

You write beautifully. Don't be concerned about the length of your messages – I'm betting that, with my hypergraphia disorder, I hold the record for the longest message posted.

Oh, I was raised RC, as well, and was a practicing Catholic until earlier this year. Just now, I have no spirituality at all.

I have not, as yet, been diagnosed with any type of Bipolar disorder although my doctor has suggested on a number of occasions that he thinks that I might have BP II. If that's true then I have been in the midst of my first true manic/hypomanic episode for the past six days. I have been hypersexual, coming very close to engaging a male escort for sex (I'm bisexual). I have two friends, a married couple, whom I have been sexually, and very emotionally, involved with since high school and they came to my rescue, again, this afternoon.

I also went on an $8,000+ spending spree over a two day period. I currently have the hypersexuality under moderate control and the spending completely under control.

When you write of your 'mania' it is something that I do not understand, but I am certain that those who suffer with Bipolar disorder identify with and understand the feelings well. I believe that I am experiencing a small taste of hypomania but the strangest part of it, to me, is just how good I feel just now. And how sad it is to think that this happiness is temporary and that I expect even darker depression after this episode.

I wrote to say that I am, at this moment, having some of the feelings that you're experiencing but I am unable to make much sense of those feelings at the moment.

I had not seen the friends that came to help me today, and on previous days, in years. I was their "roommate," a bit differently than you were the roommate with your friends, in that we were practicing polyandry during that four year period. When I had my first breakdown in 1999 I did not hear from them. After three years of being institutionalised, I got in touch with them again. But we had all been through so many changes that we simply could not reconnect and there were incidences of acrimony that pulled us further apart.

I am frightened. I do not know what to expect or when to expect a change. I could not get an appointment with my doctor until December 7th.

I'm being of no help to you and selfishly repeating my own problems. I think that my responses have everything to do with my fear and my lack of understanding.

I apologise. And I wish you well. The only thing that I ever hope to get out of these forums is a bit of information and a smidgen of support. There are no cures here. I muddle on, suffering some days and, for the last six days, hoping that someone will help me understand what is happening to me.

Sorry for any errors in this text. I'm exhausted and craving restful sleep.

Be well,

[cashart10]

I am just reading this thread. I have very different beliefs than you but I have come to believe that those who commit suicide are not always condemned to any kind of misery. That said, I understand your feelings because there are many, many times I have wanted to do as you speak but have, instead, come to realize the vast impact this will have on my family, especially my children, husband, and parents. I wish you peace in this world though and hope you find it and maintain it soon. I know sometimes peace feels unobtainable.

I'm not going to say all that much because I don't know how it all works. What I do know is that for the sicker ones, sometimes we don't have a choice but is driven to madness by our own minds. For this can we call foul, to be held accountable for the driven final actions at our own hands? MI is a ******.

For all this I reject that notion. These outdated views are reserved for the normal and sane, those that were given opportunities of which we've been denied, those that have a choice to choose over blessings or selfishness. We do it for release from mental anguish and oppressive pain.

Being I part of a multiple personality system, I prefer to live a spiritual life, but an other wants to have fun and party while yet an other wants us dead....who wins? Is this fair to have hundreds of others in our single brain while others have the luxury of normal living, but we are to be held to the same standards and rules? Blah, I don't believe it.

When the bipolar goes out of whack, the suicider has almost total control. I find to be judged or held accountable over something that I didn't ask for or have no real control over, might as well as shoot me now because it sure doesn't look very promising from my side of the fence.

I have a problem with all that even though I spent my childhood in church. It's like dangling a carrot in your face with a red hot fire on your butt with your feet tied together trying to not fall on your face as you chase the carrot. Life is a huge jokester.

I don't believe in God.

[BleakGeek]

I have two kids who anchor me to this life of insanity. Without them I probably would have chosen the path of self-destruction. Find your anchor and live for them!

[HALLIEBETH87]

I'm not sure where I stand on suicide and eternal damnAtion but I like to think gods grace covers everything.

[Unrigged64072835]

I personally don't think a God of love and compassion would condemn someone to Hell for a choice made in deep emotional pain. But like what others have said, I have family that I wouldn't put through that agony. In addition, my second husband committed suicide several years ago, so I know how deep the feeling of loss is.

[BeyondtheRainbow]

My belief is that suicide is just another sin that can be/will be forgiven. I used to try to make myself believe it was the worst thing a person could do and that it was not redeemable but I now think that is wrong for a variety of reasons.

I have never attempted although once it was only because I got myself into the hospital and then when they were about to send me home I managed to tell a nurse how I was really feeling and what I was hiding. I was then kept much longer until I was much more stable although I spent months that year fighting to stay alive.

This year has been one of the most awful in my life as I've been in an 11 month episode and no treatment has helped except one that helped a little but had to be stopped b/c of a potentially dangerous side effect. Stopping it just made me worse. I've just not had a break from feeling bad in months. And I've been suicidal. But now I've found that I'm stuck here because my niece became old enough to understand and remember and I cannot do that to her. I can't hurt her that way. So I'm here and instead find myself begging to just not wake up, to be in an accident, anything that would not leave that legacy of I did it myself.

I think it is the deepest and most difficult responsiblity I have ever felt.

[hjames]

We must fulfill our terms of service to this assignment. I've read lots of NDE literature and that's a pretty chilling conclusion. If you can keep taking it for the team here, it is all explained and magically corrected in the afterlife. This seems to mesh with traditional religious views, interestingly enough.