Evarysyn

Saturday, September 01, 2007

suicide and need

Suicide and the nature of need.

Thursday night I woke up at 1am to put that in my reminders for blogging.

Suicide's been covered a lot by my criminal law class. People seem obsessed with asking questions, and on wednesday we watched a law & order episode (that was fun!)

I searched suicide on gov.sg, and the first thing i found was an article by the straits times on July 5 2006 dealing with this topic. Maybe you’d like to look at it.

It says more than one Singaporean successfully committed suicide every day in 2005 (405 people killed themselves).

“Aside from a peak of 401 deaths in 1995, the number stayed between 271 and

371 each year up till 2004, when it rose to 381, before rising again to last year's

new high.” (from the article)

And that doesn’t count the number of attempted suicides. Why does one person kill himself, or herself every year?

I get why the media doesn’t publicise it. The threat of copycats is no joke.

But why is it so relatively easy for a Singaporean to give up his life?

We may not all be rich, but even our poorest poor aren’t in a state as bad as people in, say, India, or Rwanda, or…

It could be harder to be “poor” when you see so many “rich” though.

The thing is, the article was worried about a spate of copycat suicides by depressed people.

Do we truly have so many? I mean, I know a lot of people who’ve been depressed at some point in time – but I’m just out of my teens. Most people in that age group suffer angst and depression and so on periodically. It doesn’t have to translate into clinical depression of the kind that would cause you to take your life.

To kill yourself, in general, would be an act of extreme selfishness. Take jumping. Your corpse would have to scraped off the ground, cleaned up (and from what our teacher said of his experience you can’t repair the damage much) and be presented to your family. You’d be traumatizing them, putting the poor public cleaners through a hellish job, and traumatizing any passersby (which, in crowded Singapore, wouldn’t be rare). Just think. What if that passerby was a little kid on his way home from school with his aunty? This isn’t the harm you might to do them by falling on them (x ref killer litter). This is traumatizing a child, who could, probably would, be scarred for life. You’d have to be completely focused on yourself ad your pain and your misery to block everything else out.

But I’d say the best way to kill yourself would be to smoke and smoke heavily. (I’m not saying that all smokers have a death wish – I’m just saying it would be cleanest and most subtle to kill yourself by smoking). It’s not so painful and obviously deliberate as OD’ing on pills, taking poison, shooting yourself, hanging yourself, jumping….you notice that none of it is a pretty death? Well, death by disease isn’t pretty but your family will have had time to adjust to your ugliness, as it will grow slowly and not be sudden. They probably won’t blame themselves so much because they did get a chance to talk to you about your horrible habit. Plus smoking is a lot more reliable than eating your way to a bad heart. Some people are just more prone to some forms of disease than others and some people can (surprisingly) have a family history of heart attack, eat too much and plenty of unhealthy food and never exercise, but yet are blessed with close to perfect health.

I searched the UN website too.

http://www.unescap.org/esid/psis/population/journal/1998/v13n4a3.htm

Well at least we’re not “alone” in that sense.

But why do so many people want to die? Are they all so lonely, so isolated that they can’t stand life?

I mean, I get the trend. As I grow older, there’s this increasing trend – the friends you make don’t usually want confessions of deeply private thoughts or feelings. It sort of scares them. The girls prefer to talk about shopping, about guys and music and food and…haha it’s not that they won’t talk to you and help you if you bring it up. It’s just that it’s not the best thing to talk about. Maybe I’m wrong, this is just my preliminary assessment, and I’ve only been in uni for a year. But it seems that it’s more on the superficial level than anything else. The same goes for guys. This is truly person specific (to me). I mean, guys I meet are usually careful to make it clear we’re just friends, nothing more. Haha it’s a bit daunting. I can be pretty affectionate to the world in general sometimes, and the way most people take is sort of sad and scary. I’ve learned not to show it so much.

Digressed.

I was saying that it’s as if people build up barriers as they grow older, to protect themselves from potential hurt. It’s self perpetuating. They block me out, I harden so it doesn’t hurt, then I end up inadvertently blocking someone else out….it’s very selfish too. I don’t want to be hurt. But it hurts to be behind the barrier too so I do dump them as much as I can every once in a while. But the pattern is there and it’s a lot easier to bring them up quickly after a while.

I wish it was possible for everyone to feel love. Sometimes you’re so full of it you send a general pulse out to the rest of the world. By smiling at strangers, by being nice in general, just because you’re so happy or feel so loved. We are all linked. Closing people out can hurt them, even if you don’t intend to.

The problem with love is once you have it, you need it. Take it away and it’s of utmost priority. Like food. On a scale on 1 to 10, on a normal day, food has an importance rating of maybe 5. But take it away. It suddenly becomes something of vital importance. Of utmost urgency. Same thing with love.

But love isn’t so easy to find. If we’re behind those barriers then we’re likely afraid to show such a vulnerability in our hearts. So looking for it, actually recognizing it, can be so difficult...

Yeah. I guess I was just going to say that need perpetuates need but we, in our fear of pain, disguise our needs to protect ourselves, and by doing so may be hurting countless others in minute or major ways. By behaving that way we, too, minimize the chances of fulfilling our need. I mean, when a little kid come to you asking for a hug, you’d probably give in to the innocent display of need and satisfy it. But you wouldn’t do the same for someone who didn’t come running with arms open, but just looked on in a way that could be construed as mere interest or hidden longing, would you?

Haha if you would? Call me. Need many hug buddies. :p

Eve.

Yet another ring on the tree at1:28 PM

Evarysyn

This is MY blog. But you can read it.

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Evarysyn

This is *MY* blog. But you can read it.

0 Comments:

This is MY blog. But you can read it.