as well as the ones closer to my age . I read this in today's newspaper and it's something you all must read since it will be a very plausible option for someone close to you. I am no expert, but:
1) try to spot the signs
2) Really Show You Care
3) Put things in perspective for troubled people you know
4) Pray
5) Point out positive things
6) read up on the subject. I found this. (click the link)
I hope you never feel this pain and I hope you spread hope.
Ed
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20080903-158321/Tragedies
Theres The Rub
Tragedies
By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:19:00 09/03/2008
My son just came from the wake of a friend, a 21-year-old, just a year older than may son. He was with the same kid in the theater group of his school, and the kid seemed to have shone brightly there. He seemed to have had a fretful life as well, plunging into deep depressions as easily as soaring into ecstatic highs, which had messed up his relationship with his girlfriend. He did not die from an accident. He did not die from a car crash, as kids his age and social situation often invite, living life with bravado or recklessness of the young. He did not die from being mugged and knifed or shot to death, which has become a real and pervasive threat in these times of grinding misery and cholera. He did not die from a debilitating disease, one that had ravaged his young body beyond belief.
He hanged himself in the early hours of Sunday last weekend.
My son says he was with the kid last Friday. The “barkada” [group of buddies] had a few beers, and he was already in a listless mood. He had hinted at ending his life, which his friends, in the full flush of youthful vigor, had not taken particularly seriously. Or they had assumed it was just part of the dramatic conceits they were all prone to, or had made it a point, to cultivate.
I can understand that, remembering in my own youth the various poses budding writers struck, largely to get attention, the favorite of which was to be in a perpetual state of depression, and to hint darkly of going the route of the poet Sylvia Plath. Time would heal that pose, people realizing eventually that Plath had more going for her than suicidal tendencies: she had talent. In any case, the pose went by largely ignored. As it turned out, it wasn’t a pose at all with this kid. For three hours before he did what he did, he was talking on the phone with his ex-girlfriend. He had come to say goodbye as life had become unbearable. The ex-girlfriend had tried to talk him out of it—alas, to no avail. My heart goes out to the parents of the kid, and all those who loved him.
Naturally, they have been profoundly devastated by it, he being an only child. Your son or daughter dies from accident or disease, your grief will be incalculable. To lose a child this way, it boggles the mind. His friends are particularly unnerved, and cannot for the life of them understand why he did it. The usual recriminations are there: maybe they should have taken him more seriously, maybe they should have been more sympathetic, maybe they should have warned his parents.
Why do people do this? Why do young people in particular do it? How can people in the frenzy of life think only of the void of death? As I write this, I am in a particularly good position to appreciate this question. I am in hospital, brought here by stomach pains of an order not unlike the one I felt just before I had my gall bladder operation, when it was about to burst. It’s the kind of pain that leaves you horrendously tired and debilitated, but can’t rest because there is no position you find comfortable. It’s quite literally breathtaking, breathing itself causing spasms in your stomach beyond belief. It may have to do with the painkillers I’ve been taking for gout. But there is level of pain that makes you desperate for respite. Who knows? Maybe that is the level of pain people who are in the throes of monumental depression feel. Maybe that is the level of desperation they feel.
I myself have gotten sufficient respite to be able to write. On the other hand, you see the people in the starkest stages of debilitation struggling to survive, tubes dangling out of their bodies, plucking air like drowning men through oxygen masks, and you are hard pressed to understand how anyone, least of all someone who has the future spread out before him, would want to take his own life. Survival is the most elemental instinct of all. It staggers the mind to contemplate something that so resolutely goes against the grain of human nature, at least as we commonly understand it.
I do know that manic-depressive is a medical condition that requires treatment. Which you probably guessed the boy was suffering from, from the wild swings in moods he was prone to. I do know that people who suffer from it experience depression in ways most of us won’t be able to grasp.
Years ago, a friend of mine suffered the same fate. I didn’t know he was manic-depressive, seeing only his manic side in all the times we were thrown together. It wasn’t even manic, or wildly ebullient, he was just cheerful. He also happened to be one of the most intelligent and erudite human beings I’ve met, quoting books on development theory with the ease of Kobe Bryant shooting free throws. I didn’t see him for a while and was shocked to learn he was dead. The circumstances of his death were fairly mysterious, but another friend of mine who was his neighbor told me what had happened. He was manic depressive and had entered into a particularly deep stage of depression. Enough for his wife to hire a full-time nurse to keep him company for a month. When the nurse turned his back at one point, he upped and hung himself by the door.
That’s the truly depressing part of it, that the suicidal tendencies afflict the creative and not the destructive. I wouldn’t mind it if our public officials were seized by a sudden epidemic of wanting to commit suicide. But no, the tendency afflicts Plaths and Van Goghs and Nietzsche’s of this world and my friend and my son’s friend and others of their kind. People who feel life so intensely, so acutely, so sharply they are often crushed by it.
Makes you wonder if we really know human nature.
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