Development Of A Suicide

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

A couple of years have passed since the young girl left the continuous, threatening environment. There was bullying in her, rejection of her personality, constant humiliation and physical abuse.

The girl could not leave this place, more precisely, she did not even have a thought about it, because she considered herself to be guilty of everything and was convinced that she needed to fix everything. Constant thinking about negative events, what she did wrong, about who she was due to the current circumstances, and what her prospects are in the role of "nothing", all these thoughts multiplied the distress and drove her into severe depression. One day she could not endure the bullying and left this place.

So, 2 years have passed.

By this time, she had developed chronic PTSD. Mutism, which began at the time of those crisis events, led to a loss of social skills, which later affected the possibilities of her socialization in a favorable environment.

Life does not stand still, the girl became part of other social groups.

But the inability to get in touch with other people (after all, this is so dangerous - one wrong step, and she will again be "there", despised and lonely by everyone), the inability to start and maintain a conversation, the feeling of strong discomfort when being in the company of other people, all that what she used to do easily and freely, now caused great difficulties.

During this period, external events indicating her weakness, or simply showing her inability to communicate, drove her to despair.

To increase her self-esteem, she practiced affirmations, and it paid dividends. For the most part, she stopped treating herself as "a piece of shit."

But almost every day she had short-term periods of dysphoria and despair, which were replaced by the same short-term periods of euphoria (due to affirmations, among other things). This, on the whole, exhausted her, and she came to despair that such a polarity of her mood would always be with her, that it had already become a part of her personality.

The impossibility of normal interaction with other people, the feeling of not understanding her by others and self-isolation, bipolar mood - in such a context of existence, the thought came to her that if she died, none of this would have happened.

From case to case, falling into deep despair, she began to use this thought for complacency. Although she did not plan anything about these thoughts - she liked them. Gradually, she began to expand the concept of how she dies. She began to imagine how she was buried, how her loved ones cry and grieve and those whose attention is important to her. She experienced a kind of pleasure and, to some extent, satisfied the need for acceptance (imagining how people cry for her, she felt her importance and that she was loved).

Using suicidal thoughts has become a habit. She increasingly used them unconsciously.

As ideas about suicide developed, she, exhausted by anxiety, found new positive aspects of it. For example, these were conclusions like "if I can decide to commit suicide, I can overcome anxiety, because what can be worse than death and stronger than the instinct of self-preservation, which makes me feel fear."

In the absence of the support and help she sought, her condition worsened. Turning to specialists did not give tangible changes, self-help techniques were also ineffective. Despair from the hopelessness, uselessness of psychotherapy, aggravated the situation.

Lately, the girl wanted participation and support from her mother. But my mother could not give her the support she needed.

Then the day came when she established herself in the futility of all attempts to rectify her situation, followed by the decision to commit suicide.

She decided to postpone this until a date in a few days.

Since the goal was to get rid of the torment of consciousness, and not death, she hoped for salvation. According to her, it is unlikely that she would have committed suicide on the appointed day, but another attack of dysphoria could end in tragedy.

Typically, suicidal behavior includes signs that are consciously and unknowingly sent by suicides about their intentions.

And my mother, having caught the signals, understood in what critical condition her daughter was. They had a conversation in which my mother expressed sympathy and readiness to support her in everything.

This inspired the girl, she decided to continue the fight, and will certainly win. The participation of another person breathed strength into her.

Subsequently, she tabooed cyclical perseverative thinking about suicide and her negative state. As a result, the emotional background has stabilized. Her everyday mood was now enthusiastic, slightly exalted. The girl's thoughts were now aimed at supporting her, at supporting her determination in achieving the goal.

Later, this thinking took the form of an "achievement program" with all the positive and negative consequences for the girl. But that's another story.

David Kessler's book The Thoughts That Choose Us describes the suicide of the American writer David Foster Wallace. Quote from the book: “…. In 2005, in his graduation speech at Kenyon College, Wallace advised graduates to "make a conscious and intelligent choice about what to focus on and what value to take from their experience." “In fact, if you don’t learn how to do it now, you will be completely and completely deceived in adulthood,” he said. Remember the old adage that the mind is an excellent servant, but a terrible master. Like many sayings, this one seems at first glance banal and uninteresting, but there is a great and terrible truth hidden in it. No wonder adults who kill themselves with firearms almost always shoot in the head. They shoot at the terrible master."