I read a comment on GOMI yesterday paraphrasing David Foster Wallace thusly:
A severely depressed person who commits suicide has made a decision in the same manner that a person in a burning building decides to jump out a window. It seems like the only way to escape the horror.
I thought that was really, really excellent in explaining how people don't just cavalierly decide to off themselves. I did a little digging and found the direct quote:
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
- David Foster Wallace
Sadly, we all know how things turned out for Mr. Wallace. Even with all his insight, he still couldn't save himself.
4 comments:
This is definitely one of the best, if not THE best quote/explanation I have ever seen - if you don't mind, I'll share it in my blog too (for awareness). Thank you !!!
My brother committed suicide after being in a psychosis for over two years. I can TOTALLY understand his decision; those two years were hell on earth for all involved, and I'm sure I can only imagine a fraction of what it must have been like for him. There was no help from anywhere, no medication was working, it was a non-stop nightmare with the most bizarre and horrifying twists that I still struggle to think about.
Mental illness is about the only thing that scares me truly in this world :(
Zella, please do share. When I read it, I was all, "Ohhhhhh! NOW I get it!"
Because frankly, I was one of those dipsh*ts who thought that depressed people just needed to "shake it off". To "get over it". To "pull themselves up by their bootstraps". Sheesh. Now I know better. It's a physical condition. A chemical imbalance. They CAN'T "shake it off".
I was also one of those people who wondered why depressed people didn't think of the sorrow of those they would leave behind. Until, on the same GOMI post, a previously suicidal woman wrote about how, in her despair, she was convinced that her family would be BETTER OFF if she was dead. Her husband could marry someone who wasn't a basket case, her kids would be raised by a happy person, etc., etc. She thought she would be doing everybody a favor by ending her life.
My deepest condolences on the loss of your brother.
Thank you sweetie.
Yup, that is a very very good explanation..
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