I’m sorry you went through that with your friend.
I’ll agree to this, surrendering into depression without fighting it tooth and nail, is cowardly and selfish. I think this is the crux of Guap point. Anyone who gives up something as precious as life and doesn’t consider the cost to those that they love…is selfish. Life is a gift, and anyone giving it up lightly…is stupid…
That, said…I think Guap however is unable to see the real point of the counter argument. The CDC report is showing depression is growing at a alarming rate, and suicide is up 30% in a number of states. Its akin to the opioid crisis, and shares a lot of crossover actually if you really understand it.
I know from personal experience, you can seek help, from all quarters, and no matter how much you fight…there is not always a clear way out, to force yourself to restart hope, to see life the way you used to, to connect and not make the people you love afraid…if you share your true feelings
This is the point that Guap and a few others fail to see, some of these people are fighting tooth and nail to live each day and find a reason to cherish it. However, despite seeking all the ‘help’ they can afford and reaching out to others when they feel it might have a impact/value, they still are spiraling. Taking themselves down, and making the people around them horribly miserable. They are floundering and splashing constantly in a frenzy to keep moving/living, and all they want is to stop trying so hard…for the pain/loss/ despair to stop even for a bit, to stop dragging everyone around them down as they drown in a seemingly inescapable mire they somehow got themselves stuck into. Knowing (or feeling) its their own fault, and seeing no action, no options that can be taken that would have meaningful ease the pain to themselves and to those around them.
Do you ever wonder why the people with severe depression put on a front sometimes? Not tell you what is really going on for them? Sure, to not make you afraid for them, and all the other ranges of reactions people have. They also do it to catch that wonderful moment and have it be like it used to…before you hit this mental wall of dread. So they can fake it…and sometimes you even catch a hint of brief moment of feeling a bit like your old self, alive, and smiling… but the reality is they can never really escape their demons! Sometimes fake it till you make it just isn’t enough.
They would give anything not to torment the people they love with their ‘disease’, the cost it inflicts, the pain it causes, the helplessness they feel and even worse the helplessness in the eyes of those that they love reflected back to us when we look them in the eyes.
I think it ultimately might be a good thing that Guap doesn’t understand this, because anyone who knows that level of despair couldn’t have this opinion. I don’t want him to know, I don’t want my worse enemy to know, heck I wouldn’t even wish it on Trump. Its the worst, most unpleasant thing I’ve had experienced. Including being shot, seeing friends killed, my Dad dying horribly painful death, and having to wake my daughter at 2:34 in the morning an having to somehow find words, to actually tell her…that her mom had been a really bad accident and that she would never see her again because of some drunk driver. That Guap and some others don’t get the reality of real despair/hopelessness, I actually consider a blessing.
(Edit) On reflection, the irony and hypocrisy of the above, is when I looked into myself, I realized…I’d poured my heart into expressing this thought, hoping someone would understand my point/see a piece of me
I understand the point you’re making to a certain level. I hope I will never experience enough to understand better than that.
As I say whenever someone famous gets taken by this: “Don’t be sad that he’s gone, be happy that he was here as long as he was.”
Because the being here was likely the struggle for him.
Huge assumption to make and ultimately not true. Someone can experience the aftermath of suicide and know the agony of depression and still not feel, act or express themselves in ways you approve of… nor are they required to.
It’s kind of hypocritical to assume certain responses are completely absent of empathy or not coming from a honest place while offering no empathy in return.
When we have people threatening to leave the community because an emotional response to a tragedy does not measure up to someone’s standards… then no, this is not a safe place for someone to express themselves. It’s okay to feel angry. That emotion is not forbidden and grief does not simply stop due to time passage or because someone else demands them to stop.
I emphathize with those who know depression and the heartache of someone close taking their life, and I’m not going to judge them because they react to that pain in different way than I do nor shame them for relating in a community they are a part of to a public loss like this.
While I agree with most of what you say in this post, I disagree with this bit. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion about this subject, and obviously there is a lot of emotion involved on both sides. Problem is, this emotion is clearly showing in the way things were worded upthread, with the original post of Guap (that I refuse to quote) as an extreme example. When I reread that, even I have trouble staying calm, and I have no beef in this.
So, express yourself, sure. But try to do it in a less extreme way, especially about a sensitive topic like this.
Like you just did, for example. I doubt your post will make people want to leave?
I have little interest in cooking, but his shows transcended that. Rest in peace Anthony.
Please go for it. Don’t let the recent knucklehead arguments dissuade you.
Why isn’t it both?
If someone with a mental health problem hurt or killed someone you love, they’ve done something horrible to you that you may not be able to forgive, because they are a victim of something horrible you may not understand. It’s messy but both can be true, and the severity of the outcome is going to make it hard to reconcile those truths, but isn’t that the same thing that’s happened here?
I’m sorry for your pain, and the pain of everyone else around him. Suicide is a horrible thing which leaves many victims in its wake. I, too, have lost someone very close to me and felt both my own devastation and seen it crush loved ones. As I said far upthread, anger is one of the several rational, appropriate responses. No judgement on that from me.
Now please stop being a selfish ass by taking your pain out on the rest of the world.
Sound familiar? It should. Anger can muddy one’s perspective on the world around them just as depression can, and make it less clear what the far-reaching consequences of an action might be.
Whether it’s the small but sincere grief of fans, the deep pain and anguish of one of the thousands of people here who may have actually known the man, or one of the other people with an open wound from experiencing suicide in their own family or group of friends, your insistence to spit on Bourdain can be quite harmful to those looking to share in our grief as a way of resolving it and trying to move forward. It also comes across as a completely self-centered act, devoid of the slightest bit of sympathy for anyone stumbling across this thread.
I’m not asking you to forgive your friend; I’d never do that. Nobody is asking you to forgive your friend. If you really need it, keep a burning ember of hate in your heart as long as you live. I sincerely doubt it’s the healthiest coping technique, but I’m not your therapist and you have the agency to express and feel what you want and need to.
What I am asking—and I expect what many are—is to please understand our pain a little bit, and our way of dealing with the trauma. Just enough to the point that you’re not spitting on the people we’ve loved and lost. This whole thing almost evokes the Westboro Baptist Church protesting at the funerals of soldiers.
And to be clear, I actually suspect your desire in expressing your anger this way is out of a sincere desire to reduce suicide. That’s noble, and I want you to know I completely forgive any transgressions here regardless of your desire to receive such a statement. However, I likewise need to express my own feelings of how inappropriate and unwise some of your statements have been out of hope everyone takes moment to pause and think before posting the next time this sadly, infuriatingly comes to pass.
This is a fair point.
I think it’s always good to focus on why the person with a mental illness that literally drove him to kill himself couldn’t have been more thoughtful and considerate of others.
Also, why the fuck can’t those handicapped people just get jobs? They really need to consider other people more. If only they’d consider what a drain on the economy they are.
Have any of you who are blathering on about his selfishness considered that people who kill themselves might have a very difficult time believing that they actually do matter to anyone? That their death really will matter to anyone?
I’d seriously ask some of you to get outside of your own heads, and consider that perhaps you have no frame of reference whatsoever to understand what it feels like to be clinically depressed and alone. To feel like you don’t fit in. To feel like it literally does not fucking matter if you kill yourself, because people don’t like you, so why would anyone be particularly bothered by it beyond perhaps a momentary inconvenience.
Please stop viewing the fucking world through your own lens if you can, and understand that people who do this are not thinking, “Oh yes, all of these people really love me, boy I bet they’d miss me and this would be bad for them, but oh, I don’t think I want to be here anymore.”
Depression fundamentally distorts your way of thinking and seeing the world. Accusing a suicidal person of being “selfish” is kind of like getting angry at a paranoid schizophrenic for not just stopping with the hallucinations.
Holy crap, what happened in here?
I guess when someone is a victime of suicide, you can go one of two ways:
- Could we have done more for him?
- How dare he, he should have done more for us.
Total bummer. Liked the guy and his books, always happy to watch him on TV.
I think it’s pretty obvious, there are two camps. Those that think suicide is a disease, and those that do not.
Having never been depressed or considered suicide I have a hard time imagining depression as a disease. However I have read just enough on the subject that I am starting to believe some major chemical imbalances are involved that could be me but for the grace of genetics.
So while I understand the suicide is selfish point of view I don’t think it’s helpful and probably quite dismissive of what’s going on in their heads from a biochemical point of view.
I think it’s more nuanced than that. The heart of the disagreement is whether depression, that leads to suicide, equals insanity. Does it remove self-direction to the point that we don’t hold the individual responsible? It can be acknowledged as a disease without being acknowledged as absolution.
Personally, I think it’s an individual thing, depending on the particular suicide. Are some suicides sufficiently mentally tortured as to have no self-control? I’m sure there are such cases. I highly suspect there are other cases where the individual has suicidal impulses but could have fought those, if they exerted enough self-control (e.g., control driven by they’re concerns of the impact on others).
Having personally experienced depression at one point in my life (fortunately decades ago), I would have labelled myself sane throughout the condition. Was I clinically depressed and did I have certain thoughts? Definitely. But had I gone out and done something as drastic as try to kill myself at that time, I wouldn’t have absolved myself of responsibility. I’m sure the same is true of some suicides and not true of others.
I’m not sure if this discussion is that different than discussing murderers who suffer from one or more mental conditions. The intersection of the two (mental illness and homicide) does not, per se, make the person insane to the point that we don’t hold them accountable for their actions. As a society, we don’t put suicides on trial. But it’s not surprising that each individual personally involved in a suicide passes judgement on whether the individual was culpable or not.
I think that you guys are just coming at this from different positions of personal pain.
When a person kills themselves, it hurts those they love. We want to prevent that. On some level, we don’t want to do anything that could be considered condoning that action, because we often feel like we already failed to do enough. All of this is understandable.
But the flip side is that the people who commit such acts are clearly feeling terrible pain. And they are gone, so there’s no amount of shaming that will bring them back.
You guys are all really passionate about this, for good reasons on both sides. On some level, it’s the same reason, that you love these people that we’ve lost.
Maybe just focus more on helping people we still have as best we can, and understand that folks who have dealt with loved ones committing suicide have their own individual feelings and ways of dealing with those complex feelings.
No.
Just no.
You are comparing an actual person who suffered from depression and sadly killed themselves with a fictional person “with a mental illness” who “hurt other people”.
Do I honestly need to explain how far off course you have strayed, and into what horrible destination you have arrived at, by doing this?
I have never suffered from depression, as far as I know.
I know people who have. And hearing about it from them, and from the doctors who treat it, “depression” is almost an inadequate word to describe what actually happens, in much the same way “cancer” is an inadequate word to describe that disease. Cancers that hit different parts of the body rarely share causalities or behaviors. They’re all really different, but just get tossed into a categorization.
Depression is the same way. Lots of people suffer from it, and many are able to work with it and around it, thanks to therapy and medicine. But what happens seems to vary greatly from brain to brain. Thus, other forms of depression seem to resist treatments, and doctors have long noted that this isn’t a matter of “Think better, be better”, but rather a physiological malfunction going on. Chemicals don’t fire they way they should. Parts of the brain that should do stuff…don’t. And researchers have observed that even patients on drug therapy and regular therapy may respond well for a time…and then their brains seem to resist, and almost mutate like cancer cells that suddenly stop responding to chemo.
I have known enough people who suffer from serious depression to understand fully that it is a chronic disease, one that never really goes away for those who have it. And in that mind of thinking, I have cared about and loved people who have ended their own lives, and an angry instant reaction is only natural. But…I’ve also noticed that you never hear that response from people who have had depression take them to the edge. Instead, what you hear from them is understanding and empathy. These folks know, far better than I ever hope to, that for some, depression is always there, lurking. Waiting to catch someone unawares. Waiting to consume all of their thoughts and disable rationality. That some forms of depression come closest to being described as terminal diseases seems completely apparent to me.
And so while I have never experienced that before my own self, I’ll go ahead and listen to people who have, and follow their lead on this when they articulate what it is like. And empathy, sympathy and a sense of loss seems like the healthiest emotion to land on in the wake of a suicide.
you might be right, I could be completely wrong, not convinced I am however. I can tell you when I was younger, I was depressed at the passing of a girlfriend. Sad, and torn up, grief, depression but there wasn’t this feeling like my soul was sinking into a bottomless swamp. I recovered… after a time I laughed and smiled again, and many years yearning for and finding full life experiences.
A few years ago, I had a severe concussion (not my first), it changed the equation. Not only did I lose a big piece of myself that a neurologist and doctors couldn’t restore, caused me to have to change careers, it also caused a hole that feels like its constantly tugging on me, pulling me under.
So in my experience, I see that there is depression and sadness that are driven by life events, which people can recover from and live a happy full life and then there is ‘other’ kind. Where, recovery and normal anything seems illusive and a constant struggle. Maybe that’s a medical condition, or disease, or a inbalance of the brain chemistry. Heck maybe its diet, no one can give me the answer on that one.
I see I’m completely derailing the thread subject matter…so my last post on the subject…besides its just plain depressing :)
I’ve already said this before but reaction to suicide can be permanent, is often permanent, for the rest of the life of the survivors, and often generations below them too. Sometimes that reaction is going to be extreme. Maybe you saw someone blow their head off in front of you, maybe someone found their body, and it’s been twenty years and they can’t even explain why one day one thing returned that grief, or why someone else’s experience ripped open that wound, fresh again and they are just so angry.
Someone asked about whether this would be a good place to share about depression. How can it be? We have a group that is saying you cannot express yourself in extreme ways, they have forbidden a real life emotion. Emotions are not good or bad, is what many experts say. We barely even understand depression. Sure we have drugs for depression with a laundry list of side affects that can include more depressive thoughts and thoughts of suicide. We have a society that can’t handle asking for help, especially for guys. So yes, you can believe Depression is a mental illness, one we sadly don’t know enough about and still feel a certain way. You can feel for the family and those closest and connected to this tragedy and also believe suicide, the act, is selfish. That doesn’t mean the person who committed it was say standing around thinking of all ways to be selifish nor is it really downplaying depression to say that suicide is a selfish act. It simply does not have to mean that.
This death reminds me of Paul Walker’s, and by that I mean, when Paul Walker died it affected a lot of people in ways that sometimes just didn’t make much sense… initially. People were connected to Bourdain in a personal way, in away that not every celebrity has but this guys was, seemed down to Earth, reasonable, but still lost his cool. It’s a shock. If he can’t make it…
More than half of Guap’s post is about his experience with suicide. I don’t need to ask him why this death links to that. I imagine multiple suicides like these in the past two days is leading to a lot of reactions like that as well as discouraging those currently experiencing depression and struggle with it themselves. Some articles even mentioned the hotlines are experiencing high volumes.
I just encourage everyone who rightly provides empathy for those who struggle with illness, one we broadly label with the word depression, that you extend that empathy, that understanding, to those who’ve gone through this before because their reactions can be extreme. It is not something you simply forget, or let die, and maybe you thought you did and one day you just wake up, and you remember, and feel it again and you have no idea why… You have no idea after ten years, after twenty years, this mother’s day, this father’s day, this birthday or some headline triggers it all over again… for some that will manifest as grief, for others, that’s anger. And the part where we don’t really encourage people to seek help for these sort of emotional and mental turmoils, illness or otherwise, we don’t much for grief either. It is also possible for someone to experience suicide and know depression, so don’t assume that isn’t happening either.
And when you’re on both sides of that coin, you may not even know what your supposed to feel and the last thing we want is people tearing themselves apart trying to present themselves properly to make others happy.