james (02/27/83)
I have been reading, with personal interest, the recent suicide prevention accounts on net.suicide. A few years ago, while i was still in college, i had a series of depressing misfortunes, and eventually decided it would be simplest to just end it all. I knew that friends were always supportive if you told them you planned to kill yourself, so, to guarantee success, I didn't tell anyone. I wanted to see the few friends I had, though, so I spent the afternoon in the dorms at school, just enjoying what company I could get. No one knew what I was doing. That evening, I took a bottle of sleeping pills (about 50 pills) and washed them down with some rum. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on whether you look at it the right way or not) I was not used to drinking alcoholic beverages, and I started vomiting violently. This, of course, alerted the others in my dorm, and I was taken to the hospital to recover. The surprising thing to me, and the thing that still makes me feel that people who attempt or plan to commit suicide can be helped, was the number of people that came to see me in the hospital. They were all very supportive, and told me all the things they would do to help me, and said thing like "Why didn't you say you were depressed?". And although I (naturally) still occasionally think about suicide, remembering the things my wonderful friends said helps me pull through. So, Lady Arwen and Enid, you are to be thanked for helping sad people. You *can* make a difference. ...james
trb (02/28/83)
Maybe I missed something, but I don't think that Enid and Arwen are doing a service to suicidal folks in general, only to their suicidal friends. In my experience, depressed people can't be helped by (virtually) anonymous netnews items. It grieves me to see people grumbling about the insensitivity of others in this newsgroup. Most of us are not used to dealing with death, and some of us are taken aback when there's someone out there who has the audacity to talk irreverently about suicide. I say, be a warm-hearted, sensitive, quicheaux if you want, but don't try to gag people who don't feel like playing the game your way. The original intention of this newsgroup was to discuss suicide rationally if not morosely, not to be a suicide hot-line. Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491