Committing suicide is a very selfish act. It shows that you are a coward and not brave enough to face the world. Sure, there may be some bad or unfair moments, but that's life. You shouldn't just end your life because of that. There are people in this world that cares about you, even if you may not even know it. Even if someone isn't your 'friend', but still knows you, hearing about your death could still negatively affect them.

I have thought about suicide before, but I have never actually tried it. I realized that my life isn't the worst. It's not a living hell. There are people in the world that may kill for a life where you have an education, home, and food.

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Well, aren't all of you just brimming with sympathy? Stupid, selfish, cowardly, pathetic... I'm starting to find this thread personally offensive.

For everyone who says that people who commit suicide are selfish bastards:
What kind of existence is it to live for the people around you alone? If someone is that depressed and miserable, and not getting better, and they're just keeping themselves alive so everyone else doesn't have to suffer... what kind of trade-off is that? You say that they should stay alive because it's cruel to the family because they suffer, yet think it's okay for the individual to suffer? One person's suffering is less substantial than another person's suffering? I see that situation as selfish on the family's part. It's no better.

Yeah, that's not contradictory at all. Depressed people should kill themselves because they're just going to spread their misery all over the place, we're better without them? Thanks, I feel great now.

We all die anyway, so why not just wait it out? That's my outlook.

However, if you're truly unhappy and you wish to die, go ahead. People will miss you, things could get better, but if you're truly that depressed, maybe you'd be better off dead than suffering.

Death happens. When you're done living, you die.

I'm not going to kill myself, but if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, I wouldn't mind.

when your in such desperation to end your life, you are not concerned how your death is going to affect anyone else, yes that may sound selfish, but if you knew that someone was depressed to the point they wanted to escape themselves and anyone and everything else what did you do to help them realize they only have one life to live, did you do the same selfish thing and take care of something you were working on in you own life that you thought needed to be done to fix your life first? sometimes i think people become to personal thinking that everything effects them or needs to touch their lives in some way.yes i have tried to kill myself i cut my wrist thinking that it would make everything just well disappear well the fact is after the time since then, ive come to realize that yes i did have problems that did go away. and ive come to the conclusion life is always going to have its ups and downs somedays it rains and somedays its sunny but it all does come to pass. yes after the years we all are going to be forgotten, but thats not going to be until we are dead, so why would you want to speed up the fact your not going to be remembered? we all mean something to someone whether or not we believe it to be so, yet its your choice to make, your in control of your own life

So if you have a child...and decide to destroy your child...(meaning kill or something) you would not consider that selfish? Your child is yours but it's another living being. That's basically what you're saying, if it's yours you have the right to destroy it. Would you go around having babies and killing them? Probably not. That's a very crude example but that is essentially what you're saying.

Anyways...I have no simpathy for people who decide to kill themselves. And like I said, if you stick a gun in your mouth and actually DO pull the trigger good for you. You're a coward. And the world you don't deserve to live.

On another note. There are some people which actually have a chemical imbalance. (My friend personally has this) and they cannot control that they want to die. They just do. Nothing specific may be wrong in their life but because of the chemical imbalance (which can only really be monitored with drugs) she wanted to die.

Suicide is the end result of untreated depression. Depression is curable most of the time, and if not curable, manageable through therapy and/or medication.

I do believe it is a sin. Human life is immeasurably important. Any life is, really. God gave you life and the air you breathe, he's in charge of ending it. You have no right to take your life or anyone else's. It's complicated; I believe God is merciful and will take into consideration the circumstances, but I also know that he would never give you anything you can't handle and suicide is a temptation that could've been over come.

Personally, I have severe manic depression (bi-polar, but I haven't had many manic episodes, I lean more towards the depression). I have been to rehab several times for suicidal tendencies, and learned to control them as druggies control addictions. I've go and have gone to therapy for years, and I take medication for it. When it started I had a fine life, and I felt ashamed that I felt the way I did. I felt that I didn't deserve to live if I was such an idiot. Eventually I learned that it was a chemical imbalance in my brain and I couldn't control it.

Although at times I cannot control how I feel, I can control my thoughts. It's a complicated thing to explain. Once in awhile I feel like I want to disappear forever, but then I focus on some coping skills to get my mind off it. Eventually the feeling will pass.

Anyone who feels even the slightest bit suicidal should get help immediately.
Some, like me, have chemical imbalances. Others have deluded and distorted thinking about themselves that can be sorted out in therapy.

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I think the most horrible thing in the world is assisted suicide. No one is hopeless, everyone has the ability to get better no matter how messed up they are. If they've gone through therapy and medication, then they need new doctors. Switch therapists, research developing treatments, there's something out there that can help.

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I can't say that suicide is right or wrong, I just can't imagine how someone could feel that things are so bad that they would be better off dead. Let me rephrase that, unless you are painfully dying of a terminal illness or something similar to that, I think if that were going on with me, I would probably want it to end quickly.

@Kah, exactly my point about the children's thing...that's why you shouldn't be going around saying things like Kids are yours...I sure as hope you don't want to murder your kids...either way according to you it wouldn't be selfish anyways...

In the end yes, God does judge you...and if you commit suicide which is a sin you will go to hell. Good riddance.

And yes they are cowards and Yes I do know people who have committed suicide I'm assuming that's what you meant when you said this:

And if someone was undiagnosted and they killed themselves then I would say it was probably the parents fault. Statistics show that most of these chemical problems are in teens, not adults so it's something that will eventually go away. If these parents had no idea what their child was doing then...1) they were not good parents. 2) it's their own damn fault.

No, no, no. A child may be your child, but it is a living being with its own rights. Your body is truly your own, to do what you wish with. The child gets the same rights. It's like this; if I break my own TV, you wouldn't care. If we went in half and half on a TV and I smash it, you'd be pretty pissed, because it wasn't really all mine.

I'm not sure why any non-Christians would care about going to hell. But why don't you leave the judgment up to God? Proclaiming that all people who commit suicide are cowards and we're better off without them is a pretty harsh statement to make without even knowing the individual situations. Even the strongest of us can lose control.

Why is it the parent's fault? People who have great upbringings are still capable of becoming radically depressed. Teens are also the age group that are most commonly misdiagnosed with "chemical problems." It's often hard to tell the difference between the normal erratic behaviour that occurs in teens and a true disorder, and I see it result in false diagnoses all the time. Not to mention the fact that shrinks today love to overdiagnose.

That's ridiculous, to be frank. Many teenagers hide what's going on in their lives from their parents. In fact, most of the people I've known with actual disorders have kept them concealed from their parents. Usually other people as well. How can you blame a parent for not knowing when they never had any clue to even look? Please, tell me you would never say that it's 'all their damn fault' to a grieving parent. Parents might be a factor in suicides, but to put them totally to blame is just cruel and untrue.

I've never attempted suicide, but I've seriously thought and considered the fact. I've even plotted my own death to the point where I wanted to make it look like an accident so nobody would be mad at me. It's sad that people like me with so much going for them, want to feel that way. I went off my antidepressants and now I'm okay and feeling better. I really want to thank modern medicine! It helped me.

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Either way, it's a debate you. And we all have our own opinions and just because I think one thing doesn't mean it is right or wrong...and the same goes for everyone else. :)

Suicide is a form of murder. It's just as bad as killing anyone else. In fact, it's almost worse than that, because the people killed by others didn't selfishly CHOOSE to leave their loved ones torn up in this life. This is why a lot of people call it the ultimate selfish act.

A lot of times the tragedy is ironic, too... someone THINKS or FEELS that nobody cares about them or loves them. What they don't realize is that it's possible for those around you to care or love you very much, without you emotionally feeling like they do. Just because someone doesn't understand you or doesn't give you the life or attention you want or deserve, doesn't necessarily mean they didn't care.

In Catholicism, the Church's teaching is and has always been that these people will go to hell (provided that between the act and their death they don't repent... and keeping in mind that you can't just do it and then say, "oh... woops..."

because God knows whether you knew what you were doing, and whether or not you were REALLY regretting it before you went. So think of it as the worst kind of Russian roulette there is... a 99.999% chance of being in torments we can't even comprehend, for all eternity. Why?

-Well, not only was your last act in life murder, it was the most selfish of murders. When you went, you took a lot of hearts with you, whether you wanted to acknowledge that or not.

-You may have left behind people you had a responsibility to in justice... the parents you were supposed to take care of in old age, or maybe children you had a duty to raise and protect and teach in life.

-God had a purpose for you in this world, and gave you things only you could have accomplished. You just decided not to, not only defying Him, and being terribly ungrateful for what He gave you, but also depriving the world of the good you could have and should have been able to have done.

-Finally, God takes each of us out whenever it is the most merciful moment for that soul. That is, when He knows that every aspect of your life is not going to be any better for it than you are now. His goal is to either get you to heaven... or at least save you from a lower place in hell, because He is merciful... even if He doesn't revoke your free will to do screwed up things and suffer the natural consequences, or the free will of others to do screwed up things and make other people suffer (otherwise we'd be just meaningless robots, with no choice about anything... and God made us more dignified than that, so, among other things, our LOVE could actually mean something, and not just be an empty act we couldn't help). So when someone kills themselves, they basically 1) decide to go at a worse time for them and everybody else than when God would have taken them (even if we don't understand the tough cases, we can be sure God knows something we didn't), 2) they deny His mercy and love... that He would have taken them at the most merciful time for them (what He KNOWS is the most merciful time, not what we THINK is), and 3) they commit the crime of taking away His rights to do that, as the father and judge of every soul.

We can also never know what other people would have come into the world had they not killed themselves. What kind of people might have been born because of them, who could have done a lot of good (and not just a lot of bad).

Suicide is the ultimate selfishness, and it ends, for most, by being judged as the heinous crime it really is against themselves, against God, and against everyone they left behind... with an eternity much, much worse than whatever they were trying to run away from here.

I used to think that suicide was for cowards and loser who couldn't stick it out. But then I actually went through a point in my life where I honestly considered killing myself. Everything just looked so hopeless. And I thought that even if things got 'better' they wouldn't be what I wanted. Like the world would change but into a place I didn't like. :sweat:
I feel a little silly talking about it now. It seems so juvenile now, but hind sight is twenty-twenty after all. I am glad I didn't go through with it.
I turned out to be too much of a coward! I could only get as far as hurting myself, never actually attempting to end my life. I did swallow a bunch of pain killers once, but I puked them all up shortly after wards. :roll:

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...Killing yourself is a form of murder, I suppose. But killing yourself is infinitely less terrible than killing someone else. When you kill yourself, it's doing what you want and think is best. If you kill someone else, you take the most basic of their rights- the right to life- and chances are they don't want to die. It's one thing to do what you want with your own body, but something else entirely to do something with someone else's body.

And I believe that the family can be just as selfish as the suicidal person, honestly. It is very selfish on the part of the family to keep the suicidal person from killing themselves just so they don't have to go through loss, isn't it? You say that it's selfish to force the family into grieving, but how is it not selfish to keep the individual alive and suffering? Why is the suffering of the individual less important than the grief of the family? The way I see it, keeping someone who doesn't want to be here anymore alive for the sake of the family is a horrid thing to put a person through.

How is that ironic? How are you supposed to know that someone loves you if no one ever shows it? It's easy to forget that people care if they never bother to make it seem like you matter to them.


On the subject of defying God or whatever; And if you don't believe in God? If a suicidal person isn't religious, they won't care what God thinks. It doesn't matter to you if you'll supposedly go to hell if you don't even believe in hell. If you feel that life is a result of getting knocked up, it doesn't matter what your 'ultimate plan' might be. A Christian may expect that God still has something in store for them, but the rest of us just see a dead end that you get to live through until your life comes to its natural end. Nature does not see to remove you from the world at a most merciful time. The entire argument of God is pretty irrelevant to a nonreligious person.