I've always prided myself on great physical health, which is a great thing indeed to have in America (it's very expensive to get sick or injured in America!), and I'm lucky to have it, but I realized recently that health does not mean just physical health. There are various other types of health, like financial health (MONEY!), social health (relationships, friends, etc.), but more importantly, mental heath. A lesser known but underrated health, I'm super lucky to also have great mental health, never getting too depressed, not having suicidal thoughts, being able to have a positive outlook on life mainly because I'm surrounded by good people and a good environment. Others are not as lucky, suffering often "disease of the mind" in not thinking clearly or thinking deeply about the sadness around them, often driving themselves to attempt suicide. Mental health is as it sounds, a condition of the brain, and you have to feed the brain once in a while, or give it some medicine....it's an issue that cannot be ignored in this day and age.
I read a bunch of seemingly unrelated things this weekend and they all (tellingly) included something about suicides. In the US, about 47,000 people die each other from suicides. JUST suicides! I was taken aback by that number, but it's true, and I can begrudgingly understand why. Just today a Korean pop singer was found in her room dead of an apparent suicide.. another Korean woman was convicted of manslaughter of her boyfriend who committed suicide apparently after she told him to go kill himself. That would be an example of making it worse for an already sick person.Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole chapter in his book about the poet Sylvia Plath's suicide and how suicides occur partly because the victim associates certain things with taking their own life and would not do it if the situation/ environment were altered. Finally, I watched a video of a man who survived falling off the Golden Gate Bridge, apparently one of the most popular places to commit suicide in the United States. For a guy like me who has it all it's mind-bogging why people would take their own life, even people who have it even better than I do, as I'd thought of it as people making poor decisions and not being strong enough to tough it out on their own. but it becomes more clear after reading more and hearing survivors' stories that it does have to do with combating their own inner thoughts and blaming themselves.
I don't know directly of any people in my circle who committed suicide, a further sign that I'm stuck in my own little bubble blind to other people's problems, but I did go to college once with a girl who eventually committed suicide a few years later. It's really sad to see her Facebook page now, where people still wish her well several years after the event and wish her a happy birthday, as well as some messages like "I would you would have talked to me more about it" or "you didn't have to deal with all on your own." That seems to be a common thread among suicide victims, they blame themselves and keep it all in to themselves, finding themselves worthless or so at blame that they have to take responsibility by killing themselves, or at least ending the pain for themselves. In Japan at least many people take their own life after doing something that damages other people like putting other people into debt if their business went bankrupt, so they feel they have to make the ultimate sacrifice as an apology. There also often is some sort of triggering event that causes someone at risk of suicides to go over the edge, like the famous Sandra Bland case in Texas who was pulled over by an overzealous cop who dragged her out of her car for smoking a cigarette and not obeying the officer's orders. Bland was sent to jail for doing nothing illegal and killed herself on her third day in jail. I think the common thread for this is to improve one's mental health, to train the brain that even when they are beseiged by negative thoughts to overcome and hang on, so improving mental health truly is a lifesaving medical field and endeavor to help someone combat a disease, just as important as finding a cure for cancer and other maladies.
I still think my suggestions of making an at-risk suicidal person laugh constantly or allow them to go on an adventure would work, but it's clearly not that simple, especially when it's hard to even identify who is most at-risk of committing suicide and who needs it. No one's a mind-reader, but one possible clue to identify at-risk suicide candidates is to see who has committed suicide before.......unfortunately those who have the predilection to do it before or at higher risk of doing it again.
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