Originally Posted by
Lynarii
I'm probably going to regret this, but I'm going to try and explain for the people who are calling it cowardly.
Someone in their 40s who has had depression most of their life doesn't suicide because of their pain. They aren't 'giving up'. Pain is something a person with lifelong depression lives with every single day, to the point where it's as much a part of who they are as how tall they are or what color their eyes are. It's hard to even imagine what life would be like without the pain. If that was enough to kill them, it'd have happened at the start of it all when they were still young. Someone may talk about wanting to stop the pain, but that's pretty natural. Pain sucks. It's not generally the trigger point.
Depression is a mental health disorder. Like most mental health disorders, it comes with it's own set of delusional thoughts. Someone can know that a thought is delusional, they can be aware of all sorts of logic that argues against it, but deep down inside these thoughts are very real to the person, and fighting them is like arguing against the sky being blue. It's a self-truth so obvious that it simply can't be any other way. When depression turns suicidal, the thought process that tends to be the dangerous one is generally the one that starts with "I am in a lot of pain" (true), moves to "My pain is affecting the other people in my life" (also generally true), then to "I am hurting the people I care about" (debatable), and finally "The best thing I can do for the people I love is to remove myself from their lives" (delusional thought). When someone honestly and truly believes that they would be helping their family and friends by killing themselves, then you have someone who is at a serious risk of actually doing it. That's why people in that position push people away so hard. It's not that they don't care about their family and friends, they're hoping that if they can convince others in their life to not care about them then it will be better for those people.
And honestly, it's okay that most people here don't really understand. If you haven't faced the reality of mental health related delusional thinking, it's really impossible to truly grasp how real and powerful the thoughts are. That's a good thing, I wouldn't wish true understanding of it on anyone, it is a horrible thing to go through. But the idea that it is somehow a cowardly action is one of the barriers that makes it more difficult for people suffering to get help. They're not lacking in bravery, they're simply basing their decisions upon a thought that is wrong, which leads to the wrong decision being made.
So yeah. Suicide is a bad thing. It's wrong. If it was the correct decision, based upon sound and reasonable logic, depression wouldn't be a considered a mental health disorder. But fighting depression is a lot like fighting cancer. Some people beat it, some people don't, and the difference is generally more about which one got proper treatment at an early enough stage than which one is a 'stronger' person. Sometimes being strong, successful, rich, etc... still isn't enough.
(Source: Over twenty years of depression and two serious suicide attempts, and I'm still here. I've never given up, I'm never going to give up. A coward wouldn't last one year with the kind of fighting it takes to live a reasonably normal life through depression.)