Suicide Prevention

[Brian37]

As Stimbo said, it's much more complicated than that, but I understand that people that have never been in a position where they felt the need to kill themselves can't really wrap their head around it. Ultimately, suicide is an act of desperation. It's an act that is undertaken when a person sees no way of escaping the daily and emotionally draining pain.

yep... I guess I can't wrap my head around that.
Psychological pain is something I don't understand.
I've had my bad days, but I know that there will be some good ones after.
It's like the song says:

Behind the clouds, the sun is shining
Believe me even though you can't quite make it out
You may not see the silver lining
But there's a big blue sky waiting right behind the clouds

In my case, it wasn't something I ever thought I could even consider. After I dropped out of college I got extremely depressed, and then I ended up quitting my job. I was living in my parent's basement with nothing to do but to endure the painful days in a drug fueled haze. The daily experience of only being able to dull the pain wore me out, and eventually, I decided to take my life.

Didn't work though...

Good thing it didn't work!

Yea, well part of that depression is our society selling life as a script. I do think education is important, but lots of times when people fail a class, it isn't that they are lazy or incapable of understanding the topic, but that it isn't presented to them by the teacher learning how that individual learns and adapting the topic to their style and mindset.

I know that I learn better outside a classroom when not under pressure. If I had to had read "The God Delusion" under pressure of a grade, instead of reading it outside a school on my own without that pressure, I wouldn't have gotten through it.

And as I said before, I also hate script thinking. Failing isn't the worst thing in the world, it is how we learn. And accepting one's limitations doesn't make one a failure either. Pushing people too far can and often puts them into positions they are not qualified to handle.

Also, just because one might not understand complex things about one topic, does not mean they cant understand the over all concept. Much like one can drive a car and understand the concept of a combustion engine but not know how to build one from scratch.

I suck at math and chemistry and struggled through it in college. But that does not make a god real or Newton's alchemy idea which failed credible.

Everything I have learned about skepticism and atheism since 01 I learned outside a classroom and that lack of pressure allowed me to learn it slowly at my own pace.

Now, if I took a class on the history of atheism, I'd pass with no problem because there would be no pressure to learn it because I'd go into the class already knowing the topic.

Liking a topic also helps learning. The classes I liked I did better in just like the ones I didn't like I had a harder time in.

Texbooks for me were my worst enemy. They did not speak to me, most of the time they are written by experts who fail to understand the reader in a classroom is not at the same level. You cant bring someone up always with sink or swim because people are motivated by different interactions. I did better when my teacher was not dictitorial and allowed me to question them and tell them how I learn best.

But since this topic is about depression, it still amounts to lack of understanding about the clinical and psychological reasons people suffer from it. The epidemic of not dealing with the amount of depression is our failure to see people as individuals and failure to give people the support they need, and not just pills, when they suffer it.