Depression

[Babb'sBurstNad]

16 minutes ago, Arniepie said:

The mad thing about suicide rates is that they very rarely fluctuate massively,but if you think how random the act itself is,that makes no sense.

I'd say it makes a fair bit of sense. The rates don't change because it's rarely about the hardship society's facing, but how an individual’s brain processes things, and whether it can get through that overwhelming momentary suicidal ideation. It's only really random in as much as you don't know how you'll act if / when those thoughts hit you, like anything I guess.

[Champ]

30 minutes ago, Champ said:

I would be fascinated to know how many attempted suicide attempts are fatal and how many of those were intended to be. My guess would be that the numbers of people completing suicide are tiny compared to the numbers carrying out suicidal plans.

 

My experience suggests that there is a large group of people who make frequent attempts at suicide and that anything that breaks into those thought processes has to be worth trying

 

18 minutes ago, Elite said:

I know a few lads that have committed suicide and the story is eerily similar. Their close friends, family, etc said post suicide how they were in contact not long before the act and that the bloke in question showed no distress or emotional behaviour. It's as though they make the decision and are at peace with it, whereas a lot of the people that attempt suicide (but ultimately fail) are the exact opposite.

 

Very small sample size from my perspective of course.

Our individual experiences are of 2 very different populations; yours most probably with otherwise functioning males, mine very often with very damaged people, often women, who make multiple suicidal attempts 

[Elite]

11 hours ago, Champ said:

 

Our individual experiences are of 2 very different populations; yours most probably with otherwise functioning males, mine very often with very damaged people, often women, who make multiple suicidal attempts 

Definitely. Either way it's a sad situation when the only hope a person has is that their pain will go away by ending their own life.

[lifetime fan]

11 hours ago, Champ said:

I would be fascinated to know how many attempted suicide attempts are fatal and how many of those were intended to be. My guess would be that the numbers of people completing suicide are tiny compared to the numbers carrying out suicidal plans.

 

My experience suggests that there is a large group of people who make frequent attempts at suicide and that anything that breaks into those thought processes has to be worth trying

 

14 hours ago, Babb'sBurstNad said:

I think those things are more like nudge theory, aimed at those potentially in the build up to an episode. A lot of people who top themselves go to somewhere they know to do it. If you're spiralling down, and constantly walking past such a spot, that card - however small a token - could make the difference.

Very much so. 
 

People should have a watch of the documentary The Bridge. 

[Oh Buoy]

It's probably worth pointing out that not all attempts have a typical ideation to preparation phase. There are also some issues with the data before a certain date as coroners wouldn't record the death as a suicide. 

 

That said, conversations around suicide can be emotive and triggering for some. For anyone having negative thoughts or just feeling a bit shit and want to speak to someone: 

 

CALM - https://www.thecalmzone.net/ (they also have a webchat) 

Samaritans - https://www.samaritans.org/

Shout - https://giveusashout.org/

Papyrus - https://www.papyrus-uk.org/

 

It feels weird to contact a listening service but try not to let that put you off. When you're feeling low your perspective of the situation will narrow and become negative. Speaking to someone outside of your circle can help you gain a new perspective of your situation. You can call them as many times as you like and about anything (big problems, small problems, how the weather is etc). 

 

For obvious reasons, if you're worried about your safety, get immediate help - 999 or your local crisis team. You're not wasting anyone's time - you're looking after the most important person, you. Be selfish about your self-care. 

[easytoslip]

On 19/10/2022 at 09:45, Elite said:

Definitely. Either way it's a sad situation when the only hope a person has is that their pain will go away by ending their own life.

This happened to my neighbour a month ago after the death of her partner who was some years older, this lady was  Chinese and I often stopped when passing commenting how nice her plants and flowers  were and how I'm useless at keeping plants and a  bit of a laugh but I had no idea she had issues until her body was found at the rivers edge beneath the pier when another elderly neighbour told me that she threw herself in her husbands grave in utter grief though she never showed that in any way to me after his death, its so sad to see all her plants dying outside her flat, they made the street look nice along with the others.

You never know what is going on in anyone's mind and I'm sure we've all had our dark thoughts at certain times so it pays to be courteous and engage if you know if something might be troubling someone. 

Incidentally that was the second sad case in as many weeks at the same spot, sad as fuck. 

[Bjornebye]

5 minutes ago, easytoslip said:

This happened to my neighbour a month ago after the death of her partner who was some years older, this lady was  Chinese and I often stopped when passing commenting how nice her plants and flowers  were and how I'm useless at keeping plants and a  bit of a laugh but I had no idea she had issues until her body was found at the rivers edge beneath the pier when another elderly neighbour told me that she threw herself in her husbands grave in utter grief though she never showed that in any way to me after his death, its so sad to see all her plants dying outside her flat, they made the street look nice along with the others.

You never know what is going on in anyone's mind and I'm sure we've all had our dark thoughts at certain times so it pays to be courteous and engage if you know if something might be troubling someone. 

Incidentally that was the second sad case in as many weeks at the same spot, sad as fuck. 

Sad to hear that mate, poor woman must have been in serious turmoil. 

 

This bit highlighted is spot on though. Fella who lives opposite us late 40's possible early 50's. Lived with his mum up until she passed away a few years ago. I'd not long moved in and the first conversation we had he told me he's been sleeping in her bed. He's a massive blue and when he see's me he always starts shouting "Here he is the Red shite" and starts banging on about how shit we are but I let him have his minute of piss taking then we chat footy for 5 minutes. The way I see it, that might be his only human interaction that day so letting him call me a red-nose cunt is no problem at all. 

[easytoslip]

46 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Sad to hear that mate, poor woman must have been in serious turmoil. 

 

This bit highlighted is spot on though. Fella who lives opposite us late 40's possible early 50's. Lived with his mum up until she passed away a few years ago. I'd not long moved in and the first conversation we had he told me he's been sleeping in her bed. He's a massive blue and when he see's me he always starts shouting "Here he is the Red shite" and starts banging on about how shit we are but I let him have his minute of piss taking then we chat footy for 5 minutes. The way I see it, that might be his only human interaction that day so letting him call me a red-nose cunt is no problem at all. 

That's right, there's a fella who goes into my local who doesn't seem to have any life at all apart from getting well pissed, he comes in with his face marked at times saying he got beat up on the street though we seem to think it occurs at home, he lives just across from the pub in a Thai knocking shop and what his role in there is fuck knows as he's always looking miserable, an odd arrangement but I/we always say hello and might have a game of pool etc so like I say it's best to engage however small talk it is as you say that maybe his only interaction. 

I had a cousin some years ago who committed suicide, I hadn't seen him for years, but I believe he became depressed after having issues with his wife, you can guess what, but one day he got in his car and drove to the site where he worked in Chester from Bootle where he then hung himself. 

It seems mad that he could have the stability to drive there then do that, something must just click in the mind that's irreversible, you just don't know. 

 

 

[Bjornebye]

2 minutes ago, easytoslip said:

That's right, there's a fella who goes into my local who doesn't seem to have any life at all apart from getting well pissed, he comes in with his face marked at times saying he got beat up on the street though we seem to think it occurs at home, he lives just across from the pub in a Thai knocking shop and what his role in there is fuck knows as he's always looking miserable, an odd arrangement but I/we always say hello and might have a game of pool etc so like I say it's best to engage however small talk it is as you say that maybe his only interaction. 

I had a cousin some years ago who committed suicide, I hadn't seen him for years, but I believe he became depressed after having issues with his wife, you can guess what, but one day he got in his car and drove to the site where he worked in Chester from Bootle where he then hung himself. 

It seems mad that he could have the stability to drive there then do that, something must just click in the mind that's irreversible, you just don't know. 

 

 

Sounds like he's living the dream to be honest mate! 

[easytoslip]

29 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Sounds like he's living the dream to be honest mate! 

Haha, I can assure you he's not the poor twat plus his Kareoke efforts are just sound like mumblings of misery. 

 

[Bjornebye]

9 minutes ago, easytoslip said:

Haha, I can assure you he's not the poor twat plus his Kareoke efforts are just sound like mumblings of misery. 

 

Poor fella. Good on you for doing your bit. 

[easytoslip]

2 hours ago, Bjornebye said:

Poor fella. Good on you for doing your bit. 

Ta, yeah you've got to. 

 

[ZonkoVille77]

https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/08/27/seneca-anxiety/

 

“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,” Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his influential lecture on the shapes of stories. “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad,” Alan Watts wrote a generation earlier in his sobering case for learning not to think in terms of gain or loss. And yet most of us spend swaths of our days worrying about the prospect of events we judge to be negative, potential losses driven by what we perceive to be “bad news.” In the 1930s, one pastor itemized anxiety into five categories of worries, four of which imaginary and the fifth, “worries that have a real foundation,” occupying “possibly 8% of the total.”

 

A twenty-four-hour news cycle that preys on this human propensity has undeniably aggravated the problem and swelled the 8% to appear as 98%, but at the heart of this warping of reality is an ancient tendency of mind so hard-wired into our psyche that it exists independently of external events. The great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examined it, and its only real antidote, with uncommon insight in his correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, later published as Letters from a Stoic (public library) — the timeless trove of wisdom that gave us Seneca on true and false friendship and the mental discipline of overcoming fear.

Seneca

In his thirteenth letter, titled “On groundless fears,” Seneca writes:

 

    There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

With an eye to the self-defeating and wearying human habit of bracing ourselves for imaginary disaster, Seneca counsels his young friend:

 

    What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.

 

    Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.

 

Seneca then offers a critical assessment of reasonable and unreasonable worries, using elegant rhetoric to illuminate the foolishness of squandering our mental and emotional energies on the latter class, which comprises the vast majority of our anxieties:

 

    It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives; so look forward meanwhile to better things. What shall you gain by doing this? Time. There will be many happenings meanwhile which will serve to postpone, or end, or pass on to another person, the trials which are near or even in your very presence. A fire has opened the way to flight. Men have been let down softly by a catastrophe. Sometimes the sword has been checked even at the victim’s throat. Men have survived their own executioners. Even bad fortune is fickle. Perhaps it will come, perhaps not; in the meantime it is not. So look forward to better things.

 

 

Sixteen centuries before Descartes examined the vital relationship between fear and hope, Seneca considers its role in mitigating our anxiety:

    The mind at times fashions for itself false shapes of evil when there are no signs that point to any evil; it twists into the worst construction some word of doubtful meaning; or it fancies some personal grudge to be more serious than it really is, considering not how angry the enemy is, but to what lengths he may go if he is angry. But life is not worth living, and there is no limit to our sorrows, if we indulge our fears to the greatest possible extent; in this matter, let prudence help you, and contemn with a resolute spirit even when it is in plain sight. If you cannot do this, counter one weakness with another, and temper your fear with hope. There is nothing so certain among these objects of fear that it is not more certain still that things we dread sink into nothing and that things we hope for mock us. Accordingly, weigh carefully your hopes as well as your fears, and whenever all the elements are in doubt, decide in your own favour; believe what you prefer. And if fear wins a majority of the votes, incline in the other direction anyhow, and cease to harass your soul, reflecting continually that most mortals, even when no troubles are actually at hand or are certainly to be expected in the future, become excited and disquieted.

 

But the greatest peril of misplaced worry, Seneca cautions, is that in keeping us constantly tensed against an imagined catastrophe, it prevents us from fully living. He ends the letter with a quote from Epicurus illustrating this sobering point:

 

    The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.

[Section_31]

Seneca watching the Visigoths coming over the seventh hill: "Probably just a stag do coming back from the pub." 

[Babb'sBurstNad]

When I was a kid I saw Aliens and it scared the shit out of me. The only way I could get to sleep was to tell myself that if the xenomorphs from a film exist then so does Superman. So why spend your time worrying about them?

 

I'm not saying it's as catchy as Seneca, but I think my analogy is better.

[Guest]

36 minutes ago, Babb'sBurstNad said:

When I was a kid I saw Aliens and it scared the shit out of me. The only way I could get to sleep was to tell myself that if the xenomorphs from a film exist then so does Superman. So why spend your time worrying about them?

 

I'm not saying it's as catchy as Seneca, but I think my analogy is better.

[Anubis]

I think it’s probably very easy for some people to get caught up in an information overload and look at the world and see nothing but wall-to-wall bad news. I think that’s why it is important sometimes to switch off and just go and sit in a park somewhere.

 

I think I’ve posted before about the river front being my go to calm place. Another one is the small garden (a graveyard within a graveyard!) on the left as you go in the Priory Rd gate at Anfield Cemetery. I can easily sit there for an hour with just the odd car or person passing, nearly dozing off. Ditto the walled garden in Calderatones Park.

 

I think green spaces in cities are massively important to mental health for people who don’t have the resources to travel to country areas.

[ZonkoVille77]

1 hour ago, Anubis said:

I think it’s probably very easy for some people to get caught up in an information overload and look at the world and see nothing but wall-to-wall bad news. I think that’s why it is important sometimes to switch off and just go and sit in a park somewhere.

 

I think I’ve posted before about the river front being my go to calm place. Another one is the small garden (a graveyard within a graveyard!) on the left as you go in the Priory Rd gate at Anfield Cemetery. I can easily sit there for an hour with just the odd car or person passing, nearly dozing off. Ditto the walled garden in Calderatones Park.

 

I think green spaces in cities are massively important to mental health for people who don’t have the resources to travel to country areas.

 

As I've aged I've realised that water is very important to my mental health.  From sitting on a beach listening to the waves to the sound of torrential rain - it's just so calming and I try to get close to it 2 or 3 times per week.

 

Water as a symbol is also at the core of many religions: Holy water, rituals, the Ganges in Hinduism etc. The ancients had that much right.

[YorkshireRed]

2 hours ago, ZonkoVille77 said:

that water is very important to my mental health.

100% with you on this. 

[Bjornebye]

Depression/suicidal thoughts/feeling of helplessness is not a joke. 

 

Homepage | Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) (thecalmzone.net)

 

[Guest]

3 hours ago, ZonkoVille77 said:

 

As I've aged I've realised that water is very important to my mental health.  From sitting on a beach listening to the waves to the sound of torrential rain - it's just so calming and I try to get close to it 2 or 3 times per week.

 

Water as a symbol is also at the core of many religions: Holy water, rituals, the Ganges in Hinduism etc. The ancients had that much right.

[Bjornebye]

I lived right by the sea for 14 years. It was the day/night I sat on one of the pipes that lead into the Solent at 4am drunk and later found myself getting my stomach pumped in an ambulance wondering what the fuck was going on that worried me. One thing I don't deny is that being able to look out to sea can sooth the soul as long as you're willing to go and chase a better day. 

 

 

[Oh Buoy]

Different things help different people. What's important is knowing what's good for you and what drains you. Tomorrow is never guaranteed so enjoy the little moments and fuck off the stress like the misses telling you to hoover the house or finish the 10 DIY projects you started. 

 

In fact, fuck off the misses. 

 

Fucking hoovered yesterday. 

[Creator Supreme]

It's baaaaacccckkk!

 

Not that it ever really goes away. I think it's the time of year, I hate Christmas so it's never good, but this just feels shitter than usual.

 

The old girl is in care now permanently (we think) and it's the best place for her, the staff at the home are complete stars. The only downside is she's now got COVID. She's alright as far as I know but still scary for a 78 year old dementia patient. Looks like we'll miss her birthday on Thursday too as the home is closed until at least Saturday because of the outbreak.

 

The old fella is still in hospital, nearly 7 weeks now, he's medically fit to be discharged but not physically. He needs to go into care for a short time at least, but sorting a place out is a nightmare. He's so frail, so thin. His legs and arms look like he's been in a concentration camp instead of being well looked after.

 

To add to my joy, I'm now in the doghouse at home too. We've all gone down with some virus (non-COVID) the last few days. My missus being the trooper that she is carried on as normal as much as she could. Me being the shithouse useless waste of vomit I am downed tools and went to bed as soon as the shakes started, so now I'm lazy scumbag number one.

 

My reward, as the time of this post indicates, is insomnia. Oh Joy!

[the chimp]

You're not on your own mate. If you need to chat there are professionals only too willing and unserstabding  if you dont fancy that, I'll PM you my whatsapp number. I don't want you thinking you have to be alone