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My brother just killed himself about two months ago. Right before his suicide, I started my first job out of college and moved to a new state. I spent this last summer listening to Leo's videos, meditating, applying to jobs, and talking my brother down from multiple suicide attempts (he tried 30 different times from May to July. I tried to save him, but failed.) He was 26 years old and I'm 22. He suffered from bipolar disorder, diagnosed around the age of 15. I spent most my youth planning to become a neurologist and or psychiatrist in order to help him. We were extremely close. He was my best friend. Now that plan is in the shitter. How could I ever start a successful business, family, etc..? I moved to a new state in my brother's time of need. I was and am a coward. I guess my question is how can I prove to myself that I'm not a loser after losing/giving up on my brother. Thanks

Added Thought: To make it too much harder than it already is... is patronizing, since it's most often based on the assumption that people can't or don't deserve to make their own fundamental decisions about the quality and meaning of their own life and experience. If you truly care about the well-being of suicidal people (as opposed to obsessing about them being able to do it in a more "convenient" and painless way rather than killing themselves), then forbidding this is likely to backfire and cause those people to suffer more because of the sheer amount of invalidation already existing in their subjective experience. It is unlikely to stop someone from either wanting to kill themselves or actually doing it when it gets bad enough and they get desperate. IMO this is a bit different than the government not providing assisted suicide facilities because they've decided that making decisions about death isn't their jurisdiction, just because it is not within their scope of responsibilities as a government. Intentions and reasons matter, especially when people don't live in social vacuums. Often it is actually INVALIDATION, ISOLATION, and self-negation at the heart of suicidal ideation, not just "pain" alone, whether psychological or physical, even if the pain seems massive and unending in scope. It's believing that you are fundamentally alone, incurable, unreachable, not understandable, unlovable, not worthy... whether by humanity, God, Life itself, etc. Or believing that it is legitimately all for nothing.

IMO, a bottleneck-type effect is more than enough to deter people who might be doing it more "impulsively", which comes in the form of whatever series of passes and checks that people have to go through to reach their objective. For whatever already exists for countries that allow assisted suicide, this is likely a process that involves multiple years, I imagine at least 2-3 years at the bare minimum on top of a longer waitlist, and likely multiple psychiatric and/or medical assessments. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong...) That automatically weeds out the impulsive and those without determination, leaving a very small fraction of people who were actually serious about the outcome, have likely already thought about the outcome extensively, and have had more than enough time to come to terms with what they desire. Much like anything else which is difficult in life that involves going directly against the grain. Though I don't think we collectively have much to worry about when it comes to this issue of influencing impressionable minds to commit suicide. I wouldn't say that it's making suicide more glamourous or accessible, since people who really want to do it, even if the motives are highly emotional and impulsive, will just do it anyway. Which by the way, was already a known thing with certain cults and even literary works, which triggered clusters of suicides. For example, Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther" triggered many suicides when it came out in the late 1700s. Ironically, the book was written because the author himself was trying to process his own suicidal feelings, and his art came from figuring out how to make something positive and constructive despite it all. Art is probably always going to be more glamourous (and therefore influential) than mainstream science and the government, and therefore more influential with impressionable and young minds. Should we just go back to banning art and media? (This is actually what happened with the Sorrows of Young Werther; I believe it got banned in 3 countries.) The primary influencing factor is a fundamental shift in the emotional and moral fabric of the society first and foremost, and not the government permitting people to do something that most people fundamentally DO NOT want to do anyway. Correct. I was more thinking about this in terms of citizen involvement, people like you and I, discussing these issues on the internet. Though perhaps we should also take a look at what politicians DO first, and then measure that against what they say. Talk is cheap... Decision-making without empathy usually leads to decisions that end up harming the people they are meant to protect though. I think of it as Essential Step 1... Without a deep empathy and comprehensive perspective, there is no foundation for anything good and lasting.

PUA is a dangerous game, it will mess up with your mind, kinda like AI porn will with the next generation of young men. A (somewhat of a) friend of mine who followed Strauss' s advice for the past 20 years has recently almost committed suicide after a spiral of break-up, toxic relationships, complete inability to open up to a woman beyond one night stand and just years of following the most toxic dating ideology out there. PUA is an equivalent to snake oil salesmanship for a multinational corporation , shady, unethical, gets you good results in short term, long term completely unsustainable, likely to lead to depression, unhappiness and bad karma through years of lying, cheating and treating women like meat

If there would be a 100% chance that suicide will eliviate suffering, would you agree with it, or do you have a principled stand against it?

Well, all these arguments are probablistic and not 100%. Its all based on what you think you know and coming from that I think its more probablistic that it will eliviate pain rather than not. But even if we go with the 50-50, 50% chance of eliviating pain is pretty high, and that is probably much more higher chance compared to waiting in real life for someone to find a cure for you - my main point with all this is that I don't think that it is irrational to commit suicide in certain contexts , if your main goal is to get rid of your suffering.

I was only replying to him. Proof is ridiculous in these contexts. Even if you prove anything, it will not be accepted, emotionally. If n number of people apply for assisted suicide, will you accept all those n people for AS? At some point, you got to say no. I wonder what that point is. To covert your empathy to get something done in reality is a whole different ball game. Conservatives yap about having kids but block any social schemes that may take care of kids. Liberals yap about social programs but they are more interested in sending that money abroad to wage wars in fuck knows where. The problem plaguing these people is ignorance. Mere empathy is not enough. You need understanding and strong will. You need to be clear on what your guidelines. This is how you make things practical.

So is your position, then that you are completely agnostic (you give 50-50) about whether committing suicide will eliviate ones suffering or not?

@zurew All I am saying is that killing yourself is not the solution to end the suffering. Because I do not see how it is the solution. It could end up better or worse. If you are advocating for suicide as the solution, then the burden of proof is on you to prove that it gets better. Else it would not be a solution. I do not discount the possibility that it could better after killing yourself. But like you said, you do not have proof for it.

Arguments like that don't work. The main premise is that you have unbearable suffering right now, and you know that if you don't end your life you will continue to suffer. Lets say it is a fact, that there is plenty of suffering after you die. That isn't an argument against suicide, because you will die either way, so by living you would just delay the suffering that will come after your death - but in this case you are not really delaying suffering because you are suffering right now. The argument could possibly work if you could establish with certainty either that guaranteed suffering awaits you after you commit suicide (but you won't suffer if you don't commit suicide ) OR you would have to establish that there is a guaranteed suffering that will await you after death (regardless if you kill yourself or not) ,but that kind of suffering will be greater than the suffering you are experiencing right now. The gamble arguments don't work unless you can demonstrate that a negative outcome is more probable than the opposite - if you can't do that , then your argument isn't an argument for anything ,because it can go either way (in this context maybe not killing yourself will for some random reason make you suffer more in the afterlife).

Not surprisingly, this is a complicated issue. A recent research report recommended reconsidering legalization of EAS. "First, we would argue that wishes for death or suicide, even when clearly articulated by the patient to doctors or next-of-kin, and even if it represents the true will at that very moment, this desire or wish for death will likely change in many of these cases. As we have pointed out above, such an articulated death wish, can be a symptom of the disorder and may in reality convey several other possible messages, that have more to do with the patient feeling abandoned, disappointed or angry. It may also convey a wish for help to live rather than a wish for help to die. Second, we would claim that the notion of personality disorders as “untreatable” conditions and “without prospects of improvement” are based on outdated knowledge about the state of PD treatment. Today, a range of effective psychotherapeutic interventions are available for people with personality disorders in most of the countries that have so far legalized EAS. That this has seemingly escaped the attention of both legislators and expert medical communities is deeply disturbing. It may be that the current lack of effective psychotropic medication to treat personality disorders could have made many physicians and psychiatrists not specializing in PD treatment less optimistic about the prognosis in people with PDs and the prospects of receiving effective treatment in general. We urgently call for a revision of the current legislation and practice of EAS for people with personality disorders which we believe, is currently based on an inadequate understanding of these peoples’ needs and their potentials for having a life worth living." https://bpded.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40479-020-00131-9

BPD can be a really taxing, stubborn, life-long condition. It's hard for such people to live normal well-functioning lives because their mind is so chaotic. It's no surprise that such people have a high suicide rate. It's hard for a normal person to understand the hell that BPD can be and how stubborn it is.

I started taking it because it was prescribed by my psychiatrist after I was at the brink of suicide at a cliff. I got sent to a psych ward. In hindsight, I think I could have overcome my depression without medication because I forgot how strong thoughts and emotions feel like. I feel like I don't exist basically. But maybe that's a good thing because I see the truth in it. I stopped taking it because it made me too lethargic and it made my body feel weak and after quitting cold turkey, that problem was resolved. I had the most psychedelic visuals that engulfed my field of view after I woke up from dreams during the first 3 days quitting. And dreams got pretty vivid. I know because SSRIs act on serotonin, it also affects the pineal gland. Maybe that played a role in my first awakening somehow. Since taking and after quitting, things just look brighter and almost otherworldly now. A shift in perception most likely happened somehow. Despite the physical side effects of lethargy and weak body gone, I still feel the effects of emotional anaesthesia, poor memory and brain fog here and there but it is certainly getting better when compared to how it was like in the first days of quitting.

I discovered I was diagnosed with this at a young age. To my understanding, PDD-NOS is a euphemism for mild autism. I was socially awkward, anxious and had weird habits that neurotypicals found strange. First impressions people made of me were fine, but the more people got to know me, the more people knew I was not normal. This lead to people distancing from me subconsciously and not talking as much. I wasn't the most entertaining or charismatic either. I wasn't exactly a looker too. Due to extreme feelings of isolation, I eventually attempted suicide at a cliff but of course survival instinct kicked in. But in the moment, I thought that the cliffs looked beautiful with the sunset. I was sort of just engrossed in the beauty of it. Maybe that was the start of my awakening? But long story short, I did get pretty suicidal knowing that I will never be normal. But these days, seeing what normies do, I'm glad to be not normal anyway.

People just don't get how truly fucked up severe mental illness is. I don't necessarily endorse assisted suicide but I can understand the motivation.

In my opinion, we can bring a quicker end to this debate by asking ourselves "who's decision should it be?", the person themselves or the people around them? Who gets to decide when a person dies? In a controlled environment, I think you should have the right to do it. I am for Assisted suicide, you're all free to be upset, disappointed at a persons choice but it's theirs to make not yours.

Well, in my dreams I have been Spiderman, I have been a master Jedi stronger than even Anakin/Luke/Yoda, I have jumped immeasurable distances, or even flying. In a dream if I hurt someone, in a flash they can turn into something else or the dream can change, there is never such inconsistency in waking. If I hurt someone in waking, I have to live with that, correct? Or face consequences, I can't just wake up and be done with it. Unless suicide, but they say that's not cool bro. Maybe dream = fantasy, but waking = mathematical fantasy, making it real at its core. 1 unit +1 unit will be 2 units. Not in dreams though. I recently had a dream where I lift a cushion and it just spawns another cushion in its place for me to lift. That breaks maths hard! Its not real.

Hmm, didn't see anyone recommending something that could actually help. Don't expect it to be easy because life is not, but if you want to have hope in life and improve your mental health - figure out who you are (existentialy), what life is (metaphysically), and how to reach enlightenment. Because you are not doing that of course you are depressed; you are wasting your life stuck in the matrix, and the matrix is evil. Everyone is depressed to varying degrees, you are probably simply more deeply in touch with it. Life is suffering, but there is a way out. Suicide doesn't help, because you die, stay a bit on the other side and reincarnate into the same shithole again. What works is spiritual practices. Everything else is playing around with shadows until you die and repeat. I'm not treating you with kiddy gloves here, so hopefully you are mature enough for it.

So suicide is the solution? And yes, the human body is a deterministic system. We can study the inside out of it. There is a solution.

@Applegarden8 Quite agree because when suicide get legitimacy, the desperate mind might get locked on that idea and stop trying to challenge itself and to look for solutions out of his depression. Therefore to tell someone that even in theory suicide can be sometimes a valid option is highly irresponsible.

When it becomes an industry, it is worse. The problem is very big. Society offers little to no solution to the suicide problem, but here no "hollistic suicide (they are going to kill themselves anyway) therapy" solution works, because it's your life you are taking. Normalizing suicide is something I feel is deeply wrong existentially. What you can discover in life even if you are in a bad situation if you choose to consciously rejuvenate. Who knows how many births you took before to be in the place you are now, to be on this planet with somebody who could guide you, let alone find something that gives you liberation from birth and death. All just for this... Unacceptable. Those who found why to live can guide you for those who are suicidal. Those who found something internally will most likely will never commit it. There is an obvious reason why. But such apathy has happened in that person so that you can't reach her. To support killing people is just... horrible. If you want to die. It's your problem, learn to live. This is brutal, incomplete and fucked up, but there is no alternative. But the effort is worth it when you discover something meaningful. It is there. The magic of life is there. Just, please, don't give up on yourself. If you feel suicidal and have nothing to live for, wish for freedom, wish for enlightenment. Wish for God, wish for becoming a sage. Start accepting that maybe what is responsible for your depression is the ignorance of truth and what you have known has only survival utility value but is not what will make you happy. The paradigm we are living from (what the masses think) is bound to make you angry, suicidal, jelous, envious, fearful, powerless and hurt. These ideas usually are empty. But if there are such empty ideas the opposite has to be true for some other ideas and concepts. The journey is brutal, the Dark night of the soul is there. You will sit there with dread, loneliness, numbness and blisslessness, to then start feeling what you really are.

The problem of suicide is that it is a choice you would never make out of love. And that should tell you the validity of such actions. All actions that are not of love are of ego. And such actions lead only to more suffering not less. Only love inspired actions can lead to kingdom you're so looking for in all the wrong places.

I don’t know if this is of any help but I have identified as a boy/man and male for the majority of my life. In the beginning I was believing what I was told by my parents, peers, culture but something kicked in around 5 years old that didn’t reflect everyone identifying me as a girl. It was persistent and severely distressing so I was treated in my teens when I was finally referred to a clinic after years of therapists, psychiatrists ending in a suicide attempt. My ‘feelings’ turned out to have a biological basis. Although I looked female, I had gonadal disgenesis which wasn’t known till my teens when I was tested for disorders during my diagnosis process. I participated in a study in 2014 that showed I had a mutation in one of my genes that is typical of males but not females. It cannot currently be tested but I speculate my BNSTi in my hypothalamus falls into the male range as this is what is seen in brain autopsy studies of transgenders. There is an argument over neurological studies as the standard deviation and error bars issue in the research methodology shows too much overlap between the sexes but a recent development by a professor Menon ( Stanford university) taught an AI with large American and European samples of ‘cis’ gendered male and female brains by fMRI and identified three regions that seem to be sex specific. When the AI was used to identify the next set of scans, it identified whether the person was male or female ( as in they are both biologically and identify congruently) with above 90% accuracy. If the incorrect identifications are ironed out, or the reason possibly being these people are actually biologically variant but don’t know, then this will end the statistical overlap argument and potentially be used as a diagnostic tool. ( just for context, it was created as a tool to be used for helping diagnose neurological disorders that are sex specific. There has been no use of the method on trans but the software is available for anyone who should like to do this) having gone through awakening, I know I am ‘awareness’ and both identity and the perception of the body and all things in the objective universe are a construction of the mind. but if I were to come back into this ‘character or avatar’ that I’m experiencing I would say that it contains biological attributes of both sexes that in whatever combination or whichever attribute is predominant, expresses as a male gender. I as this avatar am not male or female but both. Whichever factor was predominant is what has swayed me to go to conformity within the societal expectation of a male/man. I do not identify as trans and do not engage with the lgbt community. I got my treatment and reintegrated back into the society I came from.( I believe a lot of problem stem from the creation of trans as an identity rather than a description of a biological variant) while my body ( as does everyone’s) contains dimorphic structures that can change to either male or female via chemical triggers( secondary characteristic), anything that required physical development during gestation has been surgically altered to the best of a surgeons ability so my superficial, bodily appearance is male. While I can orgasm I do not have the reproductive or hormonal production of either male or female and never have. That is managed artificially. My condition is invisible and doesn’t exist in day to day life. I fulfill my role as a man, a husband, a brother and a son and my condition doesn’t exist until I mention it and it forms in the mind of a person who is told. Pre conceived beliefs begin to be projected onto me and ‘their’ behavior changes. The reality was their direct experience prior to me telling them anything which was completely normal. After telling them, they start projecting their ideas onto me. This has prompted me to never talk about it for both my and the other persons sake. For me to create discomfort in a weak minded person who cannot control their own thoughts and resulting behavior would not be very conscious of me so I no longer do it. Since dissolving the ego somewhat there is no need or feeling to justify my identification. It just is. if this stuff is to be taught to young children then it should be approached holistically encompassing not just variations but the two binaries between which that spectrum appears. All of it needs to be taught with equal importance. Sexual Biology ‘is’ binary in a human and that is the male or female deviation of a dimorphic structure of which there are many in the body. Multiple simplex binary structures can all be coherent or sometimes incoherent causing complex variants we see as the many emergent genders. thats only one explanation but we can’t forget there is the purely psychological recognition of social constructs and those who loosen themselves from that regardless of the biological underlying attributes. both exist. Everything we know is highly complex and emergent from a simplex unity. the complexity of our culture and the understanding of biology and our higher psychological faculties is not something that can be taught to a child. We only know these things from having gone through all these experiences, overcoming our animalistic reactions and becoming more aware of our cognitive functions, studying, contemplating and regaining mastery over them. perhaps it would be better to teach children awareness and awareness of complexity instead of trying to break the complexity appart to save them from the experiences they inherently have to go through to learn?

This isn't for any particular reason other than to talk for the sake of talking or healing it. It's been a rough week. Advice is welcome, skip to the end questions if you are low on time. Since my brother has been going through a rough spot. I've felt the same pull on me a lot recently, and ghosted things again, only for a week. I don't have much guilt or shame for ghosting in me anymore, so I don't need to hide from that in the pattern itself. I also have no partner that I am skipping out on that needs me, so there is no painful consequence. My brother is still an opiate addict at 40, and he started before he was an adult. My 70-year-old+ mother still finances his addiction, so he doesn't kill himself. It's about as toxic a relationship as you'd imagine. She drives him to get his drugs and gives him the money. He had been working for a good long while but recently lost his job, and his girlfriend, so she's paying for all of it now not just petrol and the extra he'd usually need to get by. My father is a broken man, he's less angry now than he was most of the time but he lives in a pit of despair (mostly self-created). As a kid, we used to argue every day and then I would get a physical punishment about once a week, hand, cane, or belt. So my abuse was never the unpredictable rage others experienced, for me it was routine, and for years I could think of it as normal. It was like being raised by an angry, narcissistic 6-year-old who did nothing but get into shouting matches over small things. Such as the TV control being in the wrong, spot, the door being open, you saying the wrong word, or leaving a cup on the kitchen sink. Just ridiculous things. I remember watching Bender in the breakfast club say this is what happens to him when you spill paint, and I thought well, no to me that happens when you leave the door open. I learned to shout back at first, and that led to the physical abuse, honestly, though the enraged daily shouting was far worse. At 6 I was repeating to him what he was saying to me, that's the earliest I remember the volatile arguments, I mean, a full-blown temper over any small detail like spelling mistakes at primary school, never a simple disagreement. That was the hardest bit of deconditioning I had to do: not taking every small thing like it was the end of the world or a threat I was about to be hit for. Why do I say this? Well, I find it good to write these things out. Especially when life is tough and maybe someone has an insight I haven't thought of. It also explains my brother's initial choice to escape into drugs and my ghosting pattern. If I am not in life, I am not affected as much, computers were always somewhere that was certain and predictable. This escapism was why I loved fantasy time as a kid and eventually computer games. I assume my brothers escapism was similar. Over the many years, I've/we've tried all the things I know in relation to my brother. Love, sympathy, acceptance, denial, anger, pretending, getting him in rehab (expensive) and even using the police. We've experienced everything you imagine from an addict also. My dad and I don't often talk, as you can imagine, but he did say something today. He was talking about suicide and the helplessness he feels, I told him he doesn't see my brother; he sees the addict, and he replied that he'd never seen my brother, only as a kid, because he'd always been on some kind of drug. I realized that he was right. At what point is the person just the person? If that's what they've been all their life, that's what they are. So I realized in my head that, at this late date, I'd still be excusing it all somehow. My brother is and will always be an addict, while my mother is alive, until she or he dies. ^ 1) How would you deal with a ghosting pattern if you found yourself in one often and were tempted to do so? 2) What would you personally do regarding the family situation, bearing in mind that it's been almost 30 years? Also, I am broke and trying to restart a career, so large expenses are out of the question. *Go easy on my mother's codependence also, it's understandable given the environment. I don't excuse her enabling, and believe me I've talked at length with her but I do understand why it happened.

The Fundamentals Philosophical inquiry and research are the cornerstones of philosophy, a discipline that seeks to understand fundamental questions about knowledge, reality, existence, ethics, and more. But before one can even begin to do philosophy, it is unexpressably crucial to understand what it is exactly that you are doing as well as how you are doing it. Why? Because unlike any other field of study, or any other discipline, or any other type of investigation, whether it be scientific or social, in fact, unlike any other thing that you've come across before: the problems which the philosopher occupies oneself with are, in the most blunt sense of the word, real problems which present themselves unavoidably to the thoughtful mind. This is because contrary to other occupations, or whatever, the philosopher doesn't busy oneself with the problems of the world. To the philosopher, those problems are about as trivial as the problems of a child when it reaches its impulsive stage. No. The philosopher busies oneself with problems that are terrifyingly much more closer to home than those that have to do with survival, s/he busies oneself with the problems of consciousness. It is a natural response for many to shrug of such statements about man's problems as nothing more than mere rant. Sure, it may not seem like it now, but just as rivers run and the winds blow, the average man is more burdened by one's consciousness than s/he is by one's need to survive. Of course, this is not something that s/he might admit under groundless circumstances. It is more likely that s/he hasn't even begun to realize this, let alone suspect it. But it is not that difficult to realize, just difficult to want to realize it. After all, to simply begin, you'd only need to wonder why people commit suicide. What is so burdensome to the extent of overcoming one's most fundamental of extints – survival? The truth is – philosophy is not a discipline – philosophy is discipline. It's not something that you study either, the only thing we can study is its history and other people's impressions of it. But the true philosopher has never been a student of philosophy, s/he has only ever been a plain man who does philosophy. Philosophy is something that you do. And to the philosopher, the problems of consciousness aren't problems, they are simply matters of consciousness which only becomes problematic if ignored. So what is it that the philosopher does when s/he does philosophy? Does s/he ask questions? Is philosophy asking questions? That's what other occupations seem to think. Philosophy seeks to understand the fundamental questions, right? The dictionary describes it as an investigation. And they are not wrong, its process can be described as investigative. Yes. But is that what philosophy really is? Questions? They only recognize the questions, never mind their source. Because such is the mentality which sees itself fit to define to the world what philosophy is. We ask questions all the time, we ask questions because it's necessary for our survival. But then why bother with the fundamental questions when there's no direct reward for knowing the answers? One's social or economic circumstances don't change from doing philosophy. And if there's ultimately no way of proving yourself right in anything you might come up with, then what's the point? This is the reason why the average will not bother oneself with such a regardless endeavor, for s/he only ever concerns oneself with things, not being. Philosophy is being, in that it is true being, not the falsehood of "human being". It is an action, not a reaction. It is initiative, it is pro-activity. Philosophy is the very movement of consciousness itself emerging from that dark place which is its own unconsciousness. It is the most natural, most unsuperficial, most authentic, activity that one can engage in. Yes. Philosophy is something that you do. Philosophy is thought itself. How consciousness moves, is through thought. But not just any sort of thought, it must be disciplined thought and not stimulated thought – an action, not a reaction. It's not just about questions. If it were, we would have accepted that we simply cannot know and moved on to engage in practical matters with the rest of the world, leaving philosophy in the past where it belongs. At least, that's the assumption. The fundamental questions aren't just questions. They are our fundamental thoughts, like the stars by which the less significant bodies orbit. Which means, though you might not be aware of it, every other non-fundamental but 'serious' questions you've ever asked ultimately leads back to the much bigger questions, and are discovered if followed through, which the average man doesn't. It's one of those things that s/he will do carelessly until a career can be made out of it, like with botany or geology or economics and etc. Then when s/he finally does follow through, actually studying the methods of philosophizing rather than doing it as carelessly as the common man does, s/he is called a philosopher. A question is never really a question if it is without an answer. The mind itself knows that much about its nature. No one makes a request of anything s/he doesn't suspect that s/he can receive. Its a ring that calls itself. Consciousness calls for its own development. At least that's what the fundamentals suggest: "who am I?", "what is the meaning of life?", "what is the nature of reality?".