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Everyday life kills?

Lark

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Jun 21, 2009
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29,569
There was someone from a neighbouring, well not exactly neighbouring but not too distant, died lately and the police are not investigating their death or treating it as sinister or suspiscious. Their remains were found in Scotland and a dog had picked up a scent trail leading to a cliff edge overlooking the sea where other people have jumped from killing themselves. Its not really known if they did commit suicide because they left no note or anything and it is a dangerous place to go when it is windly like it had been lately. Although there are a lot of people who are drawing conclusions that it was suicide and saying that the person involved suffered from depression.

Someone told me that depression can do that, particularly if its a periodic or high/low sort of depression resulting from chemical imbalances in the brain. It is something which has intrigued me in some ways since reading Primo Levi's books and reading about how Primo Levi died.

Apparently after surviving the holocaust, death camps and seeing many other people die he was living, apparently fine, then one day he took a revolver out of a drawer and shot himself dead. Does anyone else wonder about this kind of thing? Are the bio-medical explanations about changes in brain chemistry sufficient?

It seems to me that people can endure and survive some pretty awful things, in the abscence of any struggles, in just normal everyday life the threat of despair and death seems to rise.
 

uncommonentity

New member
Joined
May 3, 2011
Messages
440
The mind is a dangerous thing.
People tend to kill themselves when they consider there is nothing left to live for.
Suicide makes sense to me.
Once someone has performed what they consider to be their duty.
Why shouldn't they be allowed to retire?
 

Lark

Active member
Joined
Jun 21, 2009
Messages
29,569
The mind is a dangerous thing.

People tend to kill themselves when they consider there is nothing left to live for.

Suicide makes sense to me.

Yeah, although it seems strange to me that when living, survival, is the goal, its not often explicitly so, they can contend with much more than the apparent lack of struggle, do you know what I mean?

Perhaps its easier to find something to live for, even if its just the goal of living, if you imagine or have a struggle going on than if life is just life, mundane and uneventful?

Suicide couldnt make sense to me, for reasons of both courage and fear.
 

SilkRoad

Lay the coin on my tongue
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There was someone from a neighbouring, well not exactly neighbouring but not too distant, died lately and the police are not investigating their death or treating it as sinister or suspiscious. Their remains were found in Scotland and a dog had picked up a scent trail leading to a cliff edge overlooking the sea where other people have jumped from killing themselves. Its not really known if they did commit suicide because they left no note or anything and it is a dangerous place to go when it is windly like it had been lately. Although there are a lot of people who are drawing conclusions that it was suicide and saying that the person involved suffered from depression.

Someone told me that depression can do that, particularly if its a periodic or high/low sort of depression resulting from chemical imbalances in the brain. It is something which has intrigued me in some ways since reading Primo Levi's books and reading about how Primo Levi died.

Apparently after surviving the holocaust, death camps and seeing many other people die he was living, apparently fine, then one day he took a revolver out of a drawer and shot himself dead. Does anyone else wonder about this kind of thing? Are the bio-medical explanations about changes in brain chemistry sufficient?

It seems to me that people can endure and survive some pretty awful things, in the abscence of any struggles, in just normal everyday life the threat of despair and death seems to rise.

I don't have statistics to hand but I do know that, contrary to what seems reasonable, incidences of mental illness go DOWN in war zones. I think when people are facing desperate situations they just concentrate on the essentials. But when something has happened to you like what Primo Levi went through, once you're actually out of that desperate situation, you still have all the post-traumatic stress and the various aftereffects (your own mental and physical scars, loss of friends and family, survivor guilt, etc) to deal with.

One of my favourite poets, Paul Celan, survived the camps but he lost his parents. He later struggled with depression and guilt and was brought down very badly by false accusations of plagiarism and that sort of thing. He was in his twenties when he survived the Holocaust, and you would think that by age 50 he would have been ok; but that was the age when he one day decided to take his own life.

Incidences of mental illness are also higher in the West. It suggests to me that we don't concentrate enough on the fundamentals of life. Depression is very complicated though. It usually seems to be a combination of external triggers, and a chemical predisposition to it. (I have some personal experience of what I guess is low-level depression, and it has definitely had external triggers as well as what I think is a slight inherited tendency.) I don't think that usually it's purely one or the other.
 

entropie

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Why did man invent religion ? The answer: to give their everyday life a meaning
 

miss fortune

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seems ok =/= ok... someone who is good at self monitoring can seem perfectly fine for years on end even if they aren't. Nobody wants to admit to weakness :)
 
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