Suicide

Not sure what I’m hoping for, writing this. Just need to vent, I guess.

Basically, I’m just sick and tired of people in power going out of their way to cover up the fact that people like me exist. That is people who are unapologetically suicidal and can compellingly demonstrate that our desire to die is rational and justified.

Last year, my government ran yet another inquiry into a particular sub-area of the mental health crisis in our country. In my country, anyone can make a submission to most government inquiries, expressing their views, ect., and expect those submissions to be acknowledged by the government and published on the inquiry’s website.

Typically, the turn-around between making a submission and the government publishing that submission will be somewhere between a couple days and a week.

With this inquiry, I started writing what I anticipated being about a 10-12 page submission, but the sense of injustice just kept flowing like a ruptured dam and I ended up with a document containing almost 140 pages of testimony about the mental health system, suicide, and the problems of our culture with regard to suicide and despair.

I sent the document to the inquiry’s handlers, and for weeks I heard nothing in return. Not even a courtesy “We recieved your submission”. I had to chase them up for confirmation that the document was recieved, which they acknowledged. But it still didn’t appear on their website and they claimed this was because they were “very busy”. Meanwhile, submissions that were dated AFTER my own were being posted on their website.

Eventually, my submission was posted on the website, 4 months after I’d submitted it, and only a couple days before the inquiry officially concluded! However, according to an insider, the inquiry’s final report had actually been composed weeks prior, and was now just sitting in some politicians’ desk draws waiting for the official reporting date to roll around. Most likely, the senators running the inquiry never even looked at my submission; and I suspect that it’s publication was put off til the last possible minute so that outside watchers of the inquiry wouldn’t be aware of it’s existance.

Why? Because in several places I present arguments for why many peoples’ decisions to commit suicide are rational and justified with regard to their circumstances, and argue that “suicide prevention” in such situations must focus on changing the horrendous circumstances, and not the mind of the person enduring them. My submission doesn’t try to ‘talk anyone into committing suicide’, it tries to talk the powers that be into being respectful and enlightened towards the suicidal person’s thoughts, values, feelings and experience.

My stance is that we can’t have a proper and effective public discussion about suicide until the people who believe they are better off dead then alive are aloud to speak freely an unencumbered, so that they can clarify to everyone else why they have adopted that stance and what changes they need to see in order to find life the more preferable choice.

“Stop trying to fix the rational suicidal person and instead start fixing the lives that aren’t worth living” would be the takeaway message I’m trying to impart.

But, I suspect, the people braying over and over that “we need to talk about suicide”,  “we need to encourage the suicidal people to reach out and talk about what they are going through”, are loathe to admit that there are clearheaded, rational people out here who can effectively defend their preferance for death. As loudly as they might protest our suicidalness if they ever caught us standing on the ledge of a building, in reality, they don’t want us to exist.

A little over two weeks ago, I submitted an adapted version of my previous submission to a new government inquiry. So far, it’s shaping up as the same shit. Submissions that were submitted later then mine are appearing in droves on the inquiry’s website. Several of them are almost as big as mine, and a couple are even bigger. Many of them, like mine, are scathing of our mental health industry. The only thing I can see that sets mine apart is the fact that I unapologetically admit to being suicidal, that I maintain that it is a legitimate stance for me to be suicidal, and that I present compelling arguments for why suicidalness can often be rational and justified.

I sent an email to the inquiry staff asking if they’d gotten my submission and politely prompting them for some explaination about the delay. I sent it a day before the long weekend started. No response. I know they’ve been at work, because new submissions have been appearing on the website.

Even if it was published today, it would simply be a nondescript submission buried in the middle of all the others. It would appear in the middle of the list, and likely nobody would ever notice it was there. I’m sure that’s not by accident. They don’t want anyone to contemplate the contributions of the suicidal man, much less his legitimacy. They just want everyone to keep bullying him into “getting the ‘help’ he needs.”

It’s yet to be seen whether my submission will be published at all, let alone whether or not it will actually be considdered by the inquiry board.

TBH, I really don’t like my chances.

I’m tired of it. So very very tired.

As a citizen, I have a right to be heard by my government. Those are the explicit values of our western-type democracy, and the very justification for why they make these inquiries open to public submissions in the first place.

As a suicidal man, I have the right to state my position clearly and frankly in a public discussion on the topics of mental health & suicide.

I speak respectfully. I speak honestly. I speak frankly. I speak relevantly on matters that are not only deeply important to myself, but to the entire nation, and especially it’s suicidal citizens. Yet I am made invisable because the facts are that suicide can often be compellingly justified and I have the nerve to bring those facts to light.

Just stop with the goddamned hypocrasy! Stop weeping that you want us to stay with you here in life, then do everything in your power to make it as if we – along with everything we think, believe and cherish – don’t exists. If you don’t want me, and other rational suicidals around, then just let us go and stop bitching about the fact that we kill ourselves.

— End Rant (for now) —