What I have learned in the past year - Part 3

I used to think that non-terminally-ill individuals, who died of suicide, must have been very selfish because they ignored the consequences of their actions on their loved ones: parents, children, siblings, grandparents, and the rest of their extended family and friends. I also thought of them as cowards for choosing death over confronting the challenges in their lives and trying to overcome them. 

It took the loss of my own beautiful daughter to suicide to realize how wrong I was. Shahdi was neither selfish, nor a coward. She had not given up on life and cared deeply for her family and friends, however, an anxiety attack with its feelings of pain, anguish, misery, panic, and fright, which had overwhelmed her on that doomed afternoon, drove her to making a fatal impulsive decision to end her life in order to be free of the pain and all negative emotions and thoughts. I have no doubt that if she could have calmed herself down, she would have been with us today. I am certain that she did not truly wish to cause any grief on us or her friends. But, her mind played a nasty trick on her which made her act impulsively and irrationally. 

Since Shahdi's death, I have developed a much better understanding of the reasons which may drive a person to consider suicide to end his/her life. In fact, I now believe people who have died of suicide were definitely very courageous individuals. They have to be extremely brave to go through with their decision. In Shahdi's case, I cannot imagine the feelings that were going through her mind before she jumped off the ottoman to suspend herself from the railing in the hallway. With her fatal action, she had represented both colossal misery and extreme courage at the same time. Only an extremely brave person could have taken the last step to jump off the ottoman. And, Shahdi was always fearless.

I no longer judge people who die of suicide. In fact, when I hear such news, I immediately feel enormous sadness and pain. I think of how terrible they must have felt right before committing this act. How sad, desperate, miserable, helpless and lonely they must have felt. It breaks my heart to realize how fragile the state of human mind is and how our brain sometimes makes us utterly illogical by doing harmful things to ourselves. 

I now have a much better understanding of suicide but I still find suicide totally unnecessary, mainly in case of young people. To be in such degree of misery and pain so early in their lives to give up on life, is just beyond my comprehension. To give up hope and to let doom and gloom take over their mind and cloud their judgment, is simply beyond devastating. 

The question is: how can we prevent suicides?  

I suppose if we had concrete answers, I would not be writing this piece because my Shahdi would have been alive and well.