American veterans: 21 suicides per day

Penny Starr reports in Breitbart,

As Americans celebrate Veterans Day, one man who served his country and now advocates for fellow men and women who serve or have served in the military said the country needs to come together to stem the suicide epidemic that leads to 21 veterans taking their own lives every day.

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Curiosity, creativity, joy, and darkness

At The Federalist, Caroline D'Agati writes about the suicides of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade.

...We loved these people because they helped us see something in the world that brightened the monotony or sadness of our lives. Their curiosity, creativity, and joy gave us a reason to have some, too.

To take their own lives was a repudiation of the beauty and joy that they brought to us. They gave us something marvelous then took it back in the most devastating way.

...As Kate, Anthony, Robin, and so many other entertainers show, even giving joy to others, in the end, is not enough. So in the end, why bother? How can we not be defeated when we set our eyes on the brokenness of this world? The answer: to fix our eyes on another world. The writer C.S. Lewis famously said that, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” If we believe this life is all there is, the darkness will blind us to the majesty and beauty of life.

Suicide is the tragic, but reasonable response to being confronted by life’s reality with no salve of deeper meaning to bandage the wound. This is why a life without God, no matter how grand, will always leave our hearts unfulfilled.

So please, take medication. Talk to your family. Go get treatment. Your life is precious to God and the people around you. It is worth fighting for. But no matter what help those things bring, our hearts only find true peace when they live for the one who created them. I wish my friends Kate and Anthony had felt that peace.

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Suicide by virtue-signalling

On depression, joy, life, and death

After Robin Williams committed suicide, The Academy of Motion Pictures tweeted this:



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The Academy ✔ @TheAcademy
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Genie, you're free.
6:56 PM - 11 Aug 2014

Matt Walsh responds:

Free? I’ve seen a lot of this kind of rhetoric. Robin Williams is “in a better place,” he is “free,” he is “at peace,” he is “smiling down upon us,” he’s “happy.”

This all might seem pleasant enough, but have we stopped to think how it looks and sounds to those who may be contemplating this heinous deed themselves? Can we tell our friend to step away from the ledge after we just spoke so glowingly of Robin Williams’ newfound “peace” and “freedom”? This is too important a subject to be careless about. We want to say nice things, I realize, but it isn’t nice to lie about suicide.

It is not freeing. In suicide you obliterate yourself and shackle your loved ones with guilt and grief. There is no freedom in it. There is no peace. How can I free myself by attempting to annihilate myself? How can I free something by destroying it?

First, suicide does not claim anyone against their will. No matter how depressed you are, you never have to make that choice. That choice. Whether you call depression a disease or not, please don’t make the mistake of saying that someone who commits suicide “died from depression.” No, he died from his choice. He died by his own hand. Depression will not appear on the autopsy report, because it can’t kill you on its own. It needs you to pull the trigger, take the pills, or hang the rope. To act like death by suicide is exactly analogous to death by malaria or heart failure is to steal hope from the suicidal person. We think we are comforting him, but in fact we are convincing him that he is powerless. We are giving him a way out, an excuse. Sometimes that’s all he needs — the last straw.

Second, we can debate medication dosages and psychotherapy treatments, but, in the end, joy is the only thing that defeats depression. No depressed person in the history of the world has ever been in the depths of despair and at the heights of joy at the same time. The two cannot coexist. Joy is light, depression is darkness. When we are depressed, we have trouble seeing joy, or feeling it, or feeling worthy of it. I know that in my worst times, at my lowest points, it’s not that I don’t see the joy in creation, it’s just that I think myself too awful and sinful a man to share in it.

So this, for me, is always the most essential moral at the end of these kinds of sad, terrible stories: we are all meant for joy. We are all meant for love. We are all meant for life. And as long as we can still draw breath, there is joy and love to be found here.

Joy and love. There might not be much else for us on this Earth, but these are the only two things that matter anyway. These are the forces that brought the whole universe into being, and these are the forces that sustain it, and us, and all life.

Life. Life exists, and we are made to live it.

To quote Robin Williams playing a character quoting Walt Whitman:

“What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here — that life exists.”

If you are thinking about suicide, don’t keep it inside. Tell someone.

Never give up the fight.

There is always hope.

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