Why Do Men Choose Suicide? It’s Time We Talk About Suicide.

Why Do Men Choose Suicide? It’s Time We Talk About Suicide

Why Do Men Choose Suicide? Most of us have experienced the challenges of the contraction of our perception from time to time. Think about the time when you got cut off in traffic. Maybe you felt your heart rate starts to quicken, and your face flush when it happens. In order to avoid a collision, you jammed your brakes. When you did you focused in, on that one license plate as it sped by. Maybe the only thing to get through your mind at that time was how creative you could be in the words you were about to hurl out at the guy. eventually your perception would’ve returned to normal. You eventually would have even forgotten about it. But imagine if you didn’t.

Imagine you stayed there, stuck there in that dark narrow place. That’s what it can be like to live with a mental illness. But most people hide and pretend to be normal. They become so normal that a few years later, after not getting the help that they so clearly need, most people would just give up and try to hurt themselves.

People seem plenty eager to talk about mental illness and suicide just as long as it is behind closed doors and in hushed voices. This is the part that we are doing differently with you today by talking about this topic as candidly as possible, hoping to open closed doors. And this is how we do it: we remember.

When you’re in a dark place, and your perception is collapsing, some rough through will keep coming back to you again and again. Before attempting anything stupid you ask yourself, ‘should I just hang for one more day?’. That’s a phrase people always seem to ask themselves when they are suicidal. It’s an instinctual word of hope. But for what? To be that crazy person again? You might also think that you’ve already held on for this long and things haven’t gotten any better. Why should you keep trying what hasn’t been working?

You’re not crazy to think of any of this. Your perception was collapsing. It was squeezing out that instinctual hope that everybody has inside of them. Then you have a choice to make, and you feel as if you have the utmost power in that specific moment. When you’re living in a hurricane all the time that’s an unfamiliar but satisfying feeling.   To feel like you have control over your life.

Can suicide be considered a choice even if it’s the only available choice? We ask ourselves, ‘how can it be the only choice? ‘or ‘how can it even be an irrational choice? Hopefully, we wonder and ask ourselves how we can help. Well, we can start to help by better appreciating that our mental health is contingent on the state and flexibility of our perceptions. Whether we have a mental illness or not, how expanded or how contracted out perception becomes impacts the choices that we make.

When we encounter the suicide of someone else, we try to rationalize it. That’s because we are uncomfortable with feeling helpless and with not understanding. But since we know that our perceptions are continuously created and informed by our biology, our psychology, and our society, we have many entry points for potentially helping and better understanding suicide.

One way we can help is to stop saying that people commit’ suicide. People commit murder, people commit theft, but they never commit suicide. This is because suicide is a public health concern, not a criminal one. 90% of people who die by suicide have a diagnosable and treatable mental illness at the time of their death. We know that with medications, with psychotherapy, these treatments work. So, we need to make these treatments more available and informed way, to everybody. We all must be a part of this change. Whether we have a mental illness or not, we should start by taking charge of our mental health and then extending a hand to those in need.