Discussing your suicidal thoughts online bespeaks a personal need for guidance that cannot be satisfied online. I suggest that either you can change the content of your internal monologue by act of will -- people do it, I've done it myself, though it requires self-reliance and sustained effort -- or else your very next step should be to make contact with a trusted counselor of some kind.

A trained mental-health professional, especially, will ask you about suicidal thoughts very early in your exchanges -- and if you really report eleven years' worth, well, you won't have to do anything else to justify your need for his or her services. You'll be penciled in as a high priority, right away. Which is as it should be.

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Also, you'll note that wasn't the only possible approach I mentioned.

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And one other thing: The process of altering one's internal monologue is definitely not "simple." Where do you get that idea from?

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Natali

a) Call hotline now. If you get someone you don't click with try again. [suicidehotlines.com]

b) If you can, call a friend or family and be honest. Don't be alone and don't feel like an imposition.

c) Probably a lot of truth to the saying that depression is anger turned inwards. Get it out. Scream, yell, punch, and most important, get some exercise every day. If you are disabled and can't do this, or even if you're not,

d) Get started on antidepressants or new antidepressants.

Don't think about it, don't debate the merits. Just do it.

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Seconded, on personal experience.

I worked on some clinical trials based on this notion, and some of the results observed were just astounding, especially considering what a simple approach it is.

I haven't kept up with the literature since, but my guess is that this option, when feasible, nearly always deserves strong consideration.

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In the long, large scheme of things, life is so short. Stick it out. Death will be here before you know it. If you've got an incurable disease then yes, go—with my sympathies. But if it's anything else, well, try to stick around for a while. See your shrink, take your meds, live your life, and before you know it, it'll all be over. (Too soon for many of us, alas, too soon.)

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While I still suspect that self-administering a firearm blast unnecessarily burdens the people you're leaving behind, otherwise he seemed to have thought it through in a way that I couldn't think of a way to critique. He was a dope fiend whose best work was decades behind him and whose body was rapidly giving out; as a result, very few of the pleasures that were once so central to his existence were available to him anymore. He tried to hang on and make his new, reduced existence work for quite a while, but eventually just gave up because he couldn't bear the thought of becoming an even emptier shell of what he once was. My lifestyle is nothing like HST's ever was, but I figure I could kind of see it from his perspective anyway.

Then Christopher Buckley was on Charlie Rose just this past week, and a clip was shown of WFB, on Rose's program, asserting that he was getting pretty tired of life and was making peace with the idea that it would soon be over.

Anyway, I can kind of see what you're saying. There can be positive reasons for taking one's own life, no doubt about it, and treating the option like it's absolutely unmentionable helps no one, I think. Is that kind of what you're getting at?

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Property records and construction photos:

[eyeball-series.org]

I can't see a front door on that house. I guess it makes sense for him to go in and out through an underground tunnel.

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Also: Thanks so much for returning your screen name to its original succinctness. It was getting nearly impossible to read the replies to you!

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