Do you now or have you felt suicidal before?

I spent a long time feeling suicidal, starting at a very young age. A family member sexually abused me from throughout my childhood, and the first time I can remember wishing I were dead I was only about 5 years old. Chronic depression and massive anxiety were both huge problems for me, and suicidal thoughts were a near-constant companion for way too long. I’m happy to say that therapy, medication, and resolving some family issues have led me to a much better place in my life. I’ve been free of such thoughts for many years now.

I urge anyone who is feeling this way to get help. And to remember that things get better.

Yes. Many times. I had attempted to at least four times when I was younger and was saved by the stomach pumping thing. In later life it feels different like a compulsion, it overwhelms me at times. Strange thing is most the time, I really want to live. I don’t understand it. Before when I did it felt more like a cry for help. Now as I say it feels like a compulsion.

I was severely depressed for a year. Where I cut off all contact from people and never went out. They say that is a suicide of sorts.

What made or makes me feel that way? I’m bipolar so I think that is what we often do. According to the stats. I am also rapid cycler which is said to be even higher in statistics regards suicides. As I write this, I feel ashamed. Life is so precious. There is so much to live for. It just all gets too much at times.

Yes, I have felt suicidal before and yes I have tried many times. I haven’t been sectioned yet, surprisingly. I do often have thoughts of “oh nobody wants me here, I’m useless” and then I spiral downwards to the point where I start thinking of how I can go about doing it. As some people already know, I have Borderline Personality Disorder and the erratic mood swings and abandonment issues I have are difficult to deal with at times.

Trigger warning for the following paragraph! The last time I tried to commit suicide, I grabbed a blade out of a razor and cut across my throat and I needed 10 stitches. The ER docs said I was very lucky to be alive. If I had carried on, I probably wouldn’t be alive today.

Also, I have lost someone close to me to suicide. It often leaves people wondering why that person didn’t say anything, why they didn’t just come round for a chat or a rant or a cry. It is difficult to deal with from both ends of the spectrum.

@Shippy The strange thing is, I really want to live, too. It’s just in that moment, I feel everybody would be better off if I was dead. I don’t understand it, either.

I was going to say something very similar to @Shippy, in that when I have been suicidal, it wasn’t so much a desire to die… as it was a lack of will to live. I do liken it almost to a compulsion and when it comes over me I can’t shake it. Logically, I know it isn’t a solution. But when I get to that point it isn’t really about logic, it’s more like my body/brain crying out to make the pain stop. To me it’s like carrying a very heavy object, if you carry it long enough, naturally the desire to put it down will grow. If you can’t set it down, your body starts doing all sorts of things, it will grow weaker, more tired, your arms may give out, you might drop it even without consciously choosing to do so. That is what being suicidal feels like to me. I don’t consciously want to die, it’s more like I grow too fatigued to carry the emotional weight anymore and my brain starts trying to find ways out of it.

I have lost three people to suicide. I have never attempted it, although I have been suicidal too many times in my own life, I do view it as a symptom rather than a solution. When it gets that bad I seek help anywhere that I can get it.

Yes, yes sir.
I can remember not wanting to exist (but not knowing the word for suicide or that it was a thing people did) when I was as little as 4 or 5.
Then, I was pretty much constantly depressed and very frequently suicidal between the ages of about 13 and 21. Being transsexual and not even knowing a word for it, that it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you, or that there are ways to handle it, blows. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t even fathom living much past the age of 20. I never had a plan to kill myself in high school or college, but I came close a few years ago. Coming out by myself in a new town when I started grad school, dealing with family bullshit, and having the medical aspects of my transition delayed by a horrible and predatory therapist, also really blew.
The last time I was deeply suicidal was during Thanksgiving break. It was my first time spending that alone, and all my friends were out of town. It was the first time I called a suicide hotline (The Trevor Lifeline). Those wonderful volunteers helped me a lot.
I am doing much better than I have ever done. I am grateful to be where I am, and I know I have so much to live for. I still get compulsions from time to time, but it is much easier to talk myself down now.

Of course. I am filled with self-hatred and loathing. Several times I have considered it.
During one very bad part of my life, I went to the gun range with a couple of friends from work, who were trying to get me interested in such things. After an hour of shooting, then handing over the weapon, I realized I had not once considered quickly putting it to my head and finishing it. The anti-depressants apparently were finally working.

One fifth of people with bipolar disorder die of suicide. Every single person I know with bipolar has thought of suicide and many have tried. I’ve never actually tried, but I have gotten to the planning stage.

Like most folks who think of it, I never wanted to die, either. I love life. I want to know what is going to happen next. Honestly, I can’t stand the idea of dying. I never want to die. So why did I want to die?

@DigitalBlue said it best. I loved that metaphor about carrying things for so long you just can’t carry them any more.

Depression is the worst thing I have ever experienced. I would rather be tortured for a week or a month than experience depression for that long. I experienced it for a year or more. It’s hard to put beginning and ending dates on that. The worst, though, went for around a year.

I think that we feel this horrible thing—for me, it is like a black hole in my stomach; vast and endless and unfillable, no matter how much love I try to put in it—and at a certain point it becomes clear that it will never go away, and from then on it’s just an issue of how much longer we can bear it before we put an end to it the only way we know how.

So even though life is the best and only thing I have. If I have to live depressed, I can’t do it for all that long.

My shrink kept saying that I should put off decisions for three months. Don’t divorce. Don’t quit your job. Don’t leave your family. Don’t kill yourself. Wait three months. Give the meds a chance. I wanted to believe him so badly that I did wait three months, and when that wasn’t enough, three more months, and then three more months.

That was how long it took before the meds and therapy started making enough of a difference I could see that maybe happiness would be possible some time in the future. And I still have my wife, job, family and life. I shake my head in disbelief now. I’m so lucky. I really should be dead. A weird form of survivor’s guilt.

Thinking of suicide can bring those feelings back. It starts to call to me. Thinking it could just be over. I would know nothing. Wouldn’t even know I was dead.

But then there are my kids and my wife. Everyone says you can’t to that to them. It really messes them up. My wife already lost one lover to suicide. He was schizophrenic. He flew off a building. I probably should have been warned by that when she turned out to love me. That’s how I would go, I think, if I do ever make that choice. One last solo flight head first into the concrete.

But you can’t get me if you can’t catch me. I think these things to innoculate myself. I need to prepare because they will come back, one day, and I need to be ready to feel the feelings, but not take those last steps. I didn’t take them before and the window on the 8th floor—the only one in the building that opens—is always there, three feet from my desk.

Reminds me of the e-trade baby. “A man and his thoughts.” Amazing things can happen in life. Depression is a killer. It takes over your brain and makes you see things in a molassesey fog. Literally, my head hurts, after writing this. My eyes don’t want to stay open. The world is clouding over. Just from thinking these thoughts.

I cope by letting them go. Being amused at myself. It’s a kind of joke that @Self_Consuming_Cannibal played on me by asking a question I can’t resist. And I really can’t resist any question about suicide. But I don’t have to let them get me. La-di-da.

I used to be very suicidal. When my grandad (who was literally my best friend) died very suddenly just months after my grandmother was diagnosed with terminal cancer (also out of the blue), I just wanted my life to end too. It may sound strange, but I felt like without those two important people, my life had no purpose or stability. It sounds cliche, but I really was in a ‘very dark place’. I often deeply considered throwing myself in front of a train, as I knew that that was a guaranteed way to die. But I also wanted to slit my throat or wrists, so that somebody could at least find me and I could have a proper burial with my body (mostly) in tact. However, I knew that I couldn’t do it while my grandmother lay dying. It just didn’t seem morally right, for me to take my own life while somebody else with such vigour and zest for life had no choice but to die. Now, I have renewed hope in life. From time to time there are moments where I deeply and genuinely wish that I had never been born, but I don’t think I will ever again want to end my life.

When I was seven or eight my sister took a bunch of pills and I was the only one there.

I decided then I was never going to commit suicide but I struggled with chronic depression. The thing I clung to was pride. That got me through my childhood.

But twice as an adult I have come pretty darn close. The first time I didn’t have any one to turn to. I wasn’t sleeping and being alone was the worst thing for me. I could act as long as I needed to act. That need drove me toward drug users that were up all night, but since I refused to use they were all very paranoid of me. It culminated in a very dramatic night where I believed it was very lucky of me not to be dead.

The second time was very different. It was scary how normal/cheerful I could act whilst running plausible methods through my mind. A friend of mine stepped up and noticed the second time. He never said how.

Ultimately I am a survivor. The instinct runs too strong in me. But should things significantly change I am pretty sure how I would do it.

Except for those long-ago teenage angst-y moments when suicide seemed like a way to get back at everybody whom I felt had wronged me, I don’t recall ever seriously considering it. As an adult, like everybody, I’ve gone through awful periods of illness or depression when I felt hopeless, but these were usually short-lived; and even then, suicide just never occurred to me as an option. I do wonder as I get older how I’d feel about suicide or euthanasia if my health went completely south.