An Open Window
All I had to do was jump, so I did.
TW: Suicidal ideation
Answering the question have you thought about committing suicide is always tricky for me to answer. The answer is always “well, not really.” I have never arrived at the point of planning my suicide. But on down days while driving my car, I’ve thought about how easy it would be to cross the center line in front of the oncoming tractor-trailer. To end it all, be done with it. Sometimes I get tired of the struggle. But then I think about all the things I still want to do and see. There is still a lot of life to live. Now’s not the time to throw in the towel or check out.
In those times, I’ve wondered how depressed someone must be to start planning, and to execute their suicide. In Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Talking to Strangers, he writes about the Coupling Theory of Suicide. Simply put, people who commit suicide have a preferred method of taking their own life. Suppose unrelated circumstances or obstacles render their preferred method inaccessible. In that case, there is a far greater chance that the suicide will not take place.
Say, for instance, your city has a high enough bridge that several people have already jumped to their death. The consensus would be if your city’s engineers had a fence installed to block people from jumping, then…
