211–220 of 226 posts
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Get back to us when you turn 80. :) People's experience change their perspective. What's important to you now will change. What you're able to appreciate changes.
I actually used to have that limit set to 60, but then when I thought about it, I probably would still have some physical strength at 60 and still wouldn't want to die. But at 80 I can't imagine myself being other than a total wreck.
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> Jumping out of the towers was a last-ditch attempt to survive I'm not sure how it's possible to come to that conclusion. (And to be clear: I wasn't originally trying to suggest that everyone that fell from the WTC made a decision to jump. I think it's probably fair to say almost everyone that fell was simply trying to get away from the smoke by leaning out of windows, etc. )
I'm not sure how it's not . Certain death in the smoke and fire versus a slim chance of survival if you jump, seems like the rational choice in horrible circumstances.
While interesting, this article seems to ignore the possibility that most people simply have a very strong desire to live. It assumes that if someone is suffering, and death would end that suffering, then suicide makes sense, and something weird must be going on to make people keep going. But this really doesn't make sense. The entire concept of suffering exists merely to keep us alive. We experience pain and despair…
In addition to a desire to live, not everyone views suffering as the worst possible thing. If I had to be in serious pain every day but could keep doing many things I would rather keep living with the pain. The loss in experience is worse than any level of pain. For the obvious counterpoint: I say that from experience not naivete. I've had a nerve in my hand accidentally sliced lengthwise (for a significant length) b…
My back gave out once and for about a week nearly every movement was excruciating. Getting out of bed was a 10 minute ordeal. Trying to sit down on the toilet or stand up was excruciating. Trying to sit down anywhere or lie back down on the a bed sent daggers of pain through my back. Turning in a chair or in the bed was just as bad. If a doctor had said "the rest of your life will be like this" I would have seriously considered ending it.
I've also had bad experience with bungled root canal and a resulting toothache that required 600-800mg of ibuprofen every 2.5 hours for 4 weeks while I waited for an appointment with the dentist to fix it. If the ibuprofen had not worked and had to live with that pain I would have unquestionably ended it.
Had a fingernail pulled out by a doctor once with no pain killers (well, he tried 3 injections of whatever over about 20 minutes but couldn't get the area around the nail to go numb). There's a reason denailing was used as torture. It causes extreme pain.
Whether others experience similar amounts of pain or I'm just a whimp I have no idea but of course I only have my experience to go on and I have a hard time believing if people experienced the same amount of pain every day they could truly live with it.
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> If I had to be in serious pain every day but could keep doing many things I would rather keep living with the pain. Scratch that: ~~~No, you (most probably) wouldn't.~~~ EDIT: this post is about severe chronic pain. Think cancer, or a serious toothache which lasts for years. And it's not meant to discuss the specific situation of the parent! I'm talking in general. I also agree that not 100% patients with severe ch…
> I also agree that not 100% patients with severe chronic pain will consider suicide, however the percentage of people considering suicide in such group is much higher than in the rest of the population. You may believe so right now, but that's totally irrelevant It doesn't matter if the "the percentage of people considering suicide in such group is much higher than in the rest of the population" if that percentage i…
> I've seen people with chronic pain (including long-term fatal cases) that are not just "despair and suffering". Including people who have dreams and follow them (creative work etc) despite the pain.
Without any kind of pain management? With severe, chronic pain?
Well, what I witnessed may have been outliers, but once you hear a person you care for begging to "please, just make it stop" every time she was able to actually articulate some words instead of screaming in pain... that leaves a mark.
What I'm saying is that there is - possibly very different for different people - a threshold of (pain-intensity times pain-time-length) above which everyone will be considering suicide. That the people you know are below such threshold doesn't mean it's not there. Having seen people way above it I really can't accept people telling me that they'd rather "live with the pain". What they mean is they'd rather live with bearable pain, which is OK; however, there is such a thing as an unbearable pain and I don't believe there is anyone who'd like to live with it.
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> that's how you explain things after the fact I agree, that's what I said "if what your parent comment suggests is true" In fact, said parent comment said "It might have been a mere speculation but it kind of makes sense" I agree with you that there is no predictive power in explaining things that way (indeed, what I said is speculation, hence why I worded it in the conditional), but that was not what I was respondi…
You seem to have fixated on one word in my comment and are arguing against creationism. I'm not saying that evolution makes no predictions, I'm saying that saying "oh yes, everything is the way it is because it confers an evolutionary advantage" is a mostly wrong, largely useless answer.
Well, I would argue that the vibe of your whole comment was coherent in that sense: you talked about what nature wanted, about design and about what kind of stuff would make sense while looking at it from a architect perspective.
It's a very odd way to look at it if you have no creationist conception of it all to be honest.
As for your point that not everything has an evolutionary advantage, I agree. Deafness and blindness exist after all.
But I don't really see your point as far as proposing hypotheses to account for certain prevalent traits, which, in my opinion, is what the original content was about (the grandmother hypothesis).
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> I also agree that not 100% patients with severe chronic pain will consider suicide, however the percentage of people considering suicide in such group is much higher than in the rest of the population. You may believe so right now, but that's totally irrelevant It doesn't matter if the "the percentage of people considering suicide in such group is much higher than in the rest of the population" if that percentage i…
We're talking about considering suicide! Going through with it is a completely different matter, due to very many factors, some outlined in the OP, another sometimes being physically unable to do it... > I've seen people with chronic pain (including long-term fatal cases) that are not just "despair and suffering". Including people who have dreams and follow them (creative work etc) despite the pain. Without any kind…
You seem to conflate chronic pain with "living in total agony", like some terminal patient.
People here are not talking about that. Maybe do some reading about what "chronic pain" means medically? It's not just a single thing like the one you described.
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> If I had to be in serious pain every day but could keep doing many things I would rather keep living with the pain. Scratch that: ~~~No, you (most probably) wouldn't.~~~ EDIT: this post is about severe chronic pain. Think cancer, or a serious toothache which lasts for years. And it's not meant to discuss the specific situation of the parent! I'm talking in general. I also agree that not 100% patients with severe ch…
I've torn the ligaments in my ankle and I've been in chronic pain every day for the last 12 years. Honestly, it doesn't bother me. (I mean, it hurts a lot and given the choice to be alive AND have it gone, I would prefer it gone, but, meh) It bothers people around me that I limp though. Oh well. I gave the example of acute pain because that was more challenging to me than the chronic.
I have those types of issues too. Most of us do once we get old enough.
They don't really bother me. Like yours, I can overcome them. Almost everyone does.
I suspect if either of us had trained all our lives to be, and wanted to be professional runners, it would bother us greatly.
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I made that argument in a prior thread and people were really, really against it. Despite the abundance of evidence, from that study and the Japanese one [1]. I think Zinc would make a good addition too re: suicide [2]. There are two other large scale studies like this for lithium, both confirming the findings. One from Greece [3] and one from Argentina (can't find it...) [1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19407…
It's fine if you want to medicate yourself with lithium, but it's not acceptable to forcibly medicate everyone else. The studies you linked to show an interesting correlation between lithium in water supplies and reduced suicide levels, but you can't judge the net benefit on a single metric alone. Lithium is not without side effects, and it's unreasonable to suggest that the vast majority of the population that is ot…
While interesting, this article seems to ignore the possibility that most people simply have a very strong desire to live. It assumes that if someone is suffering, and death would end that suffering, then suicide makes sense, and something weird must be going on to make people keep going. But this really doesn't make sense. The entire concept of suffering exists merely to keep us alive. We experience pain and despair…
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15 years ago I may have said something similar. I'm going to try to shed a little light on how chronic pain and disability is a bit different than acute. I've lived with chronic pain for over 10 years. As a registered person with disabilities, college resources helped me get by - but these did not exist in the real world for someone like me. It prevented me from working in my field of study and preference and severel…
You nailed it. Chronic pain can be really, really, debilitating. Think about what you are going to do in a few hours. Maybe you'll hop on public transit to meetup with someone. Or maybe bike somewhere. Or take a shower. Or make a sandwich. Or make love. Now imagine if you had a really bad joint (ankle, knee) or back. Suddenly, taking public transit has additional complexities, like does the station have a lot of stai…
In the US you only got the problem that the usually subscribed extended-release pain killer only works 2/3 of the period, but everywhere else this is a solved problem with its 4-6 hours cycle.