Discussion
  • Read More
    Yoga Nerd, Maybe DeadTracy Moore
    7/30/15 2:24pm

    Sample comment so far:

    I DIDN’T READ THIS ARTICLE YET BUT I AM OUTRAGED, OUTRAGED THAT TRACY MOORE IS CALLING FOR ALL UGLY PEOPLE TO KILL THEMSELVES!!!!!!!

    Reply
    <
    • Read More
      Falcon Depth BrunchYoga Nerd, Maybe Dead
      7/30/15 2:27pm

      This is my problem with people as a whole. I’M OUTRAGED AND I HAVE NO IDEA WHY BECAUSE I DID NOT READ THE ARTICLE BUT HERE I SHARED THIS TO FACEBOOK SO YOU CAN YELL TOO!!

      Reply
      <
    • Read More
      FrolickingGiantYoga Nerd, Maybe Dead
      7/30/15 2:28pm

      Thanks......

      Reply
      <
  • Read More
    FrolickingGiantTracy Moore
    7/30/15 2:18pm

    “Suicide is tragic enough, but it’s particularly bewildering when young people who appear to have it all take their own lives.”

    No, it isn’t really. I find this to be a really strange thing to say. Mental illness doesn’t make “sense” sometimes and it doesn’t choose to only strike pimply losers who live in their parents basements....

    Reply
    <
    • Read More
      Jolly Old St NicotineFrolickingGiant
      7/30/15 2:21pm

      AMEN - I came here to say this as well. And it’s just plain rude to say ANY person’s tragedy is so much worse because they were young.

      Reply
      <
    • Read More
      EleanorBoozaveltFrolickingGiant
      7/30/15 2:25pm

      I totally agree with you. To me they are saying- People who can’t understand suicide doubly can’t understand when it’s someone they deem successful or together. I don’t think many people can understand what mental illness feels like unless they also suffer.

      Reply
      <
  • Read More
    deerlady83Tracy Moore
    7/30/15 2:19pm

    One of the most important things is learning how to handle failure. For people who rarely experience it, it can be quite devastating. One of my cousins was considered the golden child and expected to do well. He failed in college because he never learned how to struggle. He sailed through school making him think it would be the same in college. He did graduate but it took him longer.

    Reply
    <
    • Read More
      Tzadeerlady83
      7/30/15 2:32pm

      Agreed. The only academic area I really struggle in is foreign languages, but I could still eke out Cs. To most people, that’s great, for your bad subject to still be one you pass with average grades. But to me it was a crushing failure for a long time.

      I am utterly terrified of failure because it doesn’t happen often so I’m not used to it and worried just what will happen when it does. You grow up hearing all these stories of people who made one bad decision and fucked up their life epically and I am so scared of that happening to me even though logically it won’t.

      Reply
      <
    • Read More
      deerlady83Tza
      7/30/15 2:50pm

      Being afraid of failing can be worst than actually failing.

      Reply
      <
  • Read More
    TayTayTrutherTracy Moore
    7/30/15 2:13pm

    I refuse to read this post because COOOMMMMEEE OOONN!

    Like suicide is rational or warranted if you’re an ugly loser?

    Reply
    <
    • Read More
      Codename_SailorVTayTayTruther
      7/30/15 2:20pm

      Agreed. Depression is an illness, and illnesses don’t discriminate for class, education, social success or beauty.

      Reply
      <
    • Read More
      TayTayTrutherCodename_SailorV
      7/30/15 2:21pm

      Exactly. It just seems we are supposed to CARE more about the ones who “had so much going for them.”

      Reply
      <
  • Read More
    SprocheteTracy Moore
    7/30/15 2:26pm

    When I was an ugly, fat child with braces and glasses it never occurred to me that attractive or even average people could have problems. Here I was a virtual monster, how on earth could a pretty child be unhappy about anything? It took me until my late teens to figure out we all have issues, and that some pretty, popular kids had worse lives, worse mental problems than monstrous me could ever imagine. And along the way I figured out I wasn’t the monster I thought I was.

    Sometime’s it’s obvious that a person is going through tough times. An obvious shift in habits, dress, grooming/hygiene, drug/alcohol use can all be telltale signs that a friend or loved one needs help. But sometimes the troubled person is an expert at maintaining a facade of happy, cheerful, well-adjusted and popular.

    Please, if you need help:

    United States:1 (800) 273-8255
    National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
    Hours: 24 hours, 7 days a week
    Languages: English, Spanish
    Website: www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org

    Reply
    <
    • Read More
      giddyponySprochete
      7/30/15 4:13pm

      THANK YOU. this is actually what this article was missing. And if you are gender non-conforming, queer whatever http://www.thetrevorproject.org/

      Reply
      <
    • Read More
      digbetteSprochete
      7/31/15 5:48am

      They should really have this information with any mention of suicide and bringing that up was meant to be my first comment. It’s really irresponsible to discuss suicide in this abstracted way without recognising that people who are suicidal may well be triggered, especially in an article with this GOD AwFUL headline.

      Reply
      <
  • Read More
    LynxTracy Moore
    7/30/15 2:32pm

    I find that people who are talented/pretty/smart are more obssessed with small failures. Like, I have a friend who is goregous, but she also worries about how she looks *all* the time. My friend got a B for the first time in college and she felt like the world was over.

    It’s like that study about 2nd place winners—-they found that Bronze winners were happy that they place at all whereas the Silver winners were more upset because they missed out on the gold by .001 point/length etc.

    I think too that being a perfectionist robs you from enjoying your victories as well, so even when you are winning, you still feel like a failure.

    Reply
    <
    • Read More
      adultosaur married anna on the astral planeLynx
      7/30/15 3:02pm

      I think too that being a perfectionist robs you from enjoying your victories as well, so even when you are winning, you still feel like a failure.

      this. it can also make you super afraid to try, or makes you sabotage yourself in order to be in control of the failure.

      Reply
      <
    • Read More
      goddessoftransitoryadultosaur married anna on the astral plane
      7/30/15 3:37pm

      It can definitely rob you of feeling pleasure in trying. I remember feeling relief when I didn’t get past certain levels in something I truly wanted to do; I felt saved from having the other shoe drop eventually and my loserness revealed to the world.

      Reply
      <
  • Read More
    midnightstreetridesagainTracy Moore
    7/30/15 2:30pm

    I feel compelled to share this bit of wisdom by David Foster Wallace everywhere I read anything about suicide in the hopes that it can help people - even one person - understand. (Kinja screwed up the formatting and won’t let me change it, but I feel like it’s kind of appropriate for the message.)

    ”The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

    Reply
    <
    • Read More
      robotbeepbeepmidnightstreetridesagain
      7/30/15 3:21pm

      wow thats a way better way o putting what i was trying to say

      Reply
      <
    • Read More
      robotisattvamidnightstreetridesagain
      7/30/15 3:49pm

      Yes. A million times.

      People don’t commit suicide because they want to die. They commit suicide because they want to stop hurting.

      Reply
      <
  • Read More
    MayotonillaTracy Moore
    7/30/15 2:15pm

    Because we provide them with the means to do it. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/hea...

    Reply
    <
    • Read More
      IlikefactsMayotonilla
      7/30/15 2:24pm

      I am sorry but that plays very little part in this. Japan has some of the highest suicide rates in the world and they don’t have access to any guns at all.

      American gun laws need to change, but people don’t commit suicide just because they have a gun laying around.

      Reply
      <
    • Read More
      titania126Mayotonilla
      7/30/15 2:32pm

      Specifically in the case of high-achieving girls girls like these, rates of suicide by gun are extremely low. Men tend to choose that option far more than women do. I’m as unhappy with American gun policy as you are, but let’s not confuse the issue.

      http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind...

      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2160418...

      Reply
      <
  • Read More
    goddessoftransitoryTracy Moore
    7/30/15 2:28pm

    I remember back in ancient times when Party of Five was on the air, and they did an episode where Neve Campbell’s character, who was graduating from high school, had a friend who killed herself. Everyone was horribly shocked and bewildered, not the least because the friend had just gotten early acceptance to Harvard. She had worked hard for it and seemed to want it badly.

    Later in the show Neve goes to her friend’s house, where the mother is in numb, dumb, pain, wandering her daughter’s room, and asks Neve the inevitable question; why do you think she did it? They find the friend’s diary and read the final entry, which goes something like: The Harvard catalog came today. All the kids in the pictures look so happy. I’ll never be like them.

    I never forgot that, because it was the first time I’d seen high achievement called out on a TV show. I totally got where the friend character was coming from—how it had taken every ounce of her strength and determination to achieve what she “should”, and she felt she simply had nothing left to keep “faking” for four more years. The future loomed above her, unconquerable, ready to betray her real, stumbling self at any moment.

    Reply
    <
    • Read More
      SurprisingSuprisinggoddessoftransitory
      7/30/15 2:49pm

      I remember that too! There was also a tv movie around that time period where Peter Facinelli played a popular/football player/high school student that killed himself.

      Reply
      <
    • Read More
      Deering24goddessoftransitory
      7/31/15 2:19am

      Dead on. “Never good enough,” is depression’s insidious lying motto. Just as “There must be _more_ money!!” is financial insecurity’s lie.

      Reply
      <
  • Read More
    PhyllisNeflerTracy Moore
    7/30/15 2:31pm

    The answer is: because depression is a mental disorder that doesn’t give a fuck how “worthy” you seem to other people.

    Reply
    <
    • Read More
      wellingtonbearPhyllisNefler
      7/30/15 2:49pm

      While everyone bitches about people’s “outrage” in the comment thread, you completely nailed the dangers of forming our thoughts on depression/mental illness into headlines like the one above. Thank you.

      Reply
      <