I sometimes wonder if the sexual revolution eliminated sex as a taboo, and therefore the younger generation had to find a new way to rebel, to be shocking to the older generation. Could suicide be the new taboo that must be toyed with? Or was it something I'd never really known much about?
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I started asking people in my peer group whether they had ever wanted to commit suicide, and many of them said, "Well, yes, I thought about it." One day I spoke in a meeting of my Alcoholics Anonymous group, and I talked about how upset I was about the idea of suicide. In the past, whenever anyone in the group had mentioned suicide, I had tuned them outit was just not acceptable. But that day I heard many stories from people who'd once felt suicidal. I discovered it was a part of many people's lives. I concluded that I had been too repressed by religion to even consider suicide. Perhaps thinking about suicide was a fairly normal part of coming to terms with emotional pain. When a person is in pain, working through it includes the choice of feeling it or not, the decision of living through it or not. In most cases, people choose to live.
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In the process of talking with people, a friend who had been depressed and suicidal gave me a book that has become my favorite: Suicide: The
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