Our junior year of high school, one of my best friends tried to commit suicide. She found out her father had been cheating on her mom and her mom was in some trouble with the law. She also had really low self esteem. She took 100+ of two different kinds of pills and spent about 2 weeks in the hospital/psych ward. Even though I was one of her her best friends, for whatever reason, I was the person she talked to about it the least. The only time she directly spoke to me about it was in our senior year when a freshman who was going to our school was walking to school and got hit by a car and killed...on her fourth day of high school. Neither of us knew the girl, but the sadness surrounding her death haunted our school for a really long time. Aside from a boy who died of cancer our freshman year, this one of the first losses we had experienced of a young person in our school. The day that she died, I remember my best friend telling me that after looking around at all the people who were so sad about this girl's death, that she was really glad that her suicide attempt had failed because she wouldn't want to put any of us through that. Today she has so much more confidence in herself and the people she loves and I know she would never even come closing to trying again.
With all that being said, I'm not 100% sure about how I feel about it because at times I do feel like it's an easy way out, a weakness, and mostly selfish. My cousin, who I am incredibly close with, has cerebral palsy. She's bound to a wheel chair for the rest of her life (unless medical miracles occur), she can't feed herself, still wears diapers, sometimes people have a hard time understanding her, she'll never have children, probably won't get married, even though she's 20 years old, she still relies on adults, she has had multiple surgies to put metal rods in her arms and legs, and she doesn't have as long of an expected life span as a normal 20 year old. She also has to be one of the strongest , most positive people and I know. She never complains, laughs at everything, makes everyone laugh, laughs it off when people don't understand her, rarely gets frustrated, and cares more about making others happy than she does about doing things for herself (she still believes in Santa but cares more about giving others their presents on Christmas). And so when I hear of people who seem to have minor problems compared to what she has to deal with the for the rest of her life, sometime I does see their depression to the extent of suicide as a weakness.
BUT, other times, I try and understand that some people just get to a point where they're so depressed that they lose a sense of rationality that would otherwise tell them that things aren't always going to be so bad. Some people truly feel they have no one to turn too, even if they do but don't realize it, and I know that that's not something I could possibly understand unless I was in the situation myself. In that sense, I don't see it as a weakness.
Sooo yea, my thoughts on this subject waver.
