30-11-11

Suicide doesn't make any sense. People who consider suicide do so only because they're thinking about it in the wrong way.

Depressed people want their suffering to end. Suicide makes sense as a solution because suicide will end their suffering. But depressed people don't really want their suffering to end. What they really want is for their unhappiness to change into happiness.

Imagine that you're at school. You don't want to get bad grades, so to make sure of this, you drop out. You definitely won't get bad grades if you get no grades at all.

It does technically solve the problem, but only because the problem was ill-defined. It wasn't that you didn't want to get bad grades: it was really that you wanted to get good grades. Suddenly, it becomes clear that dropping out of school was not a solution at all. Though it did ensure that you didn't get bad grades, it also prevented you from getting good grades, which is what you really wanted.

To say that depressed people want their suffering to end is wrong. What they really want is for their unhappiness to turn into happiness. When you think about it this way, you realize that suicide will not help them get what they want at all. They misunderstand their own problem. The language itself is the source of the confusion.