Words to Ponder

Words to Ponder

For many survivors, healing begins when they find a comforting shoulder or a safe place to talk about their complicated and conflicting reactions to their loved one’s suicide. ~Carla Fine

Suicide is a particularly awful way to die; the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense, and unpalliated.

~Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison

Death by suicide is usually considered a newsworthy event. Perhaps it is because the person who chooses to respond to live’s vicissitudes in this way challenges our usual attitudes toward life.
~Karen Dunne-Maxim

The public nature of suicide results in unsolicited commentary and instant analysis, infringing on a survivor’s intimate pain and introspection.
~Carla Fine

Suicide sensitizes all of us to the extreme precariousness and precautious ness of life, urging us to cherish and savor the life that we have, the relationships we enjoy, as much as we can for as long as we can.
~Charles Rubey and David Clark

Suicide survivors instinctively comprehend that in order to move on, we must not allow the disbelief, anger and sorrow that follow suicide to define our lives. We must accept our loved one’s death as self-inflicted and intentional. ~Carla Fine

Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.
Emile Durkheim

Suicide in the young, which has at least tripled over the past forty-five years. Is without the argument, one of the most serious public health problems.
~Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison

Is suicide a choice? No. Choice implies that a suicidal person can reasonably look at alternatives and select among them. If they could rationally choose, it would not be suicide. Suicide happens when all other alternatives are exhausted.
~Adina Wrobleski

We can never go back. This ‘thing’ we deal with after suicide… it doesn’t get better. It just changes with time. We will be affected profoundly by this for years to come. It is not something that can be forgotten.
~Peter Greene

Suicide does not just occur. Experience has shown that it is more often the end result of a process that has developed over a period of time.
~N.L. Farberow

“I would like to change the word suicide…to suisad, which would bean ‘self sad’… I think that it would be more illuminating than saying that someone has murdered himself…They want to save themselves but ‘murder’ the sadness.”
~P. Cantor

Suicide is the anchor point on a continuum of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. This continuum is one that ranges from risk-taking behaviors at one end, extends through different degrees and types of suicidal thinking, and ends with suicide attempts and suicide.
~Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison

The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight.
~A. Alvarez

We do not believe in ascribing ‘responsibility’ for suicide to anyone other than the victim. The failure to choose life is the failure of the deceased, not of the survivors.
~Edward Dunne & Karen Dunne-Maxim