I always find it interesting with people who have lived through hardships, when they turn out one of two ways. Either, like Will.I.Am, they say “well I’ve done it, everyone else should be able to too!” or they say “I’ve done it and I realise that there are as many ways to deal with it it as there are traumas.”
I am not saying suicide is a way of dealing with it. This is more directed at the sentiment, not the specifics.
You should be proud of yourself for dealing what what sounds like a crap hand in life. But you surviving does not give you license to criticise others.
I agree teenagers can be dramatic dickheads sometimes. But they can be just as successful at killing themselves as adults. And those feelings of grief that their parents and communities feel, those feelings are real too.
Nothing too bad has ever happened to me, thank god (except being a whiny homesickness sufferer!) but I will never assume everyone has the same coping mechanism as myself. Its selfish, and unrealistic.

I think like a lot of things in life you need to look at it on a case by case basis. And since you aren’t privvy to the details 99.999% of the time involving things like this you can’t really judge.

One case I have been privvy to the person was bipolar, anorexic, and obsessive compulsive. She told me she intended to kill herself when she did it (her attempt was before I knew her). The more I got to know her the more I realized she was lying. She is a manipulator and as I got to know her personality more I realized she did it to lash out / punish him. Things were on the rocks with her bf at the time – he was the one that found her (convenient, right?) and he was a wreck afterwards. She then had him under her thumb, but that wasn’t enough…she eventually cheated on him because she refused to take her issues into her own hands and preferred to be an emotional leech to those closest to her which would obviously cause relationship strain and their relationship died a horribly slow on and off death after the cheating. Pretty fucked up…that is one person I’d like to forget I ever met.

Honestly, I was suicidal at that age too. The reason you don’t understand is right here: “When I was 15, all I wanted to do was play video games and hang out with friends.” You had friends. I didn’t have friends. Kids in my school would rather poke out their own eyes with scissors than be my friend because I wasn’t popular. I was bullied every single day of every single school year until the day I graduated from high school. Maybe this kid is in a similar situation. At that age, your peers at school kinda determine your self-worth for you because they are the main group of people you spend time with. If they make you feel worthless and like a waste of space, you may just feel like you should stop wasting the earth’s precious space with your horribleness.

Let me clarify that I never actually *tried* to kill myself. What I did do was abuse drugs and alcohol a lot, cut myself almost nightly (sometimes to the point of passing out from the pain; I had to wear long sleeves to school even when it was warm), listen to a lot of angry rock, and fantasize about killing the bullies so they would just leave me the fuck alone.

So before you judge, imagine the kind of pain this kid might be feeling.

Well, at 15, I was a fat kid too. I got made fun of by the popular kids, but I just strived to be better than them. I was fortunate enough to not be born with a chemical imbalance, but I was born 3 months premature and had a slew of health problems. In 1984, when I was born, I weighed 2lbs 1oz. For the time and technology, I’m lucky to even be alive.

I also had a Father who grew pot and was arrested for it and ultimately sent to the pen. I also had a Father who wasn’t involved with his son at all. Lets not forget I was the fat kid growing up as well, who was the black kid, at a predominantly white elementary school.

I have had my crap hand and so have some of my immediate family members, and none of us have ever used suicide as a way out. Maybe my outgoing personality really saved me from a lot of ridicule, even though at had my short comings look wise.

I don’t try to judge anyone, I just don’t understand why someone can go down that road. The mental health issues is clearly something I don’t have a grasp on either. But even with my hardships, I’ve had a clean bill of health mentally.

A few people very close to me have been suicidal, and having heard them talk about it, I can absolutely tell you that if someone is truly suicidal, they are almost certainly incapable of just “snapping out of it.”

Now, whether this particular 15 year-old kid is truly suicidal or just making a cry for help I obviously have no idea, but does it really matter what we think of his problems? They are real to HIM. They matter to HIM. HE has to live his life, every day, and although we can all say that “in his shoes we’d do XYZ, not ABC,” that assumes that we would be in his shoes with all of our life experiences and support systems and grown-up knowledge. He doesn’t have any of that, all he has is what he has.

I do think suicide is very selfish, but then, aren’t we always telling people here on DW that they have make themselves happy before they make anyone else happy? I don’t see how telling someone they have to stay alive for all of their family and friends is any different from telling them they have to do X, Y, or Z for all of their family and friends if they don’t want to.

Honestly, even though I have much more “real issues” as an adult, I often felt far more depressed and hopeless as a teenager than I do now. For one, I was extremely hormonal as a teenager. For two weeks before my period (aka, half of the time), I was very, very depressed. I would tear up if I dropped a dime on the ground, or my bus stopped 5 feet away from me instead of right in front of me. This is something that eventually went away, due both to biology and learning how to cope with PMDD, but it certainly didn’t feel that there was an end on the horizon when it was happening. I think as a teenager, its generally hard to put things in perspective and be patient. As a 23 year old, if my friend is having a party and I can’t make it, I think “geez, that sucks”, because I know its just one night, and there will be other parties. When I was a teenager, I would have gone completely crazy, because in my head, this could be THE party where I make all new cool friends and kiss that super cute boy and my whole life changes and ohmygod what if I miss this party??? Obviously, this wouldn’t lead me to suicide, but I think it kind of illustrates the lack of perspective and patience you have as a teenager, and how huge things that are so small in retrospect seem at the time. Looking back on high school, you can see that having some group of douches think you’re cool means nothing. At the time, though, approval from your peers means so much to your self-esteem, that if you don’t get it, you feel worthless. Not to mention what inconsiderate, blatantly mean assholes other teenagers can be….

Sorry, this is long, but basically, I think its more understandable when a teen kills themselves than an adult, in a lot of cases. You’re moody and emotional, you’re often relying on a bunch of dicks and immature people to validate your self-worth, and you don’t have the coping mechanisms to deal with it or the foresight to realize that it gets better.

I didn’t mean to imply that suicide would make people happy. I just mean that I think discouraging suicide because of how “selfish” it is is a bad way to do it. It should be discouraged for all the reasons you said- you can never be happy again if you’re dead, it DOES get better, and there are about a zillion better ways to deal with it than that. I think ragging on seriously depressed teenagers about how “selfish” their suicidal thoughts are is just adding MORE guilt to their shoulders, which is probably a bad idea.