Alright. The way I answered Blue's blog about the Florida internet suicide made me seem somewhat heartless I suppose, so here I'll try to clarify my views on suicide.

First, when someone offs themselves for any reason, I experience two somewhat conflicting views on it. The first is that they're weaklings. Everybody deals with shit in their lives. EVERYBODY. The ones who kill themselves over it are the ones who are too fucking weak to cope. Period. Darwin was right... the weak ones die, while the strong ones push through and live on. 

The second thing I experience, which conflicts somewhat with the first, is outrage at all the people closest to the one who killed themselves. They should have seen it coming, they should have helped him. His death is THEIR failure. There's ALWAYS more they could have done to prevent it, and the fact that they didn't is thus DIRECTLY responsible for his death.

In my life I've only directly experienced this twice, close friends who came to stand on the threshhold of suicide. One who flat out told me he "should" kill himself, and explained to me why it would do more good than harm if he did. Another who was going through some hard times, and who I just knew well enough to know that he would not only consider it, but would be quiet about it as well, and so I confronted him about it. 

Both times, I told them to get in my car and I brought them to the hospital and admitted them. I had to tell the quiet one that I would drag him in there kicking and screaming if necessary and hand him over to the orderlies. Both times I stayed there at the hospital with them. I called other close friends and relatives, and between the group of us we took it in turns to stay by his side, usually in groups of 3 or 4 at a time, ensuring that he was never left by himself for even a moment. 

The hospital would keep them for a few days, talking to specialists and psychiatrists and whatnot, evaluating them. Neither one stayed for more than 48 hours... seeing all of us come to their side like that really opened their eyes, not much else was needed. Both of them tell me now that I saved their lives. All I did was give them a car ride and make a few phone calls. 

But with that said, I would crush any stranger on the internet who told me that they wanted to kill themselves. That's horseshit. If you're seriously considering suicide, you don't go on the internet and confide in some random fucking stranger. That's what you do when you want attention and sympathy. I would have told Florida boy that he was a sympathy-seeking attention whore who needed to put up or shut up, because I didn't want to listen to him sob about his tragic life. If I got the slightest inkling that he might be serious, I would tell him to call a suicide hotline where someone might actually give a shit.

People say shit like that on the internet all the time just to get sympathy or stir up shit. So basically what we have here is a boy-who-cried-wolf scenario. Is it tragic when the real thing comes along? Sure, but it's no secret at all that strangers on the internet are heartless and cruel when it comes to shit like that. At the VERY least he should have contacted some people he actually KNEW... even people who never leave the house and spend all their time on the internet have SOME internet friends, even if they've never met face to face they're often fairly tight. He goes in a fuckin public forum with a bunch of strangers and BROADCASTS IT?!? That just SCREAMS attention-whore. No wonder nobody believed him. 

But if he was weak enough to give in to depression, and dumb enough to expect sympathy from strangers online, then yeah, he was pretty much fucked from the get go. Darwin strikes again. But I'm still pissed at his parents and any close friends he may have had for not being attentive enough to see this coming, and for not getting him the help he needed before it was too late. Fuckers.