Suicide And Relativity Essays - Suffering, , Term Papers

Suicide And Relativity Suicide and its relativity to Stephen King's Suffer the Little Children Suicide is defined as an intentional, self-inflicted death that occurs in all cultures and usually is executed by people who are suffering from some sort of extreme emotional pain and feel unable to cope with their problems (Shneidman 6). Suicide is seen in our culture to be something that happens to only the"crazy" people. But the reality is that normal, everyday people commit suicide as well. Since suicidology is a fairly new field of scientific study there is still much to learn about it. Some theories and other scientific information have been discovered and are very interesting. In Stephen King's Suffer the Little Children a teacher suffers from fear, anxiety, defeat, and delusional attributes and the end result was twelve students murdered the suicide of herself. These symptoms of suicide are explained later in the research paper. Suicide began being studied scientifically a little over one century ago by a man named Emile Durkheim. But the specialized study of the causes associated with suicide and suicidal behaviors, as well the assessment, treatment, management, and prevention of such behaviors, has only been recorded in the last half of this century (Maris 1). Why do humans kill themselves? Each day people go out into the workplace, school, or some sort of other activity and experience the threat of failure; what degree that possible threat my affect is a whole different story. We all know that life is sometimes enjoyable, usually routine, and almost always difficult. We experience happiness and joy along with contentment and love. Much of our life is also taken up by the routine, everyday, and emotionally neutral actions of life. Then on the flip side there are the negative emotions that we feel like sorrow, shame, humiliation, fear, dread, defeat, and anxiety. When we digest these negative emotions psychological anguish and disturbance can be the result (Meyer 23-24). Regrettably, some people live in a state of constant disturbance. This disturbance is sometimes caused by physical pain, but usually psychological pain. The teacher (Miss Sidley) in Suffer the Little Children seems to have taught for a long time and is very strict. I believe she got burned out teaching and was waiting for someone to violate her, but nobody ever did. So to compensate she imagined that the students were one by one becoming evil starting with one particular boy named Robert. After class one day she stood in her classroom thinking, "What was it I saw when he changed? Something bulbous. Something that shimmered. Something that stared at me, yes, stared and grinned and wasn't a child at all. It was old and it was evil and..."(Meyer 538). This delusion that was just taken out of the story is due to psychological pain. Psychological pain is the main contributor of suicide. Psychological pain is not the same as bodily or physical pain. It is how you feel as a person; how you feel in your mind. It refers to how much you hurt as a human being. It is mental suffering; mental torment. Suicide is never the end result of joy or contentment. Pain by its very nature makes us want to stop whatever action we are doing or escape from it (Lester 34-37). When a person is likely to take his or her own life in the near feature it is called lethality (suicidality). When dealing with a highly suicidal individual, it is not useful to directly address the lethality of their particular situation (Shneidman 31). The effective way to counsel a suicidal person is to approach them with the question of why they are in this situation and what mental thoughts led them into the state of killing themselves. You basically try to do anything to lessen the person's lethal thoughts. Perturbation is also a key factor in lethality. This is felt pain. Alone, mental anguish is not lethal, but mixed with perturbation makes a deadly formula for self-inflicted death. Perturbation supplies the motivation for suicide and lethality is the terminal trigger. (Shneidman 32-33). Miss Sidley finally had to find a way to deal with felt pain that she was feeling and she did so in this quote, "That night Miss Sidley cut her throat with a piece of broken mirror-glass," (Meyer 543). She finally mixed the mental anguish with her felt pain and ended up with a deadly formula. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, a small number of suicides are caused by physical pain. Physical pain differs from psychological pain