Suicide is too real of a topic for people to joke about
In my 19 years of life, I feel I have accomplished a lot. I have graduated from high school, been accepted to college, been a captain on my high school track team and have had the pleasure of making a plethora of new friends all along the way. However, at no moment in my life have I felt the need to the take my own life.
During my four years at Penfield High School, I experienced four of my fellow classmates and friends of mine take their own life. I was closer to some of them, more than others, but felt the gut-wrenching impact of every single one of their lives leaving the earth.
Friends of mine, whom I know have been affected by those same suicides, continued to utter the phrases such as, “I might as well kill myself” and make fake guns, place them in their mouth and pretend to blow their brains out, all in a joking manner. While in that same second, somewhere in the world, a student just like them could realistically be staring down the barrel of a gun feeling as though they have no option but to the pull the trigger.
I could ambush you with the statistics involving suicide, such as 129 American citizens a day take their own life or that approximately every 12 minutes one American is killed by suicide. However, those statistics will leave you in awe for only a few moments before you return to life’s regularly scheduled programing. Instead, I will project you an image that arrives in my brain before I use a term such as “I should just kill myself,” in a joking manner.
Visualize a dear friend, within a cluster of your other comrades. You all are standing around discussing the basketball game from the night before or the last episode of “The Bachelorette.” You are so frustrated by the act of a player or character from the night before that you proclaim that person should “just kill themselves.” Being unaware of your dear friend’s mental state of depression, you proclaim this phrase to full volume.
Your friend retreats home to his dorm and back out to class on a daily cycle, trudging and working through his depression. Like a bad musical lyric, the idea of killing oneself is trapped in his mind and when he runs into a problem, which he is just too mentally exhausted to solve, he takes to the idea. Every time a he faces a problem, he takes to the idea of suicide a little bit more until finally he takes comfort in knowledge that he could simply take his own life, and it would all be over.
There are plenty of reasons and triggers that can cause suicide, but such a simple reason can easily rid of. Using phrases such as “I should just kill myself” and “they should just kill themselves” should not be a part of everyday society. People should carry with them an image that does not make these expressions okay.
Suicide is a big deal, but for many students and adults, these idioms are common place. For many, the idea of losing a friend to suicide is farfetched and the statistics are only awed at for seconds. But for numerous others the phrase “I should just kill myself,” is far too real, and for those others, these phrases are far from ordinary.
John Pullano, Opinion Editor
pullanjj18@bonaventure
