Solving Suicide: Practical Advice for Terrible Times in Your Life.

question came in from a regular viewer
named Martin do you have any advice for Jaco that would actually help him with his suicidal thoughts panic attacks sleep deprivation etc now I have done quite a few videos about suicide on this channel all of them are demonetised if not banned in your region Fe it's really pathetic that YouTube is so much more strictly censored than HBO then Fox TV then the CBC in Canada I mean these are all issues we can talk about on public television in Canada for sure but YouTube is more censored now if you've been following this channel for a while I have been through it people I mean I could not count the number of times in my life in which I would have preferred to die than to continue living and I phrase it that way advisedly because I think that is a much more serious decision to come to then merely suicidal ideation where the point is it's not that you're fantasizing about killing yourself but where you get to the point in your life where you say I don't want to live this life anymore this is so heartbreaking or so terrible you know I'd rather not continue I'd rather I'd rather do the decomposing corpse thing than the waking up and eating breakfast then continue in my life then now I would say probably the single most extreme situation that's why I mention it in response this question did combine for real-world problems psychological emotional sources of stress problems with health problems as follows I was living in a huge apartment building in the middle of Saskatchewan there are not very many huge towering buildings like that in Saskatchewan the whole province this is in Regina Saskatchewan so if you know downtown there are only a few big big towers this is really a huge tower apartment building and my apartment building did have a lot of East Indian immigrants living in it we had a couple of free energy away people it was a tower building and we had we had old retired white people and when I started getting bug bites on my legs I assumed that it was due to fleas from dogs fleet like you know that kind of thing that when I was out walking I was getting these bites on my feet and ankles walking on the sidewalk and what I was told a hashtag not racist but eventually when I discovered this was that the East Indian families within the building culturally or what have you they would actually share or Bedok between like there were a lot of them or housewives raising kids there and it makes sense I mean what we before us me would be hand-me-down saying but actually things like duvet covers and bedding whatever they what they would they would exchange between apartments and that this had accelerated the spread of bedbugs throughout the whole building now different people react to bed bed bug bites in different ways I did look into it over the years at several points there are several different breeds and species of bedbugs so not all bedbugs leave the same bites on you I was bitten by bedbugs in Southeast Asia once that I remember very memorable and the type of that was another thing that threw me was the type of swelling and the way the bite looked when I was getting these bedbug bites in Saskatchewan it did not look like the bedbug bites in Southeast Asia so when I was bitten for the first time in Southeast Asia I really looked at them in the mirror I really tried to remember the feeling okay remember this so that in future you can identify it when you get bitten by bedbugs and then here I was in Canada and it's a different breed or a different variety the insect and it didn't have the same effect of me at all but one of the main effects of the bedbug bites was sleep deprivation I could not sleep all night the itching the physical sensation of discomfort caused by the bite not pain but the distraction and the itching and I think just on an instinctual level it caused restlessness like I would guess it's an instinct like get up and get out of here you have parasites biting you like I'm just a wild speculation but I I would absolutely I would go the whole 12 hours you know through the night not sleeping and so as it wasn't a ton of I might have three bites or something but it was much much worse than the effect of mosquito bites on me in terms of my we actually do it now when did this happen in my life my relationship with my ex-wife was getting worse and worse that's really not an honest way to describe situation I had figured out who my ex-wife were really was in contrast to who she was pretending to be and as a result my opinion of her was getting worse and my outlook on the future of the relationship was getting worse and you know I deeply regretted the trust I put in her the situation I got into with her so you can be with someone for a couple of years and think you know them and then figure out who they really are having so kinds of people whatever their secrets are whether subtle or obvious or have you not everyone's experience but some people in the audience are gonna be going uh-huh I know just what you're saying and some of you had that experience when you were teenagers and some in your 20s and some of your 37 year 40s but whether it's a co-worker or a lover or your best friend sometimes you know somebody for a couple of years before you really know who they are so I wasn't really up just because I wasn't really upset about that in a short-term way but my ex-wife had four very silly reasons bought an airplane ticket to go to Taiwan I could tell all the details about this trip but it's not that interesting she really didn't I'm just saying there's silly reasons at that time she really didn't have any we could recently go to Taiwan she applied for research funding and she made a trip to Taiwan leaving me alone in Saskatchewan and I was writing to her saying I went through all the stages of this with the sleep deprivation but look I'm getting these bites I don't think it can be bedbugs they don't look like bedbug bites they don't feel like bit and I'm up all night and is it just you know that these people have fleas on their dogs you know what what's what's the situation here the combination of extreme hopelessness about my marriage and who my ex-wife was she was sending me really nasty really selfish emails back from where she was in in Taiwan she was not being an angel I think we did Skype calls was lying - we had some had some phone calls back for us she was she was not being a nice for loving or supportive person so the realization of who she was the realizations about my situation at the University they're not worth describing but I was pursuing a combination of original research and humanitarian work and it's meaningful life like the Cree in a jib way and First Nations people and you know was this kind of bright and inspiring thing I wanted to do and then finding out that no it's gonna be impossible for a bunch of reasons but mostly is due to the abysmally low quality of universities in Canada and at that time I was emailing other professors and other departments and universities around around the world saying well look if I can't do this here where can I do it so that was really deep really depressing news that way a lot of the presses that there's also a period of time where I was having to look at throwing all my books in the garbage like you've worked so hard to get these books and study these books and now it's not gonna be part of your life not party future and you know just a lot of loss it's very real so it is Neil's say this is definitely one of the times in my life where it absolutely at this point where it's like you know you know I do not I don't want to you know continue it was one of the points you come to the cold horror to rational decision that you that you'd rather be dead than alive and of course what's making it worse is my ex-wife is not being sympathetic or love supportive or even just good or even treating me in a manner that's dignified or nice or even professional my ex-wife is being awful to me she's being unbelievably horrible and self-doubts self-centered and cruel when I talked to her about the reality of the situation man and I mean to give a little bit of make it a little more sympathetic I think for her I mean she responded to it in a way that is in the psychological sense narcissistic she would respond to any of this as if it were a criticism of a shortcoming of hers you know like if I say like this situation at this university is it's horrible I mean she's she's part of course she was the reason I was at that University she was a professor at that University we were actually violating the rules that we were married but I was technically a student sleeping with a professor the rules didn't make exceptions we were already married before she became a professor but nevertheless but you know and she would react to that as if it was me complaining about her complaining about the relationship or it's like no like I'm telling you almost so that's human I mean it's human but it's true she was a very selfish very self-centered and indeed very narcissistic kind of person she also has redeeming qualities which are not the subject what is my advice for people who are like jaco suicidal experiencing panic attacks or or what-have-you well I've made a lot of different videos talking with us from different angles one of the many tragedies of the professionalization of mourning the professionalization of soro the medicalization of human misery is that people have been trained to separate sorrow from the circumstances the life experiences the challenges that cause that sorrow or in a sense that all the sorrow okay my situation when I was so sad there oh man again I was already vegan I was already an ethical that was completely you know whatever I was completely into this vegan thing and we had to have a fumigator come and spray the apartment four times and every time he came I had to research the chemical being used we had to pack up all of our belongings like everything had to be in garbage bags oh yeah everything you want every every item of clothing everything to have the apartment fumigated and then I had to research the chemical the pesticide to try to ensure that it wouldn't have a negative health effect on my pregnant life because that was into the time when she was pregnant with my first more daughter and then this isn't enough everything so I would do all this you know my wife would be at work I have to pack up everything in a garbage bag I should pack them and put them on the porch with the apartment and then we'd have to go and check into a hotel for like three days because again you you redo the reading it would be like well there can be some negative health effects from this fumigation but not if you stay away for let's say it's say 48 hours or 72 hours if you like well you're pregnant so let's make it four days or something then go live in a hotel and let me tell you something Saskatchewan is not Thailand going and staying at Hotel in Saskatchewan was also horrible and that's after she came back though the darkest period was when my wife was away and I Nev I didn't even know that these were bedbugs I didn't have a fumigator come I was trying to figure this out and then I talked to the building manager family she said well you know these people they share their bed clothes and yeah the whole the whole building is full of bedbugs as a result could have told me but anyway I went through all this misery and the misery of course is made worse by by not knowing um obviously the solution for why I was feeling so miserable at that time had to deal with grapping with the actual circumstances with the actual problem and change them so look I've just blamed the medicalization of the problem the professionalization of the role of psychiatrist and so on but I think we all know there's a shallower level on we also all learn this in childhood because whatever is unmaking prepared me as a child whatever is making you unhappy or whatever is perceived to make you unhappy your parents and your teachers are going to try to put the burden on you for you to change your attitude for you to change your outlook because one thing's for certain the teacher isn't gonna change the lessons the school isn't gonna change anything they're gonna do your parents don't want to change their lives they're not gonna change their work schedule most of the time for most of us your parents don't actually want to do anything to help you not if it involves inconveniencing them in the slightest way may not be or experice their parents of whom was with mine to a ridiculous extent so children get told a lot to change their attitude children get told a lot to stop crying and be happy just because while whatever it is that's making them happy continues to be a problem um you know I can remember like you know my parents were communists and they were extremists they were not moderate communists by me at one point they hired a Filipina nanny to take care of me they just wanted to do their own thing don't want to go to work and go to swingers clubs to throw thing they live their own crazy left-wing libertine this lifestyle isn't that much of a bird in their lives and I can remember trying to say to my mother and she was actually on a business call even when they were home they weren't taken care of me they were you know and they were working on many time zones so they'd be having a business call from London or Hong Kong you know even though they're at home they're not really parenting you know I come up we're really trying to say to my mother look you know we have to get rid of this Filipina nanny this particular au-pair this particular woman was really terrible not all the more some were better some worse of the women only one was Filipino the others were other ethnicities um it's very hard for a child to make that argument when whatever you're eight years old or something to try to convince your parents look there's a problem and I need you to actually do something and it's very easy for parents and teachers as authority figures to slip into the mode of saying oh no no the problem is your the problem is your attitude you know and what that means is the problem is you okay and it's not the reason I was so unhappy when I was in Saskatchewan I was married to a terrible person let's put this way I was married to the wrong person I was married to someone who very fundamentally lied to me about who she was I I bought the package and in some ways I didn't find out what was under the wrapping paper until a little too late guys happens to the best of us how was the worst of us do let's just say this worse things have happened to nicer people you know I'm married to the wrong person I'm enrolled at the wrong University University itself is a disaster that was on paper a lot of the university's problems are objectively proven they were on the edge of being shut down just at the time I should they don't they had a lot of objectively real problems not just my question the particular department I'm in I never met a single other student studying the language there were all these other problems you know I'm studying a language that well it's very very hard to learn and very very hard circumstances and then I find out there's no way but there were even by the way part of the problem was just a technical problem with how my credits were transferred from the University of Toronto to this University and it completely ruined my plans not worth getting so I mean just say a lot of these are just objectively real problems that have emotional consequences but they aren't about my attitude my perception and yeah sleep deprivation caused by bedbugs pitching you know the pain in my legs and so on being up all night with swollen bed bug bites and you can solve those in any order you can solve all them or not but you know what you know what would have solved all my problems running away not joking if I could have just taken a vacation if I could have even bought a bus ticket and taken a Greyhound bus from that horrible apartment to go to my mother's house in Toronto my mother and I were not on speaking terms for over ten years Oh Vitus had a supporting and loving family we're even it was a thousand miles away if I could have taken a break and literally escaped the university the woman I was married to - bedbugs the infestation the sleep deprivation if I could if I could have gotten a decent night's sleep you know decent meal to get out a few other things or something now a very very hard being vegan and Saskatchewan - at that time it's true actually if I could have if I could have eaten broccoli and some decent vegetables what I hoped loke not the biggest part of the problem yeah you know what we live in a culture that vilifies you from quote-unquote running away from your problems because it's convenient for people in positions of authority to make the problem into anything other than the problem to make the problem into your attitude and you and as an adult and if you can as a child or a teenager you have to have the self-discipline clarity of focus and purpose to say no my problems are my problems and long-term there are going to be solutions like if you hate your job and get new job whatever it is those things take time but sure short-term you know I don't think there's any course of treatment or any course of therapy that could probably do you as much good I doesn't even have to be a vacation in Thailand you could you could probably just take a Greyhound bus to the the next bleak hopeless City if if there is a way to get yourself some distance you know distance can lead to detachment detachment can lead to introspection analysis better understanding and once you have that better analysis of your problems ultimately you have to push honest solutions