Hope for prisoners. Or, why not commit suicide?

by easyreader1970 3 Replies latest jw friends

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  easyreader1970

  This is copied from a post on reddit.com. While I don't (yet) have the urge to remove myself from life, I can understand the hopelessness part of this.

  The reason I am making this submission with this title is because I find my life to be mostly similar to a prisoner. But let me give you some hypotheticals first.

  Let's say you are wrongly convicted of a crime in some third world court and are sent to prison and locked up indefinitely. You're 23 years old.

  You're not getting out. You get letters from your family and occasionally visits from them. But they can't help you. You're never going to fall in love and get married (unless you're homosexual, I suppose, but for the sake of argument let's say you're straight). You're never going to accomplish anything in life because you don't have one.

  You can't travel. The best you can do is read about it in thirty year old books. You can't teach yourself to cook. I don't know what hobbies you could have that could make you take your mind off of your condition.

  The only place you can go is your mind, but the more you hang out there the more insane you feel yourself becoming, remembering what it was like on the outside.

  Why not kill yourself? The pain of being stuck in this place forever isn't going anywhere. You're not going anywhere.

  What is the incentive to keep going?

  I have been unable to find many stories about coping with prison permanently. I know there have been books written by people like Viktor Frankl but he was only locked up for three years. There was hope. The hope that maybe he would be rescued or liberated.

  I am talking about an inescapable situation.

  How do people cope when they are somehow physically or mentally trapped? Maybe paralysis, for example.

  I'm looking for coping strategies for situations that are very bad and not likely to get better. When I say not likely, I mean pathetically remote. Like the odds of suddenly sprouting dragon wings or something.
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  Luo bou to

  I don't see why sucide can't be a rational decision
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  Nickolas

  I hear you. I see myself as a prisoner of sorts. The WTBTS has been the uninvited third person in my marriage for over 30 years. It happened after my wife, who I adore more than life itself, bought into the Watchtower story and became baptised against my wishes and while I wasn't looking. I am not an adherent of the practices and beliefs of this religion but my life has been inexorably and permanently altered by it. I have been sustained by a faint hope that I might one day get my wife back - I mean all of her. She's still the woman I love but she exhibits two personalities - hard to explain. When I get to feeling hopeless about it all I sometimes think about suicide, but I shake it off. I do not believe in life after death. Suicide is an escape only insofar as it blots out everything entirely. A life in which there is some happiness is better than oblivion, is it not?

  The prisoner in your example has his mind to himself, and that should be enough. If you read the stories of people who were imprisoned or enslaved for much of their lives you will detect a common thread that sustained them, and that is freedom of thought. I might cite Stephen Hawking as an example. Here is a man, perhaps the greatest genius of our age, trapped inside a paralysed body but who still loves life because his mind is totally free to go wherever it wishes, and every once in awhile it finds itself in wonderful places indeed.
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  snakeface

  When I was a MS I was involved in the prison ministry and I worked with many prisoners, including death row inmates in the state's most secure supermax facility. I had direct contact with them, not separated by glass or bars. One particular death row inmate wanted to be executed and get it over with. However as his case was going through the appeals process there was the possibility that his sentence would be commuted to Life Without Parole. He did not want to spend the rest of his life in prison so he killed himself. I don't blame him! And I'm sure there have been other cases like this.

  Also, Luo bou to posted: "I don't see why suicide can't be a rational decision" I thought of the example of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Some who were trapped inside realized they were going to perish in the flames, and therefore decided to jump to their death.