My friend working as a content reviewer of YouTube used to tell me how upsetting it was sometimes to review videos, because she has to watch countless violent and sensitive content every day and filter them out. I could imagine how it might be frustrating, but I have never experienced it directly.
Nonetheless, I think recently I have grasped the feeling after writing several news articles about suicide in Macau. In a way, writing stories about depressing news can affect the author more, because writers have to actively imagine how the incident happened to write a coherent story.
For me, and I should say for most people as well, death is probably our biggest fear. It signals a termination of everything we have: body, consciousness, procession and memory. It is also our instinct to preserve ourselves as much as possible. Pain sensors and our immunity systems are examples that can prevent us from dying. Without elements of fear, we would not be afraid to anything, which would lead us to a pretty short life considering that we would do all kinds of risky things.
The question remains: why do people take their own lives? Is it because they lost something that was more important than life itself?
I suppose most of us have a clue about what could possibly happen in a suicidal person’s mind. Perhaps it is an insufferable disease; perhaps they have lost someone they held dear. But as I write more about these stories, I notice something more: aren’t those things part of our life, and they are already losing them, just not literally or completely?
To reiterate, an ill person has lost part of their control over their body. They couldn’t eat what they like, or they keep forgetting, or even couldn’t move their body. If we define “having a body” as our free will to exercise it, then having a serious disease means that we have already lost part of it.
Meanwhile, what defines us more as being a human is perhaps that we are social beings, and we always fear of losing the connection with members of society. I learnt from sociology (Durkheim) that the less socially integrated and connected a person is, the more likely he or she is to commit suicide.
Although the government has been closely monitoring the mental health of local people and offers aid whenever necessary, our relations, once broken, cannot be easily restored. These relations include not only personal, but social and economic aspects such as social gatherings and jobs.
This topic is dark, and it is also just my opinion after I wrote the stories. There are many reasons for a person to end their own life, but I genuinely hope that there are no more stories to be written about it.
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