Zosimo T. Literatus, R.M.T.
Breakthroughs

CANADIAN psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden, writing for The Free Radical in October 2004, believed that “when your principles seem to be demanding suicide, clearly it’s time to check your premises.”

Most philosophers and thinkers, including Albert Camus and David Hume, consider suicide as a result of faulty thinking, may it be cloaked in such behavior as cowardice or madness.

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But the United States Food and Drug Authority Adverse Event Reporting System, which it started in 1969, indicated that 832 drugs in its database, which accounted for 1,404,470 adverse events, have been implicated with suicide.

This number of drugs represents more than 99.9 percent of the non-recreational and non-herbal drugs reported to have caused adverse reactions with patients from 2004 through 2008.

Topping these list were painkillers and anesthetics with 4,186 cases of suicidal attempts, including completed suicides, involving 54 drugs. More than 50 percent of these cases involved women with an average age of 50 years.

Antidepressants, the ones people use to stop the blues, followed with 3,572 cases involving 32 drugs. The third topmost were anxiety drugs with 2,256 cases involving 29 drugs.

Researchers Henry Robertson and David Allison of the University Of Alabama, USA, reported in the PLOS One issue this month that blues-buster Paroxetine has been reported with up to 1,323 suicide attempts.

Drugs not typically associated with such attempts include birth control pills, prostate drugs, acne medications, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) drugs, growth hormones and Alzheimer medications. One interesting finding was that erectile dysfunction drugs, such as vardenafil, have been reported among 99 percent of men to have resulted in suicidal thoughts.

Maybe it was caused by psychological problems, biochemical imbalance or even demonic aggression. Suicide is apparently a battle inside the human mind, and can be lost and won there also.

Nobel Prize in Literature awardee Hermann Hesse wrote in his winning novel, Steppenwolf (1927): “All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide.

Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one’s own hand.”

Another thought from Chuck Palahniuk in his 1999 novel Survivor is worth mentioning: “The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is press coverage.”

Don’t you think it is?