oldmanmickey wrote:Also to me its very interesting that it seems a high number of us are ex-military that seem to have had to deal with that. Perhaps because we met and worked with such a diversified group of people under some high stress situations?
I've talked people out of suicide twice and seen suicides twice, but the closest I have to personally knowing somebody was a man whom I knew, lost track of for many years, and then heard about him killing himself. Three of the first four had never had anything to do with military life. The fifth killed himself because of the chronic after-effects of being hit by an RPG years earlier.
I can't say that I've ever been in a situation where somebody who I was actively associating with on a regular basis did it.
illiad wrote:aaaaand did any work with orphanage kids who have not yet grasped grammar, and have experienced the 'loss' when one of their friends get a new home ???
Well, I was an orphan and over the years interacted with many other orphans. Not the sort who get adopted into loving families, though.
Dave wrote:As to why so many of us seem to have shared this sort of experience to one degree or another... well, there's a lot of it out there, most of us seem to be in the older age ranges, and if we live long enough there's plenty of time for bad/difficult/painful stuff to happen in the lives of those we know.
I think that there may also be something of a social shift involved. It used to be that people simply didn't mention friends or family members who had mental issues, who committed suicide, who had unapproved sexual orientations, whatever. This made it seem as though there was much less of that sort of thing going on. Now society is becoming more open and accepting of that sort of thing, and information sharing is getting easier. Plus people are less geographically isolated, so we can casually interact with more people than we could in previous years.
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