How Not to Kill Yourself Quotes

“A statistic that always startles me is that about 25 percent of all chronic alcohol and drug users kill themselves. Alcohol is involved in about a third of the suicides in the United States, and more than half of all suicides are committed by people with substance abuse problems. (It goes to 70 percent for adolescents.) The causal relationship between “drinking and drugging” (as we say in AA) and killing yourself is complicated—it could be that people prone to substance abuse are also prone to suicidal thinking, or vice versa, and suicidal thinking is certainly facilitated by substance dependence. It’s clear that drinking alcohol, especially excessively, makes you more likely to commit suicide, especially while you are drinking. (The risk associated with drugs other than alcohol varies according to the drug.)”
― Clancy Martin, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind

“Jas Waters’s death received more attention than usual in the media because of what is sometimes called “the suicide paradox” of Black women in America: while no one denies that, as a socioeconomic group, Black women have (and for centuries have had) among the most challenging circumstances, nevertheless “out of four primary subgroups in the United States—white males, black males, white females, and black females—the final group, black females, has and always has had the lowest rates of suicide.”
― Clancy Martin, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind

“If I have one crucially important piece of advice to offer in this book, among all its many practical recommendations about living as, or with, a suicidal person, it’s this: absolutely do not keep a gun in the house. If you have one, get rid of it immediately. Slightly more than fifty percent of people who die by suicide in the United States kill themselves with a gun, and the reason more men die by suicide than women, despite the fact that women attempt suicide about three times as often as men, is that men are far more likely to use guns. (As of 2020, in the United States, out of 100 deaths by suicide, about 70 were men and 30 were women—the suicide rate for women has been slowly increasing for the past few years—and in 2020 there were about three female attempts for every one male attempt.) The states that have the lowest percentage of gun ownership and strictest gun laws, like California and New York, also have the lowest rates of death by suicide. By contrast, in states with high gun ownership rates, like Utah, 85 percent of firearm-related deaths are suicides.”
― Clancy Martin, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind

“And many people, like me, are acutely conscious of what the Buddhist philosopher Thích Nhất Hạnh called “a desire for nonexistence.” Not existing is what you want.”
― Clancy Martin, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind

“The modest thesis I’m developing here is that thinking about killing oneself and addictive thinking have a lot more in common than is normally recognized. They may even be different variations of the same fundamental kind of thinking. With this model—which, granted, may only characterize one kind of suicidal inclination—wanting to kill yourself is like an extreme version of the relief you find after drinking a few glasses of wine, and the pungent smell of yourself seems to drift off into the breeze. And in fact this theory is really just an elaboration of the Buddha’s idea that the desire for self-annihilation is among our most basic forms of suffering, or Freud’s idea that the desire for life and the desire for death are two sides of the same coin.”
― Clancy Martin, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind

“I've lived nearly all my life with two incompatible ideas in my head: I wish I were dead and I'm gad by suicides failed. I've never once thought, If only I'd successfully killed myself, I would have been spared all this living I've done. And yet when I'm feeling like my life has been a complete waste, my first thought is Okay then, go kill yourself now. Or rather, I tend to think along very concrete lines, such as I'd better just hand myself, because I don't have any poison, and if I order some, I'll have lost my nerve by the time it gets here. And it's important that I do this right now, while my thinking is clear. (Which shows you how confused I actually am.)”
― Clancy Martin, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind