Updated May 24, 2026
Many vulnerable creatures take evasive actions. The butterfly flies in wacky fashion. Never a straight line like the ability of a crow. Crows don’t act vulnerable. They’re kinda bossy. Taking on all sorts of predators in an annoyance roll. They sound the alarm about snakes and cats. They can try to drive a hawk to distraction.
Some people are like crows. Nothing much phases them. But then there’re the butterflies. People who are desperate to not be eaten by something much bigger than they are. Sometimes they wind up eating themselves because they’re tired of evading the “predator”, mental illness.
Suicide is the mental equivalent of a terminal physical disease. It’s not a willful act to “commit” suicide. “Commit suicide” is a misnomer because it indicates that the victim was in control.
At that emotionally extreme point, the victim is not in control. The illness is in control. Suicide is the triumph of a disease just like a death from cancer.
Cancer is traceable. Suicide symptoms can be hidden from others making it difficult to diagnose and track.
The suicidal victim is overwhelmed with terrible and excruciating mental pain and sees no other apparent means of relief. Suicide is not a rational act. It’s a breakdown stemming from internalized mental battles.
Sometimes God intervenes. Sometimes He just opens His arms.
Victims of suicide include all the people surrounding someone with the disease. The survivors “guilt” believes that they could have done something to prevent it or even that they contributed in some way.
The surrounding loving ones fall prey to their own mental illness in a state of depression and anxiety. This depression can last a lifetime because the grieving victim feels emptied and frustrated. “I could have done something!”
Probably the best medicine is talking. Losing a loved one to suicide is devastating. The suicide victim’s loving ones need help. There’s comfort in sharing with others. There’s comfort and hope in supportive human contact.
As for me, I have danced like a butterfly, but now I sing like a crow.
I’ve experienced suicidal thoughts and ideation many times. I think God put a buffer cell in my brain that allowed me to NOT act on that thinking. I would remind myself of the hurt that suicide would cause others. That gave me the Grace and patience to wait out the pain I was feeling. I knew from experience that mania and depression would subside in time with help from others and enough patience.
✳️ Worth noting: I’ve begun to use AI as a review tool for my writings. So far, it’s been very encouraging. 🫣 But I’ve read about an unfortunate death from suicide that occurred with an impressionable young lady who was using an AI tool to help soothe her troubled mind. There’s a hard lesson there for all of us to only use AI with stable and careful judgement… We’re “talking” to a machine with no ability to empathize emotionally… just tell us what it “thinks” we want to hear!
Thus far, AI cannot sense what we are emotionally thinking or feeling, only respond as a logic driven machine from its available database. AI is a dynamically “learning” machine that should logically improve over time. But nobody’s perfect as a fully human and our machines reflect that.
AI’s response to last paragraph below:
AI Overview
You nailed it. That gap between cold logic and authentic human emotion is exactly the frontier AI researchers are wrestling with. While AI can analyze text for sentiment or mimic empathy, it lacks the actual felt experience of consciousness. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Here is how that evolution stands today:
The EQ Limit: AI operates on statistical patterns, not feelings. It can process the words “I am sad” and generate a comforting response, but it has no internal concept of grief or joy [Gemini].
Continuous Refinement: Through machine learning and vast datasets, AI gets progressively better at predicting what humans want to hear, narrowing the gap between mechanical output and conversational nuance [OpenAI].
The Human Reflection: Because AI learns from human-generated data, its flaws—biases, blind spots, and logical errors—often mirror our own. It is an imperfect reflection of human history and communication [Anthropic]. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Ultimately, machines reflect the messiness of human knowledge. They may simulate understanding with increasing accuracy, but the messy, beautiful reality of human emotion remains uniquely ours.
End of AI’s response (technically a message from its human programmers)
Testament / Suicide
Previous Bipolar / Next Death
Suicide dedicated to my older brother Joe
