mental illness and suicide

Been reading on bipolar disorder and doing random net searches, came across the two things below...they seemed interesting, so I thought I'd share.

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Powerful answer to the question "Why haven't I committed suicide yet?" It was written by a astrophysics professor at the University of Illinois who also suffers from bipolar disorder. It struck me as the best written reason I've read for why I haven't gone and offed myself:

"What I finally came up with is that my life isn't really "mine". It belongs to me, sure, but in the context of all the other lives it touches. And that when all the chips are down on the table, I don't have the moral/ethical right to destroy my life because of the impact that would have on all the people who know and love me.

"Killing myself implies killing part of them. I could understand very clearly that I did not want any of the people I love killing themselves. By reciprocity, I realized that they would say the same of me. And, at that moment, I decided I had to hang on as long as I absolutely could. Today, needless to say, I am very glad I made that decision."

--Dmitrii Mihalas
(found at: http://www.healthyplace.com/Communities/Bipolar/Mihalas/bipolar_disorder_depression_7b.htm

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Bunch of interesting tests here, including a depression and personality disorders test:
http://www.med.nyu.edu/Psych/public.html

Journal Entry #100

Ah...triple digits. Can hardly believe I made it here. :)

It's been a long interesting ride to #100, through a few months of ups and downs and sideways. Having a journal is, I think, a good thing. Certainly, it's helped me keep somewhat sane. Through the ups and the downs and the inbetweens, it's been an interesting ride.

Here's to a hundred more journal posts, and of course attempting to break the triple digits mark. :)

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Tonight, I managed to get my gurps character done for Will. You can view the current draft yourself by taking yourself to http://www.retstak.org/rpg/gurps/nicole.html. For some reason, I'm rather proud of this character, and we'll see how well it plays. I'm kinda looking forward to playing her and see how it works out.

BTW, for making GURPS characters, I highly recommend the GURPS Character Generator. It's a good program. It keeps files in its own format, it exports to HTML and/or ASCII, and it's a really good way to put a GURPS character together. I'm prolly gonna be using it, and they'll get a well earned seventeen bucks, which is really reasonable for such a decent program.

Anyway, I think I'm about to go to bed now. G'night everybody.