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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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In the Meantime
I’m not young anymore
I’ve no physical strength
like I used to have
There are no long goodbyes
We’re only here one moment
and then we’re gone
There’s no time like the present
Where the outside is inside
and the inside is out...
and its almost the end of the day
-bushman
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Understanding these are challenging times, if someone feels like talking and perhaps even visiting my sanctuary in the woods near Mt Adams WA. A text message is good. 650-248-9062
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cybele
Trad climber
Salt Lake City
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I am lurking here, and have read every word of this excellent topic/thread. Thank you everyone for the amazing, highly personal posts so far, as well as the more fact-oriented or social science aspects raised in the conversation. Several times, I found myself wanting to say something in reply to a particular post and sure enough, a subsequent poster captured some of my thoughts, or some of my feelings -- often much more eloquently than I could have expressed them.
One exception to that last statement, something I remain dissatisfied with, I address below. I realize it is --not-- one of the more important pieces of the overall ST discussion, and it is not a personal piece, but it does occur to me to clarify: In a previous post the question arose of what "to moderate" means in academic research, when it was said that substance use moderates suicide risk.
I only bring it up because according to research statistics, substance abuse does increase the risk for suicide, in contrast to what one ST poster (mis)understood. And what someone later posted as the research definition of "to moderate" barely made sense to me, though I have used the term moderate in my own published research articles. That definition, offered earlier on this thread, does not accord with the definition in social science statistics (though thanks at least for pointing out that it doesn't mean "to reduce").
For those few who might have interest and are still reading (lol), essentially, to oversimplify, "moderates" just means 'influences the measurable relationship between two other things.'
Here is a quote from Wikopedia that I think explains it well:
"In statistics and regression analysis, moderation occurs when the relationship between two variables depends on a third variable. The third variable is referred to as the moderator variable or simply the moderator. The effect of a moderating variable is characterized statistically as an interaction; that is, a categorical (e.g., sex, ethnicity, class) or quantitative (e.g., level of reward) variable that affects the direction and/or strength of the relation between dependent and independent variables."
Sorry this post went OT, but no, substance abuse does not lower suicide risk. A quick Google search will reveal the stats, especially for alcohol.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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This is a sad thread, and I am sorry to hear of the physical problems some of you face as you get older. The only thing I can contribute may seem trivial and irrelevant, but it might resonate with a few who approach old age:
*Do not become too attached to climbing. I drifted away from the activity gradually with physical problems and age, and at 81+, I recall - mostly pleasantly - some of the things I did, but have no attachment to them and no desire to climb again.
*Always have projects of some sort that capture your interest, challenging your mind and your body. This is particularly important for men the first three years after retirement.
Those in pain have my sympathy. There are no easy answers.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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...even driving my tractor is rewarding.
I've always kind of loved sweeping, raking, mopping, shoveling, etc relative to the zen of it. But I have dreamy ADHD and am a bit OCD so 'getting into' even the small things is not an issue per se for me so much as learning to do so mindfully. That was actually the reason I stopped meditating and doing isolation tanks after a few years as separating it out into a thing unto itself was great, but what I really needed was to be more mindful all the time.
That really helped me a great deal as did climbing which taught me to focus in a more directed and disciplined fashion. But, addressing Cybele's point somewhat tangentially, what really saved my life from suicide was a course of twenty-five directed LSD trips over a three month period. Without that, I wouldn't have survived my twenties or 'woken up' sufficiently to navigate life in general and other human beings in particular (not that I'm all that good at the latter even now). Can't say that would be helpful or even advisable for a mature adult, but it changed me from someone grossly lost in their head and unable to interact with people to a much more survivable version of myself. As always, YMMV.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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During an intense neurology crisis about ten years ago, I found myself in a meeting with a doctor/counselor affiliated with the research program managing my treatment at UCLA Medical Center. By their metrics my recovery was remarkable, by mine, not so much.
Near the end of our meeting she asked me if I planned on climbing in the future. My answer, of course, was an emphatic yes. I will never forget what she said.
"Well Kris, you might climb. Then again you might not. Or you might not be able to climb as well as you have. But whatever happens, it will be a real shame if you paint yourself into a corner where losing climbing ruins your life."
Since then I've done some climbing. Nothing very exciting, but I really enjoy getting out with my friends.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Yeah, I still climb and really enjoy it, but it lost most of it's serious 'emotional-bang-for-the-buck' in my late twenties and I've been in and out of it a dozen time since due to career and family (though it's been on steady since I turned fifty). In general, I feel not having climbing define my identity has always helped me to find more balance in my life (not that I necessarily live a 'balanced' life - just ask my very resilient wife).
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Trump
climber
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Oh yea I’ve gone through periods of depression where it’s hard to get all that motivated to do much of anything, and death doesn’t seem like such a bad option. And yes, some of it at least has been due to health issues and physical pain and loss of activity and trying to understand what makes life fun or worth living.
For me though, I’ve got these little people who need me, and they’re pretty good at pulling me back to reality. And to some extent, I think, despite how active I’ve been for most of my life, my baseline active-happiness needs might be lower than other people’s, especially maybe climber-people’s, and I can be pretty entertained just thinking about things.
Maybe if I didn’t have such a strong partner I wouldn’t be so self-indulgently reflective. Or maybe I have such a strong partner because I’m so reflective. Tough call.
I’ve probably been clinically depressed for much of my life, and not in any way intending to minimize other people’s challenges, but does that really matter to me? The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, it’s engagement. Ok, now I’ve got a word for it! My son is autism spectrum and bipolar disorder, and there’s no helping him when I’m gone, and I’m not that far off from his condition, either. Seems like depression might not be that unusual a human reaction to his condition, for either of us.
What makes a healthy psychology or a healthy way to form beliefs? - that’s a tough one! and I admire a willingness to ask the question. To me, it seems, we do it in seemingly crazy and difficult to understand ways. 4 billion years of survival of the fittest has probably given us a little bit of a head start, at least in doing it, if not in understanding how we do it.
Even a conversation like this one, have we actually determined that climbers do have a higher rate of suicide? The way it seems to me is that we’re working on forming correlations and an understanding of suicide based on a reference class of climbers, and creating beliefs about suicide in general based on that climber centric perspective, maybe without really noticing or understanding that it has nothing to do with (i.e. no correlation with) being a climber.
It’s hard to point to external things that cause someone to commit suicide. I think mostly it comes from inside of us - the crazy ways we process information and form beliefs and psychological attributes (to the extent that they’re maladaptive, one might call them weaknesses, but we, or evolution, looking at the flip side, might call them strengths), but who the hell knows?
Agreed healyje, I think identity plays a pretty huge role in most of the stuff that goes on in our heads, and maybe that’s at least partly a tribally/socially advantageous thing we’ve learned to do with our beliefs, often behind the scenes of consciousness.
Why and how we form beliefs and psychological tendencies is maybe trickier than we think, and if the way we happen to find ourselves doing it is by trying to understand suicide by correlating suicide with an uncorrelated reference class of climbers, that honestly, to me, doesn’t seem any crazier than voting for me.
Which honestly, to me, seems pretty crazy. But still, we humans aren’t dead, or extinct, yet.
Thanks for sharing. Hoping you’re all well, whatever that is, for humans like us.
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Trump
climber
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Thanks for the thread reference.
“While we can’t really know this for sure, there are some reasons to suspect that suicide may be higher among climbers. One argument may be that climbers often have a passion or fire – perhaps emanating from anger or pain – and this very quality is what makes them fantastic climbers.“
Huh?
The reasoning that we’re using to convince ourselves that suicide might be higher among climbers is because climbers have passion (which, who knows, might just maybe be related to pain?), and that passion is what makes good climbers good climbers, so therefore probably statistically we can assume that the rate of suicide among climbers is higher than among other people?
Ok?
Sure, then let’s correlate climber characteristics with characteristics that we imagine are related to suiciders, and then imagine that explains why suicide is higher among climbers (in our imagination at least, if maybe not in reality).
I kind of don’t get it, but, ok.
We have such strong tendencies towards confirmation bias (i.e. confirmation bias is in some way so advantageous to us) that we try to explain why our beliefs are true even when we know that we don’t know whether or not our beliefs are true. Kind of like my supporters do.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Apr 10, 2018 - 04:43am PT
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I personally wouldn't be surprised to learn climbers and other pursuits attracting contingents of novelty-seeking individuals have somewhat higher incidences of suicide.
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Trump
climber
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Apr 10, 2018 - 08:07am PT
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Yea.
And maybe we humans would be less inclined towards suicide if we spent each moment not expecting to be surprised - expecting that the way we understand things is actually factually true. I think that kind of is how we spend each moment.
Rather than facing the continuous drain on our mind-body resources of the existential angst of the uncertainty of our precarious existence, we find little ways to reassure ourselves that what we believe is actually factually true, and spend our resources worrying about something else.
So if we find ourselves explaining why a statistical fact (that we don’t actually know whether or not is true) is actually factually true, and exploring and explaining the correlations and causes between our imagined fact and other stuff we imagine is true .. ok. And while to me our tendency towards confirmation bias doesn’t seem to be a strictly rational way for us to think, it may, in our survival of the fittest reality, be the most fit way for us to think.
And while a downside of that might be that I’m now president, an upside might be that at least we’re not dead yet.
Best to you!
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G_Gnome
Trad climber
Cali
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Apr 10, 2018 - 10:20am PT
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the continuous drain on our mind-body resources of the existential angst of the uncertainty of our precarious existence
Wow!! I don't think I have ever felt like this. Is there something wrong with me? I either am or am not. I don't worry about the in between states. And while I think about the 'am not' part and its eventual coming it isn't something that I worry about either - except for maybe not recognizing it soon enough to do something about it.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 10, 2018 - 08:16pm PT
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the continuous drain on our mind-body resources of the existential angst of the uncertainty of our precarious existence
And our precious bodily fluids?
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Apr 11, 2018 - 08:40am PT
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Should we outlive suicide or escape from pain?
Perhaps the prospect of outliving those we find the most disagreeable in life could be used by some as a prime motivator to stave off the onslaught of an untimely but inevitable death, even when taking our own lives and escaping severe pain and misery would appear to be the preferred more merciful outcome.
For the past 10 or 15 years, whenever injury, illness, emotional bouts, or long periods of physical rehabilitation have gotten me down, this has been one of my go to’s to perk me up again. I reason that resentment like this turned on it’s head is almost as effective as any charity work in helping to restore my drive. Doesn’t do much for gratitude but oh well...whatever it takes sometimes to not let the bastards get you down.
We might also ask ourselves; Why should I give up so easily while so-and-so sits at the pinnacle of power, exalted by all his flock?
To the contrary one might think; as long as that prick continues to live on in his small minded nightmare prison of fear, secretly living each waking moment inwardly horrified at the prospect that his followers might discover his darkest most disturbing insecurities, then someone might have no qualms about ending their existence and embracing the sweet merciful angel of death.
No matter how we slice it, we don’t always get to chose the manner of our suffering, and are not always so fortunate as to have control over how we end it.
-b
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Rollover
climber
Gross Vegas
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Apr 11, 2018 - 12:35pm PT
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Apr 11, 2018 - 12:51pm PT
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Nice photos of some awesome climbers who are no longer tying in...thanks!
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Rollover
climber
Gross Vegas
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Apr 11, 2018 - 12:53pm PT
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Life can sometimes be easier on the rocks..
No matter how hard the route.
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