I never once had a suicidal thought as a child or teenager, though I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. Even so, my mom would constantly and completely out of the blue tell me, "Suicide is the most selfish thing you can possibly do." Maybe she was struggling with her own thoughts... or maybe she was echoing what her own parents told her.

Now I'm many years older, my depression and anxiety has evolved into bipolar and PTSD after years of misdiagnosis and mistreatment, I've failed the goals that I allowed others in my life to set for me because I was frightened of being honest and letting anyone down... and all I can hear in my mind as I contemplate why I'm still here is her voice haunting me.

It may be a self-motivated decision to commit suicide, since mental illness consumes you so much with thoughts about your own failures and lack of worth that there's little room to have healthy consideration for others. But calling it "selfish" is doing everyone involved a massive disservice. The ill person is led to believe that they're taking advantage of others through emotional vampirism instead of seeking love and support; the friends and family of the ill person are influenced to believe that the ill person is not worth loving because they're not currently able to give anything healthy and supportive in return; and the community shuns the ill person because they can't currently contribute to society in a healthy way... inadvertently continuing the cycle.

Granted, it doesn't help that we legitimately have no single word in the modern English language to describe caring for and focusing on the self in a non-negative way. Words are power, words shape our reality (especially when mental illness makes our reality so distorted)... so please, no matter what you believe motivate the mentally ill, at least consider the possibility that the survivor of suicide will view their attempt(s) as saving their friends and family from their own "selfishness"... and never get the help they truly need.