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Hello, CNN viewers.
You may have come here because you saw our page featured in a graphic accompanying a story about the suicide of Suzy Gonzales. Please be aware that despite the show's conflation of our site with the newsgroup ASH, we are not that newsgroup, nor are we synonymous with ASH, and Suzy was never a member of the ASBS community. If you wish to visit ASH, you should use a newsreader or try google groups ; ASH is not a website. If you wish to read about our association with the ASH newsgroup, you may click here. If you wish to vent about Suzy's death and the role you feel the Internet played in it, please understand that we do not believe that the Internet is to blame for any suicide. If anything, the Internet allows severely depressed people to find strength and comfort in communication with one another, communication that the housebound or anxious often cannot experience in person. Responsibility for an act of suicide rests with the individual who chooses to take his or her own life. Our stance is that the individual should have the right to make that choice. We do NOT encourage people to take their own lives. We DO support the right to choose the quality of one's own life and the time of its ending.In ASBS we find information, support and understanding that those who have never been suicidal will never understand. We find friends, peers to share our sorrows and thoughts in peace and without judgement. In contrast to other suicide support forums, we believe that every person has the right to choose to take his/her own life, if and when (s)he chooses. We do not encourage suicide, but we also do not condemn it.
ASBS originated from the Usenet newsgroup ASH (alt.suicide.holiday), which we no longer consider ourselves a part of. We welcome you with the traditional greeting:
since many people who come here are in pain, and we are sorry they have found the need to come to a place like this. You are welcome here, but we would prefer that everybody leave us, to live happy, long lives.
"The psychoanalytic theories of suicide prove, perhaps, only what was already obvious: that the processes which lead a man to take his own life are at least as complex and difficult as those by which he continues to live. The theories help untangle the intricacy of motive and define the deep ambiguity of the wish to die but say little about what it means to be suicidal, and how it feels."A. Alvarez, The Savage God, 1971
Copyright 2001-2003 by ASBS members. Please email the webmistress for permission to re-use any of these pages elsewhere.
