How much is a will to live

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Losing the will to live is not always standing on a ledge. I might laugh or appear normal, but that ache to disappear is there, underneath. - Hospital beds are filled with people whose bodies are connected to machinery that keeps hearts pumping, lungs expanding and contracting, tubes providing nourishment and draining excess fluids. These are external forces offering life sustaining activity.

The will to live or Wille zum Leben is a psychological force to fight for self-preservation seen as an important and active process of conscious and unconscious reasoning Hynes, There are significant correlations between the will to live and existential, psychological, social, and physical sources of distress. In psychology, the will to live is the drive for self-preservation, usually coupled with expectations for future improvement in one's state in life. This can be related to either one's push for survival on the brink of death, or someone who is just trying to find a meaning to continuing their life. Some researchers say that people who have a reason or purpose in life during such dreadful and horrific experiences will often appear to fare better than those that may find such experiences overwhelming. An ongoing question continues to be what keeps the will to live in these situations. Some people that claim to have experienced instances of the will to live, have many different explanations behind it.

Survivors lie in multi-tiered bunks in a barracks in the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. Many later reported that their otherwise healthy friends and family members appeared to perish from hopelessness. This condition has now been given the name 'give-up-itis' or psychogenic death. As unscientific as it sounds, "give-up-itis" is a real term used to describe a medically documented yet poorly understood phenomenon wherein a person who has lost the will to live actually dies, despite no apparent physiological cause. The condition was first described in Americans and South Korean soldiers who perished in captivity at prisoner-of-war PoW camps during the Korean War, and was later applied to Vietnam War PoWs, shipwreck survivors, and retrospectively identified as a common occurrence in Nazi concentration camps based on the recollections of internment survivors.