Permanent Solutions to Temporary Problems
Spontaneity is often celebrated, but like everything, it’s better taken in moderation.
First things first, this post talks about suicide and you should stop reading if that’s going to bring up unpleasant reactions in you.
I don’t personally feel like I’ve been a victim of the stigmatisation associated with mental illness, yet I know it is absolutely there and it does make me think twice about sharing. Funnily enough, my experience with occasionally-debilitating depression (as a symptom of various other things) has been nothing but positive when looking at the bigger picture, in terms of the sheer amount of support I’ve received from my closest friends, my therapists, and my work, and the vibrant life I’ve managed to live. The level of acceptance from all of these people is beautiful and sometimes overwhelming.
I’ve attempted suicide twice in my life (I really had to stop myself from adding ‘so far’ to that), and the first time I kept it a secret for many years until I was shown the potential of psychotherapy. Pyscotherapy and the presence of the friend who introduced that (as I’ve written about before!) changed everything for me and did far more good than the medication I was previously on did.
People often talk about depression in terms of some metaphor that tries to make it easier to understand. I don’t actually associate with those metaphors—like the big black dog—that much because one person’s depression isn’t the same as another’s and it can be very strongly influenced by their past just as much as it’s influenced by their brain chemistry. It’s not like the flu where the frequent torrents of diarrhoea, torturous congestion, and awful headaches are pretty comparable between patients and more easily diagnosed.
For obvious reasons I’m not actually going to describe those two attempts, firstly because it’s really fucking hard to re-live and try to understand a moment of such impulsive, intense desperation; and secondly because it can and does give other people ideas and the implicit permission to try it themselves. Needless to say they both failed, and to address the potential stigmatic response: they went far beyond making attention-seeking threats. I’m not going to go into great detail about the thought processes that convinced me to make an attempt on my life either, because that belongs between me and my therapist. I will, however, tell you about what went through my mind after it happened and what my reaction to this is when in a sounder state of mind.
There is very little, if often nothing at all, in your life that is so great and so impossible that the only solution to it is to kill yourself.
It’s funny that I’m the one saying this just after admitting to my total lack of faith in the concept, but nevertheless it’s true and now I believe it more: there is very little, if often nothing at all, in your life that is so great and so impossible that the only solution to it is to kill yourself (terminal illness and prolonged, incurable suffering excepted: that’s euthanasia, not suicide). It may feel like you are faced with an insurmountable challenge at times—for me, I sometimes fear that I’ve become stuck and nothing is helping to make me un-stuck—but it is only insurmountable in that precise moment that you believe that. You were surmounting the challenge before you made that conclusion and you are surmounting that afterwards when you survive.
It might feel more true than anything else in those seconds you start making the decision, but when I reflect on the last time it happened, it was more like a broken record, or a scratched CD that jumps on a certain track if you’re unfamiliar with the idiom. You get stuck on a super intense and destructive thought and it drowns everything else out as it runs itself in a loop over and over and over again, and not even the usual processes to return to your presence seem to work.
When I reflected on the last attempt the day afterwards I could barely get to sleep as I tried to process the magnitude of what I’d attempted. It scared the shit out of me especially when I realised I survived it without any physical harm, and my mental state had shifted. In the midst of the existential gratitude that I did survive, there was the intense fear of realising what I was capable of doing to myself if I didn’t seriously look after myself and prioritise my wellbeing. It was an intensely powerful and sobering thought and, even though most of the abuse is directed towards myself, it upset me that I made many other people worried (to varying degrees) as I went through the last week-long ordeal. I wasn’t violent towards anybody but I gave them a pretty substantial dose of my suffering.
“You say you’re ‘depressed’ — all I see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn’t mean you’re defective — it just means you’re human.”
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Notice there that the problem isn’t the deeply upsetting and painful thought-process because it’s okay to feel sad and messed up at times, but the toxic stickiness of it that makes it seriously difficult to let go. It’s like it stops being a thought and becomes a need, and intensely unfulfilled needs often lead to desperation and completely irrational acting. Given that, the solution isn’t to suppress every negative emotion you have and try to keep only the positive ones around, because all of those emotions have to be recognised and acknowledged, and potentially addressed through your support network.
The difference between depression and not-depression in such a circumstance is that your vocabulary of responses to desperation don’t include suicide. You can be clingy, you can turn to criminality, you can push people away, become addicted, all kinds of common, uncommon, and outright bizarre things. All of these things have consequences of their own that you still have some chance to undo or work with on some level (you can go to prison and still find redemption and spirituality, while still being stuck in prison for the rest of your life; you can have paeodophilic tendencies and know how to avoid triggering them…), but once you take the nuclear option and eradicate your entire life, and all those connections with those you love…this is not something to be judged, it’s intensely tragic and it’s tragic to know you’ve chosen it as an option.
It’s also tragic and very uncomfortable to process your reaction to the failure. For one moment in time you decided you were done with this shit, and then nothing happens and it turns out you’re absolutely not done. The cosmic joke (and dare I say the beauty?) of the universe: you’ll die only when it wants you to, no matter how hard you try. Congratulations on traumatising yourself though; you absolutely will need a therapist to talk through that, and what went through your mind, and how awfully that affected any loved ones you might have shared it with beforehand.
What is most tragic is how you might try to seek that professional help afterwards and what the actual ‘help’ you get turns out to be if you don’t find the right therapist who will allow you to talk about it without jumping straight to hospitalisation and medication. The stigmatisation of mental illness in my mind is also the reason why treating mental illness right now can be so scary. Hospitals (and mental hospitals) seem to give you the second-best option to suicide, in terms of trapping you in a bland surrounding with other suffers, and constant drug cocktails, sedation and analysis. I was offered medication, not psychotherapy, as an option after my last attempt and I was essentially forced to accept the prescription because the alternative was being sent to a mental hospital for 2 or 3 weeks. That was fucking terrifying, the idea of being carted off in an ambulance and cut off from the world and all of my existing support for an undisclosed amount of time, maybe without the opportunity to actually inform people of that.
The thing is, you can’t just say “don’t do this”, “don’t think this,” because anyone who has experienced being a child or teenager knows that’s a really good excuse to actually give something a shot and at worst it just doesn’t work. And whatever reason you have against it can be super difficult to communicate in a way that is received how you want it to be, when you don’t fully understand the reasons why those thoughts are occurring in those who share them with you. It’s most likely going to be explained in terms of how you benefit from their survival, unless you can really tap into their self-esteem and give it a good boost.
The important thing is that you survived, you got a new chance, and with that fresh lease on life you’ve gotta start it with love. For yourself.
There is only one permanent solution in life and it is death, and while you may have many permanent problems in terms of physiology, chronic illness, there is always the gift of resilience to help you take those problems and find ways to embrace your life with them. And that’s a really important distinction: enjoying with, not in spite. This applies equally to your attitude to yourself if you try and fail to make an attempt: you have to do your total best to not judge or guilt trip yourself for taking action on that feeling, because you are only going to fuel the fire for another attempt later on in life. The important thing is that you survived, you got a new chance, and with that fresh lease on life you’ve gotta start it with love. For yourself. Not just for others, because you just realised that you can’t leave yourself even in attempted death.
Like almost every post, this is more for me than anyone who reads it. I fought this temptation for almost a full year and then I couldn’t hold it off, and in that sense it was like the big black dog. Only it’s the big black dog that needs petting and it’s a Doberman, and you don’t wanna pet the kind of dog that’ll bite your face off if you touch it.
