I (narrowly) Survived a Brain Attack
Today is World Suicide Prevention Day, and it’s a good opportunity to reflect on my past understanding of suicide, the sobering reality of the present, and the promise I see for the future.
If heart failure is the failure of an organ. Then suicide is a failure of what? willpower? strength? regard for the people we love? That’s certainly what I thought talking to my parents on the phone in the emergency room 13 years ago.
My good friend, Lisa and I were messaging earlier that day, and I ended the conversation with ‘goodbye’ instead of ‘good night’ or ‘see ya’. She was concerned enough to check on me, and that turned out to be the difference between life and death.
I was in overwhelming and simultaneous angst and despair (called a mixed state). So, I took every pill I could find to end the immediate pain and laid down on a soft pile of laundry waiting for the end to come.
I was so ashamed when she arrived, that I quickly locked the door and refused to let her in. Eventually my roommate came, unlocked the door, and drove me to the ER where I was on the phone with my parents, sobbing and repeating…
“I’m so sorry, I’m a chicken shit.”, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m a chicken shit.”
Back then, my family was ignorant to brain health (mental health) in the truest sense of the word. We just didn’t understand it. I grew up in a town where suicide is commonly seen as a direct ticket to hell, and feelings weren’t talked about.
It’s no surprise I believed depressed people were a bunch of pansies who couldn’t get their shit together. Panic attacks were lame excuses for weak people who couldn’t handle stress. Bipolar and schizophrenic nutjobs belonged in a mental asylum where they couldn’t hurt people, and of course, suicide was a chicken shit thing to do.
Now I know better. I’ve faced some of the worst bipolar has to offer, and I’ve come out the other side to live a happy, fulfilling life.
Now I know that saying “He committed suicide because he lacked the will to live” is like saying “He committed heart failure because his heart just wasn’t in it anymore”.
This is especially a problem for people like me with bipolar. We are 30x more likely to complete suicide, and studies range from 5 to 50% mortality rates with the majority landing somewhere around 15.
5.7 million Americans live with bipolar. So even the most conservative estimates represent nearly 300 thousand lives. Most studies put the number around a million. One million deaths, and yet…
Have you ever heard of someone dying from Bipolar?
If heart failure is the failure of a heart, suicide is a symptom of the failure of a brain. People with bipolar don’t ‘commit suicide’. They don’t die from weakness, selfishness, or lack of attention. They die from bipolar. They die from a mixed state…
They die from a brain attack.
Sounds strange to say it, but if we are going to stop those hundreds of thousands of deaths, we need to change the way we talk about them. We need less of this:
And more of this:
