I feel mixed emotions about posting this and have decided to do so purely in the hopes that it will help someone, somewhere in the ether. Suicide… It’s a dirty word. Isn’t it? We don’t talk about it and when we do, we associate it with other dirty words like weak, selfish & stupid. Why didn’t that person wait just one more week? Another job opportunity arose, that would have made them feel better. They were so stupid to kill themselves… How could they have been so selfish? They left their family. They’ve put their family and friends through hell. Why couldn’t they just snap out of it like everyone else? We all feel down sometimes. They were too weak and so selfish… Suicide is not something that is often spoken of within the parameters of education. Most of us know some of the warning signs. We know to be mindful of the dangers of when our loved ones shut themselves off from us. In Approx 85% of cases, the victim of suicide tells someone of their intentions. Many of us know that if we suspect someone is going to suicide we have to get them to a hospital emergency department. The media don’t like to report cases of suicide either for fear that it will give other people ideas and set off a cluster. It seems rather an unsavoury topic. I feel compelled to write something because of the shock passing of Robin Williams. Along with the messages of love and support that have graced social media, I have come across more than a few writings of suicide from author’s who’s absolute knowledge on the subject seems to be lacking. Mixed in with the loving and supportive messages, confusion is rampant. Why? Why do some of those we love feel that the only way out is death? Of course there is no one answer as everyone is so completely different and their illness was not the same as any others. I was very nearly a victim of suicide. It’s a chapter of my life that I have healed from but still brings me to tears when I access the memories because they been filed internally with such intense pain. I don’t really talk about it and if I do, it’s just a glossed over rendition. In truth this is a glossed over rendition. I don’t abstain from my suicide tale because of any reason in particular; mostly because it hardly comes up in conversation and also because although I am fine, it does make me cry and I become a blotchy, swollen mess when I cry. For those of you who don’t know about this chapter of my life, just know that this is the past. It occurred quite some time ago and I am (mostly) completely healed so please, don’t be alarmed! There are no exact words to describe how suicide feels. Anguish. Intense pain. Numb. Empty. It’s the feeling that you are trapped in a body that won’t move and you are suffocating…screaming without sound on the inside. It is an advanced form of depressive illness. Not all that dissimilar from end-stage metastatic disease although suicide, as an illness , is virtually invisible; it has no obvious signs however it does present with many symptoms which are often over looked. The first time I realised that I was suicidal, I was washing the dishes; such a mundane task. Without even being conscious of how I was feeling, I caught myself about to bury the blade of my kitchen knife into my stomach. “Geez! That was odd!” A fleeting thought, a fleeting moment and life continued for another couple of months. Depression wasn’t an illness that I knew much about and suffice it to say that I was extremely ignorant on the matter. When I actually knew that I had an illness that I hadn’t thought really existed, I was past the point of ‘depression’’; I was unknowingly in a psychotic episode. It was news to me, news to my husband, news to my family and news to my friends because on the outside I could rally myself to create a convincing façade. How exhausting that façade was and when I removed it from myself, I was in a deep, deep well. Way down the bottom, without a memory that there even was a top, an exit, a brightly lit world bathed in the warm shining light of the sun’s rays. I wasn’t the only new mother feeling this way, at this particular time. There were three of us, all unknown to each other and I only know of the other two because I heard of their deaths on the news. One woman’s father was on the evening news, scratching his head, devastated and bewildered. “I don’t know how this happened? She has a new baby. This should be the happiest time in her life.” And if the hormones, that she could not control, had been doing their job correctly, it would have been the happiest time in her life. A time of love, first steps, baby smiles and giggles that make the heart soar and faces crinkle in joy. We three new mothers were no longer producing the necessary hormones to feel joy, love and a sense of wonder. We were left with the sensation of being dead inside. We were left with the deep instinct to no longer exist. I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t want to exist. I needed to not exist. It wasn’t just for my own sake that I didn’t want to exist. As surely as I believe that the sun is going to rise tomorrow; I knew that my baby girl and her daddy would be better off if I didn’t exist. I knew that as an absolute, irrefutable fact. I had it all planned out: I was going to put my baby down for a late sleep so that her dad would be home before she woke up. I couldn’t bear the idea of my helpless baby waking up in a house, with her mother dead in another room. It devastated me to think of my sweet little baby crying and crying and no one coming to her. I was lucky. My illness hadn’t spread throughout my entire sense of reasoning. I was certain that my husband would agree that my nonexistence would be the best solution for everyone, however on a strange impulse I decided to tell someone how I was feeling. I searched the phonebook and sourced a suitable number at the hospital. I called them and spoke to a nurse about my psychotic symptoms and how I was planning my suicide. I could tell from their panicked reaction that they did not think that my symptoms were normal and that my reasoning on suicide was ‘correct’. I was glad then that I had called although I was confused and surprised that no one agreed with my logic. How could they not see? I was whisked here there and everywhere to get psychological treatment and my husband implored me to listen to him because my brain wasn’t well for the time being. So I put my own convictions aside and trusted in him and trusted his judgement; I relinquished my independent thinking for the first time in my life and put myself 100% in his hands. When not existing was no longer a valid option, the pain began. I hadn’t been able to feel anything in months. I had forgotten what ‘feeling’ was like. I had been experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations as a part of my psychosis and now I began to hallucinate pain. Did you know that scientists found under MRI testing that a person who is hallucinating sounds is actually physically hearing them as far as their brain is concerned? I don’t know if they have tested hallucinations of the pain receptors, I don’t know how common it is. The pain was real. It was the most excruciating pain that I have ever known, it was everywhere in my body, in my skin, in my organs in my hair and it didn’t stop. The excruciating pain did NOT stop. All I could do was lie on the lounge room floor and live this pain moment by moment because if I tried to think of even one minute into the future I could NOT handle this pain. I was being tortured against the rules of the Geneva Convention by my own nervous system. I was at the bottom of the fictitious well in agony. I was trapped in a body that could not move and I was suffocating because every fibre of my being needed to not exist. I was screaming soundlessly on the inside like being trapped on the operating table, my skin being sliced open by the surgeon and not being able to stop it. All of this endless, tortuous, crippling pain for something so simple- to not exist. My nervous system slowly relinquished its grasp on its internal torture devices and my time on the lounge room floor diminished. My husband and I began to watch Dexter together and play chess; they were both good distractions and it was clear that I had survived the worst of my disease and I had begun my long journey to recovery. Had I have been a different person without a bizarre sense of humour which had me making dark humoured jokes as I lie physically paralysed yet in excruciating pain on the lounge room floor; dark jokes that confused my nursing staff but allowed me to know that ‘I’ was still in there somewhere, I don’t know if I could have survived. Had my husband not held my hand, looked into my eyes and said “trust me”; and had I not trusted him, I would not be here now. If my husband was not able to take a month off work to care for me, I wouldn’t be here writing this. If I had not family, friends and a wonderful family nurse to care for me without judgement and criticism for the way that I felt, never causing me to feel belittled or isolated, I would now be dead. My daughter would still wonder if it were her who had killed her mother? My husband would be tortured with the thoughts of “If only…” And my own father would have been on the news scratching his head. But I am here, fortunately for me and my family. If you feel dead inside, tell someone. If you are planning your suicide, tell someone. If you are in the throes of the suicide horrors, they will pass. If you think someone is not quite right, ask them. If someone has reached out to you, be compassionate because they can’t snap out of it and they can’t count their blessings just yet; be sure to steer them in the direction of help. Depression is no one’s fault, it is an illness. Depression is not a weakness or a personality flaw, it is an illness. Suicide is no one’s fault, it is the end stage of depression. It is the point in which the brain has made pathways that disable normal, logical reasoning. Suicide is the result of a HUGE chemical imbalance. A suicide victim is not weak, selfish or stupid- they are ill and that is why people compare a casualty of suicide to a casualty of metastatic disease. The only way to fight this illness is through education. Let’s get talking and understanding to create a world where there are no ‘victims’ of suicide. There is already too much sadness in the world and unlike many other illnesses, this one can be both prevented and treated. Xx Char
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 10:25:16 +0000