Then I was free. Eventually, I made my way home. It was past midnight by the time I grabbed the plastic jug of bright-blue antifreeze from its spot in the bathroom, poured it into a pair of oversized pottery mugs. I placed the mugs of poison on the floor beside my burgundy futon-couch. I recall keeping the newspaper fanned out in sections beside me. As a prop? Did suicide seem less pathetic if I just pretended I was catching up on world news?
I swallowed the fistful of pills first, waited expectantly. I remember registering disappointment in their inefficacy before consciousness and memory dropped off a cliff. Which, sure. Recollections return in uneven swatches. Sleeping pills, even when taken as directed and not downed like peanuts, are one hell of an amnesic. Now, when I try to pull memories out for reinspection, I find them frayed, viewed through a lens messily smeared with Vaseline.
Some reappear in high definition much later: the way I tried to read a book in my ICU bed only to find the words bounced as my squinted eyes stung and watered, unfocused.
What do you tell the people you love about the thing you did that caused them pain? You have abashed phone conversations with your Calgarian grandparents. You hold your breath and avoid the topic altogether. After two or three days in the ICU , they put me in the short-term psych ward. Introverted at my best, I spent my institutionalized time impotently attempting to construct personal spaces. As my eyes improved, I resorted to my childhood proclivity for disappearing into books, pulling my consciousness through that escape hatch and shutting it behind me.
Go, sixty-eight-year-old Caucasian man with short brown hair last seen wearing hospital pants and a brown wool cardigan and no shoes! Days were divided between Visiting Hours and Everything Else. The five of us—my parents, brother, sister, and I—went outside the hospital for meals and pretended everything was fine. Their outward resilience and our collective ability to laugh at the most horrible things helped me get through without choking on my own guilt. Most of my psych-ward time was deadly cabin fever: marathon pacing, ear-splitting earbud music, books that were never escapist enough to hold my splintered attention for long.
I spent interminable minutes in a luminescent white Space Odyssey cocoon whose broad vocabulary of echoing blurps and bloops mimicked the sound effects of a retro sci-fi film. I learned the less-than-uplifting result of this diversion days later. An otherworldly neurologist—wide blue eyes growing wider, syncopated Scandinavian-accented voice slowing as she spoke—walked me through a series of white blobs I was told depicted my brain.
I learned through later googling that, once in your system, the methanol in antifreeze metabolizes into formic acid, which can prevent your cells from grabbing and using the oxygen they need, ultimately killing you within about thirty-six hours. Your optic nerve and basal ganglia can be among the first bodily bits badly damaged in this process—either directly poisoned by formic acid or suffocated by lack of oxygen.
Depending how badly damaged they are, you could be blind or shaky and off balance for the rest of your life. I was sure if I just acted normal enough they would let me go. I tried to be courteous, lucid and calm but not suspiciously upbeat. I met, as required, multiple times a day with nurses and social workers. The second psychiatrist was smart and sardonic and treated me like someone capable of communicating in multisyllabic sentences. He also had a far better bullshit detector. He did not buy my argument that this whole suicide thing was an anomalous one-off, a mental misunderstanding, never to recur.
He decided I had major depression. And that I was fucked up enough to merit more time locked up lest I try to off myself again. E ight hundred thousand people around the world kill themselves every year, which means about 2, a day, or three every two minutes.
Statistically, two dozen people killed themselves in the time it took you to get out of bed, showered, and caffeinated. Maybe forty-five during your commute to work, another ninety in the time you spent making dinner. Unless you, like me, take an eternity to do any of those things, if they happen at all. In which case, think of it this way: every time you mull killing yourself and manage to talk yourself down because you have more to do and more to ask of life, a handful of people have lost that internal, wrenching wrestling match and ended it.
Many, many more people try to kill themselves than actually do it—about half a million Americans are brought to emergency rooms every year after having tried to end their lives. For one thing, despite the supposed decrease in shame in having a family member kill themselves, our persistent societal freak-out regarding suicide can make both relatives and authorities hesitant to classify deaths as such.
Even if they had at some point in the past, how do you know this specific incident was a suicide? If someone is depressed, even suicidal, but also misuses drugs, how do you know for sure whether an overdose is purposeful? How do you know for sure whether a single-vehicle crash was careless driving or driven by a need for death? How can you be certain whether someone slipped or jumped?
Grieving families would frequently prefer not to touch the issue. Suicide deaths are also examined a lot less closely, on average: a report found that about 55 percent of US suicide deaths get autopsied, compared to 92 percent of homicides. Another study, which examined autopsy rates in thirty-five countries across Europe, the Mediterranean, and Central Asia similarly found that higher autopsy rates were correlated with higher suicide rates.
Volunteer Events Programs Updates. About the AFSP Idaho Chapter The grassroots work we do focuses on eliminating the loss of life from suicide by: delivering innovative prevention programs, educating the public about risk factors and warning signs, raising funds for suicide research and programs, and reaching out to those individuals who have lost someone to suicide.
Looking for even more? Idaho Facebook Idaho Instagram. Swipe for mental health resources to support our Native and Indigenous communities. We'll be screening our documentary "Family Journeys: Healing and Hope after a Suicide" and hosting a discussion with suicide loss survivors.
We hope to see you there! This VeteransDay, we're thinking of our Veterans and Servicemembers. At the end of my rope, I turned to Google. Scrolling through post after post, I realized that actually, a lot of people understood. A lot of people knew what it was like to not want to be here anymore but not want to die. We had all typed in the question with one expectation: answers. And answers meant we wanted to know what to do with our feelings instead of ending our lives.
And maybe, I hoped, that meant that deep down, we all wanted to hold on to see if things could get better. And that we could. My mind had been clouded by the anxiety, despair, monotony, and a relationship that was slowly destroying me.
To look at how things could get better if I attempted to make changes. The reason I thought I was just existing was because I really was. I was miserable and I was stuck. But I did start to make changes. I started to see a therapist, who helped me gain some perspective. My toxic relationship ended. I was devastated about it, but things improved so quickly as I started to exercise my independence. Yes, I still got up every morning and made the bed, but the rest of the day would be at my hands, and slowly but surely, that started to excite me.
I think a huge part of feeling as though I was just some form of existence was because my life was so predictable. Now that that had been taken away, everything seemed new and exciting. With time, I felt like I was living again, and most importantly, that I had and have a life worth living. But knowing that I got through this truly difficult time in my life gives me the motivation to get through any other bad moments again.
I know that better than most. But I promise you things can and often do get better. You just have to hold on to that doubt, however small it might be. And speaking from experience, I can assure you that small, nagging feeling is telling you the truth.
Hattie Gladwell is a mental health journalist, author, and advocate.
0コメント