November 19th is International Survivors of Suicide Day
Originally posted by sweetmusic_27 at November 19th is International Survivors of Suicide Day
November 19th is International Survivors of Suicide Day.
Pretty terrible-sounding holiday, huh.
I know this is a difficult topic, but I'd like to talk about it. In a little over five weeks, it will be a year since my mother killed herself. I'm still coming to terms with that. I'll probably be coming to terms with it for my entire life.
Just as my mother and her brothers spent their lives coming to terms with their father's suicide.
Just as my maternal uncle's children spent their lives coming to terms with his suicide.
Just as I pray my sister's children will never have to do, nor any of my family, even though both of us struggle with the sorts of issues my mother did.
Here's how I look at it: There's a sickness you can get. And sometimes, it's fatal. It takes over your mind and body and you die from it.
Some people have this sickness temporarily, some fight with it their whole lives, and in some people it's hereditary. We don't really know how it spreads, why it exists, what combination of nature and nurture conspire to make a person a breeding ground for it, or how this disease is related to other, more positive evolutionary adaptive traits.
But when somebody dies from this sickness, we try not to talk about it too much.
And I'm not saying that this sickness is depression. Depression is a higher risk factor, but still a risk factor like many others; most depressed people don't kill themselves, and a significant number (about a third) of people who kill themselves are not depressed. (Nor am I saying that people who commit suicide are mentally healthy - more than 90% are suffering from some sort of mental disorder - I'm just saying that depression as we know and describe it currently is not always the culprit.)
What is the culprit? Well, there's a mnemonic list of risk factors and warning signs, namely, "IS PATH WARM," which I don't think is particularly memorable, but it's better than nothing:
I Ideation
S Substance Abuse
P Purposelessness
A Anxiety
T Trapped
H Hopelessness
W Withdrawal
A Anger
R Recklessness
M Mood Changes
The letter I find most helpful in this whole mnemonic is T, for trapped. After my mother died, a lot of people told me that suicide is selfish.
It's not.
The best word I can think of is "narrow." People have... a mental house to live in. There are different rooms with different functions, and there are renovations, and sometimes they hang out more in one room or another, but there are options, places to go, things to do, ways to make things work differently. There are a lot of ways you can use this metaphor to describe various mental problems, with similarly varying degrees of success, but my point is that my mother's mental house faded around the edges. Room by room, the space available to her shrank until she was left a hallway. Maybe there had been some things in it, but it just got smaller and smaller. It's not that she was thinking of herself; it's that she couldn't think of anyone, anything.
There's another myth that any people in that trapped place, people who have come to a point where they see suicide as the only way out, will just keep making attempts until they reach their goal. That's very rarely true. It may well have been true of my mother, but I'll never know for sure. She was atypical in many, many ways.
And, in some ways, typically atypical. Which is to say, her death had a lot of "normal" characteristics that aren't normal at all. It's a commonly held belief that suicides occur more heavily around the winter holidays, and hers did, but more suicides actually occur in the spring. Some people think that suicides always leave a note. She did-- three notes, actually. But from what I understand, about two-thirds of suicides don't.
I'm making this post public because suicide isn't something we talk about very much. It's less of a taboo now, which is why I'm not as monumentally fucked up as I would have been, had this happened, say, forty years ago. But it's still something we don't talk about.
And my mother deserved better than that when her father died. She deserves better than that for how she lived and died.
I think we all deserve better.
So, I'm saying something I didn't have the courage to say in a public post almost 11 months ago. This is what happened: My mother killed herself. She took some sleeping pills, went down to the basement, put a bag over her head, and used a tank of helium and a tube to fill the bag with gas she breathed instead of air. This is a method described in the book Final Exit, which I purchased and sent to her*.
On October 22 of last year, I was in town for a conference and my mother and I went to run an errand, and we had a disturbing conversation in the car. The conversation started when she said a couple of things darkly that I didn't get, and then said, "[my S.O.] won't give me my gun." Then I got it. Then we started talking about it. It was strange. It was a conversation in fits and starts and vagueness. I tried to be open and supportive and as factual as I knew how in response to my mother considering suicide methods from anecdotes and half-remembered news stories. She mentioned antifreeze, and I was terrified. But when I was a child, and had questions, she had answered them as best she knew how, no matter what. So I did the best I could, because that's what she'd taught me.
I asked her to wait so I could at least do some research. She said "How long?" and I asked her to give me a month or two, to ask around, check on the internet. I remember now that she said she'd like to be dead by December 15, and I said, "Before Christmas, really? Why not after Christmas?" And she said, "How soon after Christmas?" and I said something like, "I don't know, between Christmas and New Year's? This really isn't my area of expertise, Mom."
"That's not a very big window," she complained.
"Just give me some time to do some research, I'm not saying you have to do anything at any certain time, just... give me a month, okay?"
I realize now that she took my advice. I was half-stalling and half-trying to find conclusive arguments against drinking antifreeze! I didn't mean it to be advice. I didn't want it to be advice. That's ridiculous. Did she take it to heart? I haven't the slightest.
Over the next month or so, she'd ask me on the phone: "Have you found anything?" And sometimes I'd have no idea what she was talking about, and sometimes there'd be no question.
Eventually I told her about Final Exit, and she asked me to order it for her. So I did. It arrived. I read it. I showed it to my husband and my best friend, who was in town visiting the weekend after Thanksgiving. I explained why I thought sending it was a good idea. I made myself look at the diagram for the Exit bag method again. I showed it to my friend after telling her about the book, and said, "but this is disturbing, no matter what."
And then I mailed it to my mother, along with some of her favorite soap. She got it. About a week later, she said she'd read it and didn't really like it. Something about the tone of it, she said. [Probably the way the book stringently counsels the use of these methods with the support of friends and family, says that people shouldn’t have to die alone or in pain, that the methods within are only for the terminal or hopelessly physically ill, competent adult, and encourages otherwise troubled people to seek help, and tells them the book is not for them.*]
Her dislike of it made me feel a little better, a little hopeful. Then my psychiatrist encouraged me to write my mother a letter, saying flat-out that I didn't want her to kill herself and explaining why she was important to me. I did, I wrote it, though it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. I sent it. She got it. I mailed it on Wednesday the 22nd. I talked to Mom on Christmas Day. We talked about food, of course. I was making a standing rib roast, she was making soup. We talked about cake, and garlic, and at one point she said, "I got your letter. It was sweet." I didn't know it'd get there that fast. I just said, "Oh. I'm... glad." I said it awkwardly. I wasn't really comfortable saying those things to my mom. I knew they needed to be said. I feel a little ashamed, now, for being uncomfortable. But at least I sent it; at least she knew. In it, I explained that she had been my greatest teacher and role model. I ended my letter by saying, "You have the right to make your own decisions about your own life, or the lack thereof. I wouldn't contradict that, either. But if there's some part of you that imagines, in your sickness, that every choice you've made in your life has been a bad one and everyone will get on fine without you [things she'd told me recently], you are simply wrong. I love you. I don't want you to die."
The following day I went to work. Everything was normal until about two. I noticed I had a voicemail, and surreptitiously checked. It was a message from my mother's S.O. Urgent. Call home. I warned my boss, who was the only other person on shift that day. She said it was fine.
Twenty-five minutes later, I had to come out of the office and explain why that took so long. I had to talk to Mom’s S.O. Then I had to hang up and call my sister. I had to tell my sister my mother died. She killed herself early in the morning on Boxing Day. She put a bag over her head and breathed helium from a little red tank for inflating balloons. She used a method from a book I gave her. I had to tell my sister that, too. I was terrified she'd hate me for it. She didn't even let me finish my sentence. She said something like, "Don't. Don't blame yourself, don't you dare blame yourself. If that helped her, that means we're not driving to Ohio trying to donate kidneys she wouldn't even want; we're not having to pull the plug because she missed and her body's hanging on. A book didn't do this. If anything, I'm glad, Amy. I’m glad it made her be kind to herself and us."
My sister is a smart woman. I agree with her. I am learning to stand on my own. I am learning just how strong I can be when my world changes in profound and terrible ways.
A day later, I was home. I had to meet with my sister and go home and see the things my mother had laid out. The letter I’d sent her. A letter she’d gotten from my sister about a year ago, in another time of strife. A couple of cards. Photo albums. It was as if she had reviewed the available literature of her life one last time to make an informed decision. As soon as I got to the house, I asked if I could see my note. Mom had left notes. The specter of that note had been hanging over my head. What would it say? What could a little piece of paper possibly say to explain that she was a person, the person who made me, and that she had decided to stop, just stop being? I didn’t even get the note she wrote; I had to read a copy, because the police had taken the originals. I read it and made the most hideous, breathless, hysterical, inhuman noises I've ever heard from my own mouth. Not because of what it said so much as what it meant. She was really gone. This was it. This was what I got. Not my mother. A piece of paper. My mother was gone. The note wasn’t much; apologies and a request that I “lead the charge to pull the plug” if she was unsuccessful in her attempt. But it started with two sentences that are very important to me, two sentences that in their way are very... Mom, and very kind.
“Thank you for your letter... it was very sweet. I am not worth helping because I am too frozen in fear to accomplish anything or to want to continue.”
She acknowledged that I cared, that she understood my feelings, and she tried her best to explain why she felt she had to leave. I hold on to that, now. I try to find comfort in it because that’s all I can do. That’s all anyone can do in the wake of a suicide. Just hold on and find little things that showed that person cared for you, little things that showed that person knew you cared back, and try to forgive. Try to forgive yourself for all the things that occur to you that make you think you didn’t do enough, try to forgive life for being so hard that it made someone snap, try to forgive the person you love for having had you and life and then choosing to walk away from both.
In my family, we experience our first suicidal ideations somewhere after puberty and before turning 21. I have spent a lot of my life becoming comfortable with that. In fact, you might even say I'm hypervigilant. I take my pills and talk to my psychiatrist and have a vast and reliable support group and have worked very hard to maintain a healthy sense of self-worth. These things have helped me on my own and in the wake of my mother's suicide. And in my family, it’s not a word we’re afraid to say. If there’s a stigma attached to suicide, it’s one we’ve already experienced with previous deaths. Because of that, I was able to talk to my mom about it when she asked me questions. I was able to talk to my psychiatrist about it. I was able to talk to my sister. When I had to tell my cousins and uncles, I didn’t have to be afraid that they would shun me.
But there are a lot of people who haven't had any reason to be vigilant. (Thank goodness.) There are a lot of people who think suicide is a bad word. There are a lot of people who can’t talk to anyone about it, who think there’s something wrong with them for even considering it.
Suicide is a medical condition, not a weakness. As I said before, there's a sickness you can get, and it's not rare. As many as one in six people become seriously suicidal at some point in their lives. And sometimes, it's fatal. It takes over your mind and body and you die from it. It doesn't have anything to do with your strength of character, although to die from it you have to be courageous.
Suicide is a medical condition that is not simply explained. It is not directly or obviously caused by depression, or anxiety, or drug use, or any of the other associations and risk factors. However, most associated conditions that cause or worsen seriously suicidal thoughts can be treated.
Suicide, self-harm, and self-medicating are three very different things, but because they’re all under the shameful umbrella of “hurting yourself,” a lot of people won’t admit that they think about any of them, let alone consider getting help.
Talking about suicide does not cause someone to be suicidal. If you're worried about someone, it is safe to bring up the topic of suicide.
If you're suicidal, there are people who can help. If you know someone who is suicidal, you can help. If you're not suicidal and you don't know anybody who's suicidal, the odds are that somebody in your life will be or has been before, and you can still help by being willing to educate yourself and others. There are a lot of bad myths surrounding suicide, and a lot of people unwilling to even think about it as a concept because it's taboo.
Please consider looking at:
Thank you for reading. I know that this is a confusing and difficult subject, but I feel it’s one that people should be able to talk about. Today, I’ve decided that “people” starts with me. I’m sorry I didn’t feel comfortable saying all of this earlier. And finally, the scary parts: Feel free to link back to this. Feel free to talk to me about suicide. Feel free to comment anonymously on this post (trolling and hate speech will be deleted).
November 19th is International Survivors of Suicide Day.
Pretty terrible-sounding holiday, huh.
I know this is a difficult topic, but I'd like to talk about it. In a little over five weeks, it will be a year since my mother killed herself. I'm still coming to terms with that. I'll probably be coming to terms with it for my entire life.
Just as my mother and her brothers spent their lives coming to terms with their father's suicide.
Just as my maternal uncle's children spent their lives coming to terms with his suicide.
Just as I pray my sister's children will never have to do, nor any of my family, even though both of us struggle with the sorts of issues my mother did.
Here's how I look at it: There's a sickness you can get. And sometimes, it's fatal. It takes over your mind and body and you die from it.
Some people have this sickness temporarily, some fight with it their whole lives, and in some people it's hereditary. We don't really know how it spreads, why it exists, what combination of nature and nurture conspire to make a person a breeding ground for it, or how this disease is related to other, more positive evolutionary adaptive traits.
But when somebody dies from this sickness, we try not to talk about it too much.
And I'm not saying that this sickness is depression. Depression is a higher risk factor, but still a risk factor like many others; most depressed people don't kill themselves, and a significant number (about a third) of people who kill themselves are not depressed. (Nor am I saying that people who commit suicide are mentally healthy - more than 90% are suffering from some sort of mental disorder - I'm just saying that depression as we know and describe it currently is not always the culprit.)
What is the culprit? Well, there's a mnemonic list of risk factors and warning signs, namely, "IS PATH WARM," which I don't think is particularly memorable, but it's better than nothing:
I Ideation
S Substance Abuse
P Purposelessness
A Anxiety
T Trapped
H Hopelessness
W Withdrawal
A Anger
R Recklessness
M Mood Changes
The letter I find most helpful in this whole mnemonic is T, for trapped. After my mother died, a lot of people told me that suicide is selfish.
It's not.
The best word I can think of is "narrow." People have... a mental house to live in. There are different rooms with different functions, and there are renovations, and sometimes they hang out more in one room or another, but there are options, places to go, things to do, ways to make things work differently. There are a lot of ways you can use this metaphor to describe various mental problems, with similarly varying degrees of success, but my point is that my mother's mental house faded around the edges. Room by room, the space available to her shrank until she was left a hallway. Maybe there had been some things in it, but it just got smaller and smaller. It's not that she was thinking of herself; it's that she couldn't think of anyone, anything.
There's another myth that any people in that trapped place, people who have come to a point where they see suicide as the only way out, will just keep making attempts until they reach their goal. That's very rarely true. It may well have been true of my mother, but I'll never know for sure. She was atypical in many, many ways.
And, in some ways, typically atypical. Which is to say, her death had a lot of "normal" characteristics that aren't normal at all. It's a commonly held belief that suicides occur more heavily around the winter holidays, and hers did, but more suicides actually occur in the spring. Some people think that suicides always leave a note. She did-- three notes, actually. But from what I understand, about two-thirds of suicides don't.
I'm making this post public because suicide isn't something we talk about very much. It's less of a taboo now, which is why I'm not as monumentally fucked up as I would have been, had this happened, say, forty years ago. But it's still something we don't talk about.
And my mother deserved better than that when her father died. She deserves better than that for how she lived and died.
I think we all deserve better.
So, I'm saying something I didn't have the courage to say in a public post almost 11 months ago. This is what happened: My mother killed herself. She took some sleeping pills, went down to the basement, put a bag over her head, and used a tank of helium and a tube to fill the bag with gas she breathed instead of air. This is a method described in the book Final Exit, which I purchased and sent to her*.
On October 22 of last year, I was in town for a conference and my mother and I went to run an errand, and we had a disturbing conversation in the car. The conversation started when she said a couple of things darkly that I didn't get, and then said, "[my S.O.] won't give me my gun." Then I got it. Then we started talking about it. It was strange. It was a conversation in fits and starts and vagueness. I tried to be open and supportive and as factual as I knew how in response to my mother considering suicide methods from anecdotes and half-remembered news stories. She mentioned antifreeze, and I was terrified. But when I was a child, and had questions, she had answered them as best she knew how, no matter what. So I did the best I could, because that's what she'd taught me.
I asked her to wait so I could at least do some research. She said "How long?" and I asked her to give me a month or two, to ask around, check on the internet. I remember now that she said she'd like to be dead by December 15, and I said, "Before Christmas, really? Why not after Christmas?" And she said, "How soon after Christmas?" and I said something like, "I don't know, between Christmas and New Year's? This really isn't my area of expertise, Mom."
"That's not a very big window," she complained.
"Just give me some time to do some research, I'm not saying you have to do anything at any certain time, just... give me a month, okay?"
I realize now that she took my advice. I was half-stalling and half-trying to find conclusive arguments against drinking antifreeze! I didn't mean it to be advice. I didn't want it to be advice. That's ridiculous. Did she take it to heart? I haven't the slightest.
Over the next month or so, she'd ask me on the phone: "Have you found anything?" And sometimes I'd have no idea what she was talking about, and sometimes there'd be no question.
Eventually I told her about Final Exit, and she asked me to order it for her. So I did. It arrived. I read it. I showed it to my husband and my best friend, who was in town visiting the weekend after Thanksgiving. I explained why I thought sending it was a good idea. I made myself look at the diagram for the Exit bag method again. I showed it to my friend after telling her about the book, and said, "but this is disturbing, no matter what."
And then I mailed it to my mother, along with some of her favorite soap. She got it. About a week later, she said she'd read it and didn't really like it. Something about the tone of it, she said. [Probably the way the book stringently counsels the use of these methods with the support of friends and family, says that people shouldn’t have to die alone or in pain, that the methods within are only for the terminal or hopelessly physically ill, competent adult, and encourages otherwise troubled people to seek help, and tells them the book is not for them.*]
Her dislike of it made me feel a little better, a little hopeful. Then my psychiatrist encouraged me to write my mother a letter, saying flat-out that I didn't want her to kill herself and explaining why she was important to me. I did, I wrote it, though it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. I sent it. She got it. I mailed it on Wednesday the 22nd. I talked to Mom on Christmas Day. We talked about food, of course. I was making a standing rib roast, she was making soup. We talked about cake, and garlic, and at one point she said, "I got your letter. It was sweet." I didn't know it'd get there that fast. I just said, "Oh. I'm... glad." I said it awkwardly. I wasn't really comfortable saying those things to my mom. I knew they needed to be said. I feel a little ashamed, now, for being uncomfortable. But at least I sent it; at least she knew. In it, I explained that she had been my greatest teacher and role model. I ended my letter by saying, "You have the right to make your own decisions about your own life, or the lack thereof. I wouldn't contradict that, either. But if there's some part of you that imagines, in your sickness, that every choice you've made in your life has been a bad one and everyone will get on fine without you [things she'd told me recently], you are simply wrong. I love you. I don't want you to die."
The following day I went to work. Everything was normal until about two. I noticed I had a voicemail, and surreptitiously checked. It was a message from my mother's S.O. Urgent. Call home. I warned my boss, who was the only other person on shift that day. She said it was fine.
Twenty-five minutes later, I had to come out of the office and explain why that took so long. I had to talk to Mom’s S.O. Then I had to hang up and call my sister. I had to tell my sister my mother died. She killed herself early in the morning on Boxing Day. She put a bag over her head and breathed helium from a little red tank for inflating balloons. She used a method from a book I gave her. I had to tell my sister that, too. I was terrified she'd hate me for it. She didn't even let me finish my sentence. She said something like, "Don't. Don't blame yourself, don't you dare blame yourself. If that helped her, that means we're not driving to Ohio trying to donate kidneys she wouldn't even want; we're not having to pull the plug because she missed and her body's hanging on. A book didn't do this. If anything, I'm glad, Amy. I’m glad it made her be kind to herself and us."
My sister is a smart woman. I agree with her. I am learning to stand on my own. I am learning just how strong I can be when my world changes in profound and terrible ways.
A day later, I was home. I had to meet with my sister and go home and see the things my mother had laid out. The letter I’d sent her. A letter she’d gotten from my sister about a year ago, in another time of strife. A couple of cards. Photo albums. It was as if she had reviewed the available literature of her life one last time to make an informed decision. As soon as I got to the house, I asked if I could see my note. Mom had left notes. The specter of that note had been hanging over my head. What would it say? What could a little piece of paper possibly say to explain that she was a person, the person who made me, and that she had decided to stop, just stop being? I didn’t even get the note she wrote; I had to read a copy, because the police had taken the originals. I read it and made the most hideous, breathless, hysterical, inhuman noises I've ever heard from my own mouth. Not because of what it said so much as what it meant. She was really gone. This was it. This was what I got. Not my mother. A piece of paper. My mother was gone. The note wasn’t much; apologies and a request that I “lead the charge to pull the plug” if she was unsuccessful in her attempt. But it started with two sentences that are very important to me, two sentences that in their way are very... Mom, and very kind.
“Thank you for your letter... it was very sweet. I am not worth helping because I am too frozen in fear to accomplish anything or to want to continue.”
She acknowledged that I cared, that she understood my feelings, and she tried her best to explain why she felt she had to leave. I hold on to that, now. I try to find comfort in it because that’s all I can do. That’s all anyone can do in the wake of a suicide. Just hold on and find little things that showed that person cared for you, little things that showed that person knew you cared back, and try to forgive. Try to forgive yourself for all the things that occur to you that make you think you didn’t do enough, try to forgive life for being so hard that it made someone snap, try to forgive the person you love for having had you and life and then choosing to walk away from both.
In my family, we experience our first suicidal ideations somewhere after puberty and before turning 21. I have spent a lot of my life becoming comfortable with that. In fact, you might even say I'm hypervigilant. I take my pills and talk to my psychiatrist and have a vast and reliable support group and have worked very hard to maintain a healthy sense of self-worth. These things have helped me on my own and in the wake of my mother's suicide. And in my family, it’s not a word we’re afraid to say. If there’s a stigma attached to suicide, it’s one we’ve already experienced with previous deaths. Because of that, I was able to talk to my mom about it when she asked me questions. I was able to talk to my psychiatrist about it. I was able to talk to my sister. When I had to tell my cousins and uncles, I didn’t have to be afraid that they would shun me.
But there are a lot of people who haven't had any reason to be vigilant. (Thank goodness.) There are a lot of people who think suicide is a bad word. There are a lot of people who can’t talk to anyone about it, who think there’s something wrong with them for even considering it.
Suicide is a medical condition, not a weakness. As I said before, there's a sickness you can get, and it's not rare. As many as one in six people become seriously suicidal at some point in their lives. And sometimes, it's fatal. It takes over your mind and body and you die from it. It doesn't have anything to do with your strength of character, although to die from it you have to be courageous.
Suicide is a medical condition that is not simply explained. It is not directly or obviously caused by depression, or anxiety, or drug use, or any of the other associations and risk factors. However, most associated conditions that cause or worsen seriously suicidal thoughts can be treated.
Suicide, self-harm, and self-medicating are three very different things, but because they’re all under the shameful umbrella of “hurting yourself,” a lot of people won’t admit that they think about any of them, let alone consider getting help.
Talking about suicide does not cause someone to be suicidal. If you're worried about someone, it is safe to bring up the topic of suicide.
If you're suicidal, there are people who can help. If you know someone who is suicidal, you can help. If you're not suicidal and you don't know anybody who's suicidal, the odds are that somebody in your life will be or has been before, and you can still help by being willing to educate yourself and others. There are a lot of bad myths surrounding suicide, and a lot of people unwilling to even think about it as a concept because it's taboo.
Please consider looking at:
- The American Association of Suicidology's website, http://www.suicidology.org
- The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's website, http://www.afsp.org/
- The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline's website, http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ and the free and confidential 24-hour Lifeline that gives them their name, 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255) - consider programming it into your cellular phone.
- IMAlive is an online chat-based Hopeline staffed by trained volunteers - while there’s no information about suicide on their website, it is a resource worth knowing about and donating to, created by a partnership between To Write Love on Her Arms and the Kristin Brooks Hope Center, which is also the foundation which provides Hopeline, another free crisis hotline, whose number is 1-800-442-HOPE or 1-800-SUICIDE. They route to the same number.
- And for more information, I recommend Thomas Joiner's book Myths About Suicide, ISBN 9780674061989, available from Harvard University Press. I've looked at five or six different books on the subject, and I own two, and this is the most up-to-date, comprehensive, compassionate, well-researched book about suicide by far.
Thank you for reading. I know that this is a confusing and difficult subject, but I feel it’s one that people should be able to talk about. Today, I’ve decided that “people” starts with me. I’m sorry I didn’t feel comfortable saying all of this earlier. And finally, the scary parts: Feel free to link back to this. Feel free to talk to me about suicide. Feel free to comment anonymously on this post (trolling and hate speech will be deleted).