Let's Talk About Suicide

Depression isn’t always sadness, it is often a complete lack of emotion. A numbness that leads to a soul-crushing boredom which in turn leads to a sense of detachment. It’s a boredom that isn’t helped by participating in activities. A loneliness that cannot be cured by interacting with others.

It's not just not caring, it's not having the ability to care or feel much of anything. It's like you're the same in every situation, you're at a concert and you should be excited or someone is shouting at you, but the anger just passes you by and you feel nothing.

You logically know that one is a positive experience and the other is a negative experience and so you say that you're having a good time, or you convince yourself that you care if someone is angry at you when in reality it is all just the same nothingness. The only reason you think you feel something is because you know you should, but you don’t. You can give someone with depression as many cakes, face-masks, DVD’s, and positive experiences as you want but they will still be depressed.
They may even serve as a reminder of their inability to feel joy.

So, what can you do?

Acknowledge that they are struggling.

Most of the time people with depression want you to acknowledge their problem more than they want you to find a solution.

And this lack of emotion makes interacting with people incredibly difficult. When someone tells you that they passed their exams it’s impossible for them not to notice the lack of enthusiasm in your voice when you say, “well done”. Or when they tell you that something terrible happened it’s impossible not to notice your disinterest. It’s not that you don’t want to care, you just can’t.

People seem happy enough to sympathise when people with depression stop caring about themselves but when they are incapable of caring about others they CHOOSE to stop caring about you. But this is another thing that can result from depression and it doesn’t mean that they are selfish or unkind, it’s just another symptom of their illness.

People with depression still deserve love even if they seem full of hate.
People with depression deserve help even if they are resisting it.

I’m not saying that you deserve to be the subject of their hate but try to remember that for the most part it isn’t personal and they probably hate themselves 10 times more because of how they are treating you.

I subconsciously tried to convince myself that I hated all of my friends and family because if I hated them enough I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about leaving them. I wouldn’t have to feel bad about killing myself. And the only reason I am still here is because people continued to love me when I tried to hate them.

The only reason I am still alive is because some people took a step towards me when I took two steps back.

So, I’m not stronger because I’m still alive because taking your own life isn’t ‘easy’ or ‘weak’. As far as I can tell, the only difference is that one group believes that their death would cause more harm and the other thinks that people would be better off without them.

People don’t kill themselves, suicide kills people.

I wish you didn’t have to be ‘at risk’ for people to care. I wish people cared whether someone is living in misery, not just because they might die prematurely. I wish people cared before it was too late.

As far as I can tell, survival depends on taking one day at a time, knowing that people love you even if you think it would be easier if they didn’t and being able to ignore how meaningless you believe everything is.

The truth is, nobody can guarantee that everything isn’t meaningless but:
1. There is the possibility that it isn’t meaningless and surely that’s enough to keep living?
2. If everything is meaningless then you might as well cut out the things that make you unhappy because they don’t matter either. Instead of saying ‘What’s the point in doing anything because everything is meaningless’ say ‘Yes! Nothing really matters so I might as well take risks and eat cake and put myself out there because even if I mess up it doesn’t matter!’

Wanting to die is a lot like walking through a completely white corridor. When you enter, you think that there must be some colour somewhere, so you keep walking forward. You may walk for years and whilst some people think that this proves that there is simply no colour, others think that you might as well keep walking, even if you aren’t convinced that there is any colour to find.

When you feel nothing, life seems meaningless because it wouldn’t matter if you were lying in bed or skydiving, at a party or at home, it’s all the same nothingness. You would still feel numb. You try to go out and have a good time but the only thing you feel is a frustration at the inability to enjoy yourself. Whether you go out and do things or not doesn’t matter because you don’t feel anything either way and so life just seems unbelievably boring and meaningless.

So, saying “but you have so much to live for” won’t help someone who doesn’t care about living. You think you have nothing to look forward to, regardless of what could happen because everything ‘feels’ the same.

Reminding someone that many others want to live but don’t have the choice won’t help because those people want to live and so this will only push them further away. Saying “things will get better” doesn’t matter when you feel the same regardless of what’s going on around you. But things will get better but it’s not because you can leave school soon, or because you may get a promotion, or go on a holiday, things will get better because with time your ability to feel and enjoy things will eventually return.

When somebody does kill themselves, saying that it was “such a waste” only presents the idea that people are only worth as much as they provide for the world– that a life only means something if it is productive. But that’s not true. You do not exist for other people. You are not here to make your parents proud, or to help others or to be a valuable contributor to the community. These are things you may want to do but if you don’t, you still deserve to live.

And I didn’t really want to kill myself, I just didn’t want to be alive. I thought maybe I’d get lucky and be hit by a car. But what if it paralysed me instead? Anyway, that would probably be painful and I didn’t exactly want pain, which is why the thought of just falling asleep and not waking up was so comforting to me. Simply not waking up would have been extremely convenient. But I did wake up. Every morning I woke up and began every day disappointed that I was still alive.

“I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

I felt incredibly guilty for not wanting to be alive when there were so many people fighting to live another day. I thought the world was playing a cruel joke by taking a life from someone who would do anything for it and giving one to me.

Once, I told somebody how badly I wished I was in a coma. Understandably, this was met with shrieks of horror and anger because out of context that is an awful thing to say. Obviously, the ideal was to be happy, not dead or in a coma, but that didn’t seem possible.

Sometimes I thought I was happy, because I was in a situation or doing something which was supposed to be accompanied by happiness, and it just didn’t seem worth it. So I would think, ‘If this is happiness then what’s the point?’

Reading this must be very strange if you’ve never felt this way before because humans are designed to survive. When deprived of food your blood will have very little glucose and so your body fights for survival by compromising, breaking down fat for energy. Our immune system is designed to recognise cells that make up our bodies and fight for survival by repelling foreign invaders, like viruses.

That’s why feeling this way is so peculiar, because every cell in your body is still fighting for your survival, even when you wish it wasn’t. But as clichéd as it sounds, it does get better, even if that is simply regaining the ability to care about whether you live or die.   

I just want to say that unless you have ever truly wanted to die, you will not fully understand what it’s like. I’m not trying to say that your pain is any less important and you can still sympathise but you won’t truly grasp the heaviness of wanting to die unless you have carried it yourself. And although I’m trying to help people understand it a little better, if you don’t completely understand, I am thankful.

I want people to realise that if you hate what you’re reading you don’t have to throw the entire book in the fire, you can choose to tear out a few carefully selected pages. Remove and rewrite the parts that you don’t like. If you want to kill yourself, kill what you don't like. Because maybe, just maybe, you don’t actually want to die. Maybe you want to start living.

“Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

UK & Ireland – The Samaritans - 116 123

Northern Ireland Lifeline - 0808 808 8000

America – The Samaritans - 1 (800) 273-TALK

Australia – LifeLine - 1-300-13-11-14

Netherlands – National Crisis Line - 0900-1450

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If you liked this post, you may also like my post on staying alive.