On Contemplating Suicide

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Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell

If there were some little switch in the arm which one could press in order to die immediately and without pain, then everyone would sooner or later commit suicide.

- Robert Lowell

As human beings, we can contemplate our mortality. We learn about death. We see it as children after a pet is put down, or a family member passes and we’re stuffed into suits or dresses and forced to be quiet for reasons we’re not completely sure about. But we know those reasons are serious.

Eventually we learn that everything alive will die. Quickly followed by the realization that we are alive and, as such, are not exempt from this rule.

Since we can imagine our own death we can also imagine taking our own lives, and I wager that every person who lives long enough to imagine dying also thinks, maybe just once, about killing themselves. Sure it may not be as detailed as, “I will slit my wrists and bleed out,” but along the lines of, “The world would be better off without me,” or, “I hope the plane I’m on will crash.”

We’re all human. We’ve read enough, heard enough, and seen enough about the inevitability of death. And each of us has likely had a passing thought about not being among the living anymore. It’s normal. It means you are alive enough to devote a few brain cells to contemplate how you will leave this world. Despite Mr. Lowell’s quote, human beings have an innate fear of death and a strong inclination to delay its arrival. 

We are alive because our ancestors fought to survive in environments more dangerous than anything we could possibly imagine. Survival is in our genes, and bypassing that instinct is terribly difficult.

Tightrope_walking.jpg

But now, I am on the difficult tightrope of NOT romanticizing suicide. Because it is difficult to do, managing to do it could be considered an accomplishment to a distorted mind. It certainly was for me. Romantic ideas are why people consider jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. As Dr. Thomas Joiner writes in Why People Die By Suicide:

Why does it matter that one’s location of death be beautiful? One possibility is the merging of needs for nurturance and death that occurs in the suicidal mind.

For me, it was the desire for order.  Since I felt that I lacked control over any aspect of my life, there was a romantic idea that I could make the end of my life entirely the way I wanted. Ideas turned into fantasies, fantasies into obsessions, and obsessions into plans. 

Thoughts, by themselves are harmless. I can think about jumping off something really high without consequence, but if I start figuring out the details, that is when the danger starts. It’s the same as any goal a person thinks about. I can think about becoming say, an electrician, but if I don’t do anything to make those thoughts manifest in reality then I’m just thinking and there is very little chance that I’m going to stumble into the profession without any work.

The big difference between thinking about suicide and thinking about starting a career as an electrician is that most people will hide the former and pronounce the later. 

If I say to my friends: “I’m thinking about starting a new career as an electrician,” and they say “Whoa, okay cool. What’re you doing to make that happen?” If I don’t have an answer I’m probably not that serious about it.

Same with if I say to my friends: “I don’t want to be here anymore,”  and they say “What do you mean? Do you have a plan to hurt yourself?”

I might say: “I wouldn’t go that far; I’m just really sad and tired all the time.” 

Or I might say: “Kinda, I mean I’ve been looking up hotels downtown with luxury balcony suites, but I’m not doing anything.”

The former is a feeling, an idea, a concept.

The latter is the first concrete proof of a plan. Both need to be addressed, but the tact will be different.

Learn more about the warning signs of suicide and resources available to family and friends with concerns at:

https://afsp.org/about-suicide/risk-factors-and-warning-signs/

Donate to my Team “This Too Shall Pass” for the AFSP Out of the Darkness Walk in Baltimore on 11/3 at

https://afsp.donordrive.com/participant/Gordon-Corsetti


Know Your Enemy

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I am obsessed with learning about depression, anxiety, and suicide. I believe that educating myself about the disorders I have helps me battle my dark thoughts. For many years I resisted the thought that I had any mental illness. I thought that mental illness was a “tough it out” illness; thing is, you cannot battle something you do not understand. So I endeavor to know the enemy within myself.

Edwin Shneidman

Edwin Shneidman

I discovered several books that helped me wrap my head around how a suicidally depressed person copes with thoughts of killing themselves.

The very first book I dug into was “The Suicidal Mind” by Dr. Edwin Shneidman. Dr. Shneidman was a professor of Thanatology (the study of death) at Emeritus University in Los Angeles, California, and “The Suicidal Mind” was the culmination of years of work studying suicide notes left behind by those that had committed their final act. 

This quote from “The Suicidal Mind” accurately describes what I craved while planning my death:

“Perturbation is felt pain; lethality relates to the idea of death (nothingness, cessation) as the solution. By itself, mental anguish is not lethal. But lethality, when coupled with elevated perturbation, is a principal ingredient in self-inflicted death. Perturbation supplies the motivation for suicide; lethality is the fatal trigger. Lethality - the idea that ‘I can stop this pain; I can kill myself’ - is the unique essence of suicide anybody who has ever switched off an electric light deliberately to plunge a hideous room into darkness, or with equal deliberation, stopped the action of an annoying engine by turning the key to OFF, has, for that moment been granted the swift satisfaction the suicidal person hungers for. After all, the suicidal person intends to stop the ongoing activities of life.”

The great thing about Dr. Shneidman’s writings was that he didn’t just lift the veil, he also described how to help a suicidal person:

“The sad and dangerous fact is that in a state of constriction, the usual life-sustaining responsibilities toward loved ones are not merely disregarded; much worse. They are sometimes not even within the range of what is in the mind. A person who commits suicide turns off all ties to the past, declares a kind of mental bankruptcy, and his or her memories have no lien. These memories can no longer save him; he is beyond their reach. Any attempt at rescue has to deal, from the first, with the suicidal person’s psychological constriction. The challenge and the task are clear: Open up the possibilities, widen the perceptual blinders.”

I had a definition of suicidal action (perturbation and lethality) and how to help myself (widen the blinders on my mind). That however, wasn’t enough. I needed more so I kept reading more books.

After reading about various experiences with mental illness and suicide attempts I no longer felt alone. I felt in the company of some truly remarkable people who experienced a traumatic event, but learned to overcome it.

These books lifted me up. It was no longer me versus the world. All of a sudden I had a whole bunch of people in my corner who had battled the black dog and came out of the fight stronger. The more I read, the less mysterious depression and suicide became. I learned that it was possible to successfully deal with my suicidal urges, and if other people had done it then I was certainly capable of doing the same.

Education leads to empowerment. The more you educate yourself about your mental illness the better equipped you become at dealing with whatever it throws at you.

There is a critical thing that I learned from all of my readings. I am not my diagnosis.

This is the most empowering concept that I learned. Not being my diagnosis meant that I could do something about it. It was possible for me to change and overcome the cards that genetics dealt me.

All I had to do was apply myself and fight like hell.