The Mysterious Melancholy of Meriwether Lewis

This day I completed my thirty first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now sorely feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. But since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least endeavor to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestowed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.

- Meriwether Lewis, Journals - August 18, 1805

Emotional tunnel vision - see a magnificent sight, and be unable to appreciate it.

Lewis wrote that on his birthday, at the continental divide. He wrote those words after seeing a sight that no white, non-native man had ever seen.

He had gone further than any American of his time, charting a course with his fellow explorer, William Clark, from the western-most border of the young American states, to the actual west cost of the North American continent.

Today, there is lively debate among historians as to Meriwether Lewis’ mental health and the true circumstances surrounding his death.

The quoted passage from his expedition journals, and observations from his friends, lend a good bit of weight to the argument that Lewis lived with Bipolar Disorder. By most accounts, he was prone to bouts of depression where he could not get out of bed, but also showed incredible vigor and drive.

Though we cannot accurately diagnose someone who lived over 200 years ago; it is fascinating to look through the lens of a historical figure’s personal thoughts, and get the sense that our ancestors dealt with many, if not the exact same, issues we deal with today.

For the sake of comparison, imagine that astronaut Buzz Aldrin stepped off the lunar lander and onto the surface of the moon. Instead of his famous quote, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” he said, “I have done very little to further the happiness of the human race.”

Getting to the continental divide in 1805, was the equivalent of landing on the moon in 1969. The distances were mind-boggling, the environments treacherous, and the planning complex. These were nearly impossible accomplishments! If Buzz had said something so depressing at that moment, Houston might have replied, “Buzz, you okay?”

Why dig up 200 year old journal entries for a blog in 2018? I believe it is valuable to show people today that those who came before us lived with mental illness just as they also lived with ear infections, tooth decay, strokes, and high blood pressure. We are not so far removed from those that lived before us, and examining the recorded thoughts of important historical figures, demonstrates that mental illness does not prevent a person from achieving great things.

Imagine getting here! Farther than any of your contemporaries, and simultaneously thinking that you have done nothing to “advance the information” of the next generation.

How Someone Chooses a Location for Suicide

I write this in an abundance of caution.

Before I go further, if you are planning suicide, I highly encourage you to call the

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

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“He feels pessimistic about any future. Some time ago, early in his life, he formed a fixed idea, a flawed concept of what tolerable happiness might be, but his great tragedy was that he defined it in such a way that he could never attain it. It is present from the very beginning, in the very first few sentences. It is the pain, the enduring psychological pain that darkens his life. It is a pain that, in his psyche, is unbearable, intolerable, unendurable, and unacceptable. In his terms, it is better to stop the cacophony in his mind that to endure the unbearable noise.” - Edwin Shneidman, Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind

Dr. Shneidman, the father of modern-day suicidology, researched why people killed themselves in an attempt to find reliable indicators that medical professionals could use to recognize when someone may be at risk for suicide.

A friend asked me why someone might choose to end their life by suicide in a particular place. I can speak from personal experience, as well as from what the historical research into suicide can elucidate.

2,000 deaths since 1968, with 100-200 saved from jumping every year.

In the United States, we are familiar with the high rate of suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge, but you may be unfamiliar with the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in China.

The beauty of an expanse of water is a romantic human notion. We are drawn to the possibility of something beyond, and it requires very little imagination to see that dying by jumping off a bridge can, “merge the needs for nurturance and death that occurs in the suicidal mind” (Joiner).

If you believe someone snaps, and jumps off a bridge or slits their wrists in a bathtub; let me disabuse you of that idea.

The act itself may be impulsive, but everything that led up to the attempt was planned. I planned to kill myself by hanging in my basement apartment of my parents house. 

Why? Did I not care that my family would be the first to find me? Of course I cared, but my thinking was so distorted that those thoughts barely registered in my mind.

I planned to die in my home for two simple reasons. One, I was comfortable there. Two, I knew the rhythms. I knew when everyone was asleep, or when the house was deserted. I could plan, intimately, the details of exactly where I wanted to end my life.

Joiner again says it best,

“Planfulness regarding episodes of self-harm represented a significant risk factor for later completed suicide. Planfulness requires competence, which in my model is a key aspect of the acquired capability for lethal self-injury.”

Someone may choose to jump off a memorable bridge or building for a degree of flair, but also because they have read about people dying, and succeeding, at these locations. Whereas another person might choose to end their life in their home or their office, because that is where they are most comfortable.

Still others, myself include, might get a hotel room. Where there is a semblance of home, combined with the knowledge that no one will disturb you if you put that little sign on your door.

Reasons for choosing a location are as varied as our preferences for why we choose to move, or the work on which we embark. It may be due to convenience, to allure, comfort, control, accessibility; the list is truly endless.

These are all answers that we can consider if we are faced with the terrible question, why? Why did my friend, spouse, child, coworker kill themselves? Why there?

I will tackle these questions and more as I explore my own experiences, in the hopes that my search for better answers will help others. 

Impulse Control

“As for impulsiveness, a volume could be written about the disastrous consequences of this symptom. It has ruined many a business, many a marriage, and many a life.”

- Karl Menninger

Before I turned twenty-five I had:

• Committed early to college to play lacrosse

• Blew all of my money skydiving

• Changed my major multiple times

• Enlisted in the Marine Corps

• Moved into an apartment without steady income

• Attempted suicide three times

I was impulsive, and I was young. My prefrontal cortex was still developing.

In fact, some research indicates that, “the frontal lobes, home to key components of the neural circuitry underlying ‘executive functions’ such as planning, working memory, and impulse control, are among the last areas of the brain to mature; they may not be fully developed until halfway through the third decade of life” (Johnson, Blum, & Giedd).

Kids, I get to call them that now that I’m thirty, do not have the mental hardware to deeply consider anything beyond their immediate future.

Many adults look at the behavior of adolescents with bemused concern. Surprised at what we consider silly behavior, we ask: “don’t they think about the consequences?” They do! Just not like adults with fully developed frontal lobes.

Kids, for the most part, have a dial-up connection to their impulse control center. Adults have a 4G connection. It is no wonder that young people will think through a decision, experience slow loading times, and decide to do what they want.

The lack of impulse control may be why we see that, “suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death in the world for those aged 15-24 years.”

15-24. Ages where a young person goes through at least three different learning environments, experiences vast changes to their bodies, simultaneously juggles youth and adult personas, and, as if to add more to their plate, every adult asks what they plan to do with the rest of their life.

Add in the potential for bullying, social isolation, poverty, physical and sexual abuse, mediocre parenting, poor parenting, or no parenting, and you can see that kids, despite our adult objections to the contrary, do not have it easy. To say otherwise demeans them, and calls into question the validity of our own growing pains.

Are you worried about your child, but do not know where to start? The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has an excellent list of resources that will help: https://afsp.org/campaigns/talk-about-mental-health-awareness-month/teens-and-suicide-what-parents-should-know/

https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/

Mind Hack: More Vitamin D

I am naturally Vitamin D deficient. Which means I have to find ways to increase the amount of Vitamin D my body can produce. Some of that is with supplements, waking up to a UVB blue light, and driving without my sunglasses. Watch the video to learn more.

Vitamin D Deficiency in Adults: When to Test and How to Treat

Vitamin D: The “sunshine” vitamin

Vitamin D and Depression: Where is all the Sunshine?

Treatment of vitamin D deficiency with UV light in patients with malabsorption syndromes: a case series

Philips goLITE BLU Therapy Device - At $275, it’s pricey, but it makes waking up so much easier for me. Just to note, I’m not a paid spokesman for Philips. I’ve used several light devices and this one has worked the best for me.

When It's All Too Much

https://www.amazon.com/Classics-Paperback-Alighieri-Archibald-MacAllister/dp/B00CSXWB36

If you explored my site you’ll find many references to Dante’s Inferno. The English translation, which I am quite partial to, places the Wood of the Suicides on the seventh shelf, or circle, of Hell. The other url of my site is www.7shelf.com for this reason.

On this shelf are the condemned that committed violence against others, violence against themselves, and violence against God and Nature. I read Dante’s Inferno every year, and I am always struck by how fair he described hell. Those that sin receive their sin reflected upon them in equal measure to their behavior while still bound to their mortal coil.

Even without Dante’s visceral descriptions, the dogma of most major religions is that those who die by their own hand live out eternity in hell. But with Dante, an entire Western culture absorbed a powerfully disgusting story of the horrors that await sinners, the limitations of logic, and the ultimate saving grace of God.

What still keeps me up at night is the thought of why, after The Inferno approached near-canonical status, people still killed themselves. We don’t appreciate that.

Imagine you’re a German peasant in say, the 17th century. The Inferno is accepted lore that reinforces the primary religion of Christianity in your country. The prevailing wisdom of the time is that life is hard and contains much suffering, because at that time, life was hard and contained much suffering. But, if you died as a Christian, you were assured eternity in paradise. The suffering had to mean something for the system to function.

Truly though, your life as a peasant in a feudal system was hard work in awful conditions, on land you didn’t own, with sickness and disease rampant, and, if your lord went to war, you were automatically conscripted to fight and probably die. And that was just for the men!

Women were essentially property; worth their capacity to have children plus a dowry and they stood a good chance of dying in childbirth. Medically-trained practitioners did not start attending to births until the 1730s. Records of dying in childbirth were not recorded until the late 18th century, and they started at 25 deaths for every 1,000 births!

I find it unrealistic to believe that someone with a life that fraught with hardship would not consider suicide at some point, but I find it even more astonishing that people still killed themselves! They knew, to their core, that death by their own hand would result in being flung into hell where they would agonizingly grow into a tree. They would be ripped and broken apart by harpies until Judgment Day. At which point, their former bodies will be hung from their bleeding branches for the rest of time because God decreed that “it is not just that a man be given what he throws away” (Canto XIII, Circle 7, Round 2: 105).

The thing is, while the collective lives of almost everyone in an industrialized country today is immeasurably better compared to that of a feudal serf, we’re still human. Times and circumstances change, but sometimes, some things are just too much, and we want it all to stop.

Some, like myself, considered suicide as a solution. I don’t claim that thinking about suicide is a rational thought. It is merely one of many thoughts a human can have, and we have plenty of irrational ones too. But, for those of you who have never had a thought to want to end your life and can’t imagine why anyone else would, imagine being in so much present agony that the possibility of spending an eternity in hell is worth ending the pain you experience now.

Then you will have a glimpse of why a person can be driven to that awful thought when it’s all too much.

Know Your Enemy

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

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.

• Why People Die By Suicide - Thomas Joiner

• Insiders | Outsiders - Steven Scott

• Taming the Black Dog - Patrick Ellverton

• How I Stayed Alive While My Brain was Trying to Kill Me - Susan Rose Blauner

• Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind - Edwin Shneidman

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.