I recently was asked this when I was in the hospital on a couple of occasions. A mental health worker just could not understand why I would want to take my life. So many people think life is precious and taking your life is just not right. I won’t go into the religious aspect because I lost my faith years ago and more so when the Catholic church was harboring pedophiles and did nothing about it for years…But I digress…
Most of the time I do not know why I want to end my life, I just feel that life is not worth living that I feel so dead inside that continuing to live just does not make sense. Sometimes I feel so dead that I just wish my autonomic nervous system would realize this and stop working, that my heart and lungs would cease to move as they should. But that isn’t how it works.
I have not attempted suicide in quite a few years. Maybe it is because when I did, I felt panic that dying was going to happen and it changed me in a subtle way in wanting to live, if for that moment. But since then I have changed methods. Now instead of overdosing on drugs, I plan on putting a rope around my neck or a plastic bag over my head. This is instant death that you can’t go back from without some sort of intervention because without oxygen, you will die.
Another reason I think about ending my life is because of pain. During my recent hospital stay I was frequently asked what my pain level was every time I had to take my pain medication. Yet when I was given my antidepressant, I was not asked about the level my depression was. I brought this up to my case worker and she said “that is what we are talking about, to assess your pain” but it is not the same as when you are given meds. Shouldn’t the level of depression be assessed when given the meds to know its effectiveness? I know that these antidepressants take time to work, several weeks in fact, but shouldn’t a baseline be used to gauge the effectiveness after a week to see if maybe the drug needs to be increased? I was at this hospital for two weeks and never was my psychological pain assessed. My depression and feelings were but not my pain. Interesting that my case worker thought there was no distinction of pain versus feelings. I guess in her mind, they are one and the same but to me they are not. When you have feelings of killing yourself, the feelings are more than just the typical run of the mill depression that everyone goes through at some point in their life. When you are CHRONICALLY suicidal, that is, when you are thinking of taking your life every day for months, your feelings have to be so deep and painful that ordinary measures just don’t cut it. When you have mental pain, it is like you cannot breath with the weight of an invisible 100 lb weight on your chest. It literally hurts to breath and taking a deep breath is the only way to get the lungs moving, least that is how it is with me. Nothing helps this pain and even though I take a narcotic for my physical pain, I do not get relief for the psychological pain. This pain can be defined as the melding of despair, anguish, hopelessness, helplessness, guilt, shame, loneliness, and depression all rolled tightly together in the confines of the mind that knocks out any kind of joy and pleasure life might bring. This pain, this ache is what the father of suicidology, Dr. Edwin Shneidman (RIP old man) called psychache and believed it was the underlying cause of all, if not most, suicides. Stop the psychache, stop the suicide.
This psychache causes the constriction of the mind into believing that there is just one way out of this hell, suicide. As this pain cannot be relieved by any drug known to man, it is this pain that drives one to think endlessly about suicide. It is this never ending all consuming pain that makes life not worth living. This is what drives the suicidal mind. Ending this pain is what suicide is all about. It is a deep desire to end this suffering of living day in and day out with mind numbing mental pain. No doctor can treat it. And knowing this makes the hopelessness drive on fueling the pain even more so…
midnightdemons7 