I generally don’t talk about suicide. I don’t discuss my battle with anyone, aside from close friends, because it makes most people uneasy. I never used to understand that because it didn’t scare me. Suicide is a choice — a conscious decision — and a conscious decision can’t be scary. But more recently, I found myself feeling overwhelmed, then afraid I would make a really big mistake.
That fear has kept me alive. Admittedly, I’m still trying to understand these thoughts in myself.
There have been a few high profile suicides in the news lately. When making a statement about his son’s death, Walter Koenig said “If you’re one of those people and you feel you can’t handle it anymore, you know, if you can learn anything from this, it’s that there’s people out there who really care.” Then his wife added, “All the people up here, from the police to his friends, have shown love which he didn’t realize was available to him.”
Their words show a very common fundamental misunderstanding about the reasons someone has for taking their own life.
You think love can fix us? You think it matters that you care?
The very nature of suicide is that a suicidal person doesn’t believe there’s any hope. If we felt like there was somewhere to turn, someone who could help1, that would imply there was hope. And if there was hope, they probably wouldn’t commit suicide.
We know you care, and we appreciate it when you tell us. We know how lucky we are to have the friends we do. But none of that helps. Suicide doesn’t necessarily result from a lack of external love. It can come from a lack of internal love, when we hate ourselves, or because our thoughts or problems seem too difficult to bear.
Sometimes I get advice about how to fix the issue, almost always from people who have never been suicidal. They think it’s a simple problem, and that we can just stop thinking about it and it’ll go away. Or we just need to find a hobby to distract us. Or find a passion to give us a reason to live. They don’t understand that suicidal thoughts are like a phobia — an irrational fear. You can’t easily fix irrational thoughts. They’re irrational because they don’t follow logic. Otherwise, you’d be able to cure someone’s arachnophobia simply by explaining to them, “Spiders are small and most can’t hurt you”. A person with arachnophobia knows that fact, and understands it perfectly, but put a spider next to them and they’ll be filled with uncontrollable anxiety.
Relate that back to suicidal thoughts: trying to rationalize things to a suicidal person by saying, “You have so much to live for”, is just as ineffective. Someone may have a rewarding career, a wonderful family, and good health, but none of that permeates the mind when suffering from a mental issue. The depression is irrational, and suicide isn’t the easy way out, it becomes the only way out.
From my own personal experience, the worst things you can do when handling a suicidal person are:
- worrying or getting uncomfortable — it puts pressure on us and makes us feel worse
- getting angry — it only makes us withdraw more and communicate less, and communication is one of the few outlets we have left
- telling them it would be a selfish decision — when someone is ready to kill themselves, they really don’t care and making them feel guilty is not the answer
The best things you can do for them are:
- giving them space — we need to handle things on our own terms and at our own pace, not yours, and the last thing we want is to feel like we’re inconveniencing you
- showing that you care, not just telling them — random flowers, text messages, hugs, poems (but back off if you’re told that you’re smothering)
- understanding that getting better is a long-term process, and not always permanent — we rely on your patience and understanding to get through it, and there may be regressions
- never, never, never turning down a chance to talk or hang out if they ask you — nothing makes us sink deeper in our fragile states than to feel like we aren’t important enough (we wouldn’t ask if we didn’t need to)
By no means am I suicidal right now, but yesterday I considered, and came as close to it as I’ve ever been. That was enough to scare me into the realization that I need help. Perhaps I’m fortunate enough to say that I understand how irrational these feelings are, and I know that I need to discipline, practice, effort, and systematic observation to fix myself.
- Which is very different from someone who wants to help. [↩]