Important note:
I'm getting the help I need to get me to an okay place mentally again. It's a long road though.
Trigger warning: Suicide Ideation, Depression, Mental Health,
So, as of late, there's not a day that goes by that I don't have at least one of the following thoughts:
"I wonder what it would feel like to slit my wrists"
"What if I swerve my car into a guardrail?"
"I don't really want to wake up tomorrow"
"Do you really think 'it gets better'?"
and many more related ones.
It's familiar to me at this point because a lot of these same thoughts were in my head about two and a half years ago. I was so scared that I'd impulsively kill myself that I hid the knives in my house, tried to avoid driving as much as possible and slept with wrist guards on to stop me from being able to just "make the cut".
I never tried to kill myself though. I never made a plan. I never made a decision to do it and had someone intervene before I could sort my shit out and with help, the thoughts decreased and eventually went away for a time.
At that point, I couldn't label myself as "suicidal" because I thought that meant that you had a plan and you were going to act on it and these thoughts that were entering my head weren't ones I wanted. I didn't identify with them. I worried about them. Of course, worrying about them meant I focused on them more and became freaked out about them (because if someone tells you not to think of a pink elephant, you're gonna think of a pink elephant). I felt like I couldn't talk about them though.
The outward silence about my inner thoughts had many causes. Mostly, I was scared that someone would want to lock me away or put me on suicide watch and admitting that I needed help was as bad as admitting defeat because it meant that this was something that I'd be dealing with for a long time and not just a weird one off situation. I felt like I didn't deserve to take away valuable resources from people who were "actually suicidal". I was worried if I talked about it, I'd be more likely to follow through.
That silence was not remotely helpful. It left me freaking out and isolating myself from others in case I accidentally blurted out my thoughts. It didn't mean the thoughts went away. It didn't mean that I didn't need help. It didn't mean that I was somehow overcoming this illness on my own.
I went to a suicide prevention workshop called "
safeTALK" last week run by
NAMI. It was 3 hours and completely free but reminded me of all the above and how hard it was to get help. I think it was one of the best things I did last week and strongly encourage other folks to check it out. Below is a quick summary of what I think was most important to me from those three hours.
The fact is, one in twenty people think about suicide in a two week period. If you're on a sports team, there's a high likelihood that someone else on your team has thought about suicide at least once in the past two weeks. Very rarely are these people at the point where they've made a decision and come up with a plan BUT getting help before that happens is the BEST time to get help. The majority of people who decide to die by suicide act on that decision within ONE DAY of making it. Some people act in as few as five minutes after deciding.
We need to talk more about what it means to be suicidal. We need to make it okay for someone to say they have thoughts of killing themself without us going into crisis mode. We need to learn how to get these people help that feels right to them because help is far easier to obtain when thoughts are just thoughts than after they are a decision and we need to find ways to confirm that thoughts of suicide are serious and important and worth talking about and getting help for no matter "how intent" the person is on killing themself. We need to stop the stigma and treat mental health the same as physical health because being mentally ill can kill you.
