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0 By Kate Carre
I know more people who have died by suicide than I know people who have died of cancer.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Not one of those people was a coward. Not one of those people was selfish. On the contrary, they were people who gave to others beyond what is usual. They were people who stood up to be counted, who lived by their principles and were not afraid to intervene where there was injustice.
Cancer is a terrible illness. It blights lives, it disables, it chooses people at random, takes young lives full of promise, and leaves devastation in its wake. So does mental illness. Those who are left behind, living the aftermath and unpicking the threads, wonder what the hell happened and why.
So where are the fun runs, the balloons, the facebook games… and where is the funding? And when someone suffers from mental ill-health, where is the bunch of flowers from their workplace, and where is their get well card?
Their deaths leave a gaping hole
These aren’t people I met in mental health units, but people I met during the course of everyday life. Not that the former would make them less valuable, but I say this because… I don’t think the numbers are disproportionate.
I’m not going to name them here; their stories are not mine to tell. But all people with promise, intelligent and loved people whose deaths left a gaping hole and a plethora of grieving family and friends whose lives are forever changed.
CS Lewis wrote, ‘the death of a beloved is an amputation’. The death of a loved one by suicide is a traumatic and unexpected amputation, a limb caught in a combine harvester. It is a hideous accident, leaving flashbacks and nightmares, unanswered and unanswerable questions. Taking the metaphor further, it leaves a hideous mess of lacerated flesh, hemorrhaging furiously so that you wonder how you can possibly live. But somehow you do. The ribbons of exposed innards are somehow tidied into something that can be presented in public.
My North Star is extinguished
And somehow you learn to walk, or get by on crutches. But there are always pains in the stump, that at times are excruciating. And the finished job can never be as neat as a planned operation might be. Although you are left to learn to walk again just as anyone else who has lost a limb has to, at the end of the day, over years and decades of painful healing where you seem to be going round in circles, the absence becomes the greatest obstacle. You begin to miss the limb rather than reliving the circumstances of the amputation.
When a person dies, we lose a part of ourselves. We lose the person we are in relation to them. I will never relate to anyone in the exact same way as I related to my best friend. And so I have lost a part of myself. We define ourselves by our relationships with others. The people close to us are the stars by which we navigate our way. I am adrift because my North Star is extinguished. And I feel angry, cheated of sharing the rest of our lives.
We stood by each other’s side on our wedding days and became Godparents to each other’s children. The natural order of things dictates that we should have grown old alongside one another, eventually shared news of grandchildren and retirements. How F***ING dare life take that away, especially her chance to experience those things and her family’s chance to share those things with her? It, for want of a better expression, F***ING stinks.
They did not ‘die of suicide’
Suicide should never be romanticised. After the stereotypes and misconceptions, that is the greatest danger. That in remembering the best of those we have lost, we make them heroes.
They are heroes. They are heroes who fought a hideous, insidious and misunderstood battle against their own minds. Those I knew fought with courage and integrity. They never let the hideous injustice of their suffering make them bitter or hard. They maintained their compassion in the face of enormous mental pain that was ultimately too much to bear.
Which brings me to say this: they did not die of ‘suicide’, or of any of the details of methods that the Press should be ashamed of reporting. They died of depression, of bipolar disorder, of eating disorders, of psychotic illness. They died of mental illness. Suicide is a complication. We might as well say they died because their heart stopped beating. What happened at the end is not relevant, is not the cause of their death.
We need parity for mental illness
Until we see mental illness recorded as a cause of death, we will never achieve parity with other serious, life threatening illnesses. These people died of a serious disease, yet we persist in labelling their deaths as something they did to themselves.
Until we view mental health on a parity with physical health, understanding and research will lag behind. On what basis do we separate the mind and the body? Is the brain not a body part that can be affected by disease? We distinguish because symptoms are behavioural. Because mentally ill people do weird stuff. And that is archaic.
I can tell you that they would have given anything to get better, not to have the illness they didn’t ask for, that they were unlucky enough to have. ‘Suicide’, and more specific details, are merely descriptions of a person’s final moments. We don’t see that with any other illness. We don’t see specifics of how a person died, only the underlying illness that was the cause. It needs to be the same for mental illness.
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Why should grieving families do the work?
We need to see the truth that mental illness is powerful, sometimes fatal, and cannot always be overcome. That brains, like other parts of the body, can create terminal illness when they malfunction. Any less is a disservice to the people I have known, the people you will all have known, who can no longer speak this truth for themselves. It is also a disservice to people in the future, who need support and deserve to have their illnesses taken seriously. Misconceptions are a barrier to suicide prevention.
It is not the responsibility of grieving families to spread the word and raise awareness. How can we ask that of people in the wake of that traumatic amputation, at a time when they are barely able to keep breathing? To open themselves up to public scrutiny and campaign for the greater good? No. It is the responsibility of all of us to educate ourselves and those around us. To treat mental illness exactly as we would any other. And to recognise that a death by suicide is a death from mental illness, a tragedy and a travesty.
Reproduced with permission, originally posted here onmymindblogging
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