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0 By Frances Beck
Five hundred days. Five hundred days!! Yes, 500 days since you drew your last breath. I like to think that you left this world quickly. And peaceful in the knowledge that you believed you were doing the right thing in that exact moment. I also like to think that you now know it wasn’t the right thing to do in any circumstance. As much as there’s nothing any of us can do about it. I’ve envisioned every conceivable scenario and quite a few inconceivable ones too. And this is the only one that I can bear to begin to believe.
It’s been 501 days since we last had any contact with you. And you gave no indication of the true depth of your despair or what was going to happen.
499 days since our world was devastatingly turned upside down, inside out, and ripped completely apart, much akin to the annihilation caused by a bomb blast.
499 days of missing you more every day and wondering how that’s even possible.
499 days of wishing that you’d just walk through the front door again.
499 days of trying to come to terms with our new normal and trying to find the strength to keep on keeping on.
499 days of continuous counting.
499 days of really not knowing how I have survived when I was sure I couldn’t possibly, and in a way I didn’t because I’m definitely not the same person I was 500 days ago.
Can this be real?
Although I’m acutely aware that Conor is no longer physically with us and how he left this world, I still have days where I don’t believe that any of this can be remotely real. My mind’s way of protecting me perhaps. It’s a bit like watching your life unfold on a TV screen, being absorbed by the story line but also detached from the reality of it. There are always situations that bring me crashing back to earth with an almighty bump though. Most conceivably, having to explain to someone that doesn’t know already, that I’m a mum of three, but one of them died… by suicide… is never easy.
Also quite expectedly, hearing about yet another person (particularly a young person) having died by suicide hits me like a sucker punch to the stomach. It takes me right back to the evening we were told about Conor and all the raw emotions that were involved.
Perhaps less expectedly, it certainly surprised me, was my younger son’s birthday a couple of weeks ago when he turned 24, the age Conor was when he died. This raised a whole range of emotion, from happiness to abject fear. Conor will be forever 24 and I’ll only rest a bit easier when my younger son becomes 25. I’ve only just realised the negative connotations that I now associate with being 24 years old.
Statistics of suicide
Another example of being brought back to earth with a bump this week, was seeing the published statistics of the number of people who died by suicide in Scotland in 2018. Conor being one of them, knowing another two, and now knowing the families of few more. They make for shocking reading; 784 people, 581 males and 203 females took their own lives, a 15% increase on the previous year’s figures. Most alarmingly, there has been a 50% increase in the number of young people under the age of 25 dying by suicide in the last year.
More and more of our young people are unable to see any other way out of their distress. We MUST actively do something to change this. And when I say ‘we’, I mean every single one of us. We all have a responsibility to keep our young people safe and prevent suicide. Not only those who work with young people or in mental health, or those of us who have lost our own young people and are desperate to stop others having to live our nightmare. Everyone.
It bothers me that too many people will only see these statistics as meaningless numbers, and not of individual, amazing, loving people who are desperate to find a way out of their distress. People who leave behind many devastated loved ones, unanswerable questions and absolute turmoil in their wake. Hence my interview with The Times this week to highlight the stark reality of the issue.
So…what to do?
So, what to do?? Well we definitely need to be embedding mental health education into the school curriculum. We need to be teaching all young people a variety of positive coping strategies and building their emotional resilience. We need to tackle the root causes of mental health problems and suicide. Causes such as poverty, trauma, lack of connectedness and worthiness, to name but a few. And we need to ensure that the appropriate support and treatment is available for everyone who asks for help. And that they can access that support when they need it, whether that be early or crisis intervention.
Also we need to be pressuring the government for full and effective funding and support for all of these. The waiting times for people accessing support and treatment are completely unacceptable. Their problems become so much worse and harder to treat in that time. I also keep hearing of people admitting themselves to the ER desperate for help, just for them to be sent away because they don’t have the resources to help them at that time. This only adds to the person feeling like a burden and not feeling worthy of getting better. So they go on to take their life before their scheduled appointment.
Fourteen months ago when I really started researching and campaigning for change, there was a huge push to get people to open up and ask for help, which is absolutely key to recovery. Now more and more people are doing just that, but the help isn’t there for them! It’s just not good enough! And I intend on doing something about it. So who knows where the next 500 days will take me!
UNITED STATES
UNITED KINGDOM
