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Suicide is Often the Result of Mental Illness that has been Untreated or Minimized
Having had periods of thinking about suicide, I have learned to stop the thoughts when they begin. Nothing good ever comes from dwelling on negative thoughts because they lead to negative feelings. I believe suicide to be the ultimate selfish act. I also believe that for many suicides, if the person had waited five minutes, strength would have come to overcome the thoughts. For me, an antidepressant and working each day to stay in hope and joy is the best medicine. My heart goes out to all who have not searched for ways out of their depression. Depression kills many people who could be saved by reaching out for hope. Reach out–there is help everywhere!
1. From Vicki Larson:”Should You Divorce Someone Who’s Suicidal?”:
“A sobering fact is that more than 90 percent of those who kill themselves have a diagnosable mental disorder, accounting for the tens of thousands of suicides each year (34,300 in 2007 alone). And many of them are men. In fact, four times as many men commit suicide than women, although women attempt suicide more often — two to three times as often as men. One of the reasons listed is divorce.”
“It’s no surprise that divorce plays a factor in suicide. Your life feels like it’s been slipped out from under you like a rug. For some, divorce is so devastating that they believe they have nothing to live for. Divorced people are three times more likely to commit suicide than those who are married. Again, it is men who are more at risk; one study found that divorced men have twice the risk of suicide than married men.”
“Not only can divorce spur depression, but depression can, evidently, spur divorce.”
“Marriages in which one spouse is depressed are nine times more likely to end up in divorce, according to Laura Epstein Rosen and Xavier Francisco Amador, authors of When Someone You Love is Depressed: How to Help Your Loved One Without Losing Yourself. That’s a pretty depressing number. It isn’t depression itself that sends a couple to divorce attorneys, however, but the consequences of not addressing the depression, experts say. And most of us aren’t very good at that.”
“Our loved ones see our illness far differently than we do,” writes John McManamy, an award-winning mental health journalist and author who has bipolar disorder and blogs at McMan’s Depression and Bipolar Web. “We may complain that they don’t understand us, but far too many of us fail to recognize the horrible abuse we have put them through.”
“It isn’t easy living with someone who has a mental illness, nor does everyone reach such a happy ending as the story of John Forbes Nash Jr., a Princeton mathematician and schizophrenic who was the subject of 2001′s A Beautiful Mind. Often a depressed spouse withdraws or cheats. Sometimes the spouse of the depressed person feels responsible and becomes more of a caretaker than a partner. Not only is that exhausting, but it doesn’t make for a happy, healthy marriage.”
2. From Kids Health: “About Teen Suicide”:
“The reasons behind a teen’s suicide or attempted suicide can be complex. Although suicide is relatively rare among children, the rate of suicides and suicide attempts increases tremendously during adolescence. Suicide is the third-leading cause of death for 15- to 24-year-olds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), surpassed only by accidents and homicide.”
“The risk of suicide increases dramatically when kids and teens have access to firearms at home, and nearly 60% of all suicides in the United States are committed with a gun. That’s why any gun in your home should be unloaded, locked, and kept out of the reach of children and teens. Ammunition should be stored and locked apart from the gun, and the keys for both should be kept in a different area from where you store your household keys. Always keep the keys to any firearms out of the reach of children and adolescents. “
“Suicide rates differ between boys and girls. Girls think about and attempt suicide about twice as often as boys, and tend to attempt suicide by overdosing on drugs or cutting themselves. Yet boys die by suicide about four times as often girls, perhaps because they tend to use more lethal methods, such as firearms, hanging, or jumping from heights.”
“For the second consecutive year, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide, than it has to combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. That doesn’t even include all the reservists. End the wars and improve mental health for our soldiers AND civilians. For too long, mental health has been the “dirty lil’ secret” in America–it’s time to speak out and be brave.’
“It’s really easy to slap a yellow ribbon magnet onto your gas guzzling Hummer and lull yourself into a delusion that you’re supporting the troops. Of course, everyone supports the soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, but how about when they come home? All too often they fade from our memories and they are left to disappear into the shadows of loneliness, isolation and mental anguish. Our soldiers did their fighting abroad, and now that they are at home, it is up to us, the civilians they fought for, to stand up and fight for them. It is up to us, to support them, and to gain the top-notch, mental health care that they have earned and deserve.”
“I refuse to stand by and let our tormented veterans be ignored and shunned because of the battle wounds that have scarred their minds. I hate war and dislike that they have to go through war in the first place, but I love those soldiers more. We need to put our money where our mouth is on this issue–literally. Is it so hard to give of our wealth, so that these heroes will be given every bit of assistance they need, earned in blood and deserve? Or, is our support for them limited to those yellow magnets on our cars that are literally, “the least we can do” for them?”
PTSD Recovery Includes Recreating Basic Self-Concepts
I have written several times that I did not discover until 2010 that I suffered from PTSD since I was a child. I realized this in 2010 when I read a story about a PTSD sufferer, Travis Twiggs, and the fact that he suffered from “social isolation”. I remember my mother telling me that I had no friends. That wasn’t true but it was true that I chose to have few friends. I never understood why I continued to feel separate and different even after 34 continuous years of sobriety. PTSD taught me how to freeze my feelings and lower my expectations of how full life could be. By learning to compartmentalize experiences, I could keep life on a shelf, so to speak.
In the past year, I have begun letting all parts of me come together and I feel so blessed and grateful. I have three mental illnesses–alcoholism (recovery date Nov/ 24, 1976), depression (has been in remission since 1992), and now PTSD. I always knew that the addictions were the Band-Aid over the wound. But I thought the wound was depression. Instead I now know that the wound was PTSD.
I scan over 500 blogs in my Google Reader and am so thankful for the brave souls who write about their recovery experiences.
1. In her blog, Being Sober, Mary Christine writes: “June 7″ :
“It was 30 years ago that I was raped. If you would have told me then that I would still have this date engraved in my soul thirty years later, I would not have believed it. But my life was irrevocably changed that night. (I wrote about it in depth here.)”
“Two years ago I was suffering terribly from PTSD from the rape and underwent therapy for it. It was immensely helpful. And just sitting here tonight, about to go to bed, I am brought to tears remembering. I was asked to name a “safe place” before we began the therapy. I thought it was lame, but the best safe place I could come up with was my own bedroom. My own bed. In all of its glorious whiteness, the crisp white sheets, the white duvet, the white duvet cover, all bleached, ironed, and starched. The window open and the sheers floating on a warm breeze.”
“This is exactly the safe place that I get to fall into in a moment. This is no dream. This is my reality today. I have a safe place to lay my head.”
“And if you are an alcoholic woman, you may know what a miracle this is.”
“God has blessed me so abundantly. I am so grateful to be sober. I am so grateful for the beautiful life I have today.”
2. In the LA Times, Steve Lopez writes about “ACLU’s lawsuit against the V is a step in vet’s recovery” :
“Combat veteran Greg Valentini slept in Wednesday morning in Hollywood, the day he sued the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Actually, Valentini didn’t file the suit himself, and he was only one of four plaintiffs in what could become a class-action case. The ACLU of Southern California argues in the suit that the VA has mismanaged and underutilized its sprawling West Los Angeles campus even as mentally impaired homeless vets sleep on the city’s streets.”
“If there’s money to wage two wars, there ought to be money to restore abandoned medical buildings at the VA and fill them with some of the estimated 8,200 homeless veterans in Greater Los Angeles, as well as provide them the rehab services they need. That’s how the ACLU’s Mark Rosenbaum described the thinking behind the lawsuit to me this week.”
“As the suit notes, the VA campus has enough space for private companies to store buses and rental cars and for a hotel laundry facility, but no permanent housing for veterans, even though the property was deeded to the government more than 100 years ago specifically to house veterans.
“As for Valentini, his involvement in the lawsuit came as a surprise to me, even though I’ve been shadowing him for several months in a series of columns about his efforts to rehabilitate himself. He told me he was sworn to secrecy until the suit was filed.”
“On Wednesday morning I visited him at the Hollywood rehab center where he has lived since last August along with a few dozen other veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Valentini, 33, hadn’t seen the lawsuit, so I delivered a copy.”
“Valentini, who grew up in Lakewood, wasn’t entirely comfortable being named in the suit. He doesn’t enjoy reviewing the harrowing details of his combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and his later descent into suicidal fantasies, homelessness and drug addiction. But he was willing if it would help others.”
3. A message of hope from one of the best PTSD survivors, Michele Rosenthal, on her blog Heal My PTSD writes about “PTSD Success Story: Finding the Window to Freedom” :
“A very exciting event occurred recently: One of my clients had his final session with me and is now off to live a life that is free of PTSD symptoms. That’s right, free.”
“The day any of us reaches the end of the healing part of our journey is a cause for celebration; this story particularly moves me because the psychiatrist and psychologist involved in this case said it couldn’t be done. They believed this client couldn’t heal based on their assessment of the fact that PTSD had set in at a very early age due to chronic and horrific child abuse. They had tried for years to help this client move forward, all to no avail. He was heading into middle age and they had told him just to learn to live with it.”
“While it may be true that C-PTSD is more of a challenge to heal, I never lost hope. The journey was not easy but my client hung in there. We believed in each other and felt that together we could reach his PTSD recovery goals.”
“It has taken us almost 2 years to get to where we are today. Through a combination of coaching, hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming he has been able to:
- establish a sense of safety
- process and release grief
- resolve issues of anger
- integrate the trauma
- reconnect to himself in important and meaningful ways
- reclaim his identity as a worthy, lovable human being
- put in place necessary boundaries with family and friends
- reassess and reframe the past
- re-envision the present
- begin constructing the future
- stop all medications
- sleep through the night
- take back control of his life
- resolve all symptoms of posttraumatic stress
- feel happy, strong, empowered and good about himself
“I’m sharing this story with you for one reason: You must always have hope. Find someone you believe in to work with. Stay determined and committed to your ultimate recovery.”
“It’s easy to lose faith. The road to posttraumatic stress syndrome recovery is long and hard-fought, but it is worth it. You have enormous healing potential. The goal is learning to access it. Keep seeking that stairway that leads to your window of freedom.”
