AFTERMATH & MENTAL HEALTH

"The world breaks everyone and afterward, many are strong at the broken places."

Ernest Hemingway

With Christmas becoming extra special this year for lots of people seeing it as a huge cheer-up through the lockdown and coronavirus pandemic, it’s sort of been inevitable that more people will experience a ‘Christmas Come-down!’ Realising this, I thought I would blog some tips for making it through that time, and then my thinking sort of snowballed into me thinking about aftermaths in general. And aftermaths can be so connected to a person’s mental health that it feels worth talking about the entirety of them…

aftermath

[ˈɑːftəmaθˈɑːftəmɑːθ]

NOUN

The consequences or after-effects of a significant unpleasant event.

 

SELF-HARM

If I’ve labelled the aftermath of self-harm difficult or bad in any way, I’ve sometimes found people surprised by this because they’ve assumed that if I’m self-harming it’s to help myself in some way and so surely, I should consider the aftermath of it to actually be pleasant. And that if I didn’t think of it as enjoyable, why would I continue to self-harm? My response to this is an attempt to get across the desperation that a person usually feels when they self-harm. Especially where it isn’t the first time…

You can become so desperate to escape the motivations to hurt yourself that you don’t stop for even a moment to consider how awful any previous aftermaths have been. And it isn’t really about denial and blocking out those memories, it’s just that… Well, personally, I have the mindset that no matter what the aftermath, it’ll be worth that very short, momentary feeling of relief that I experience immediately after self-harming. So, it’s not as though all those memories about unhelpful responses in the aftermath of self-harm aren’t in my head; just that in the grand scheme of things, they mean nothing. Honestly, in the past, there’ve been times when a professional’s response to my self-harm has left me saying ‘I’m never going back to that A&E!’ or ‘I’ll never speak to the Crisis Team again!’ Yet, those instances don’t change my decision to self-harm.

THE REALITY OF LIFE AFTER ATTEMPTED SUICIDE | TW

I’m all for using previously popular posts as inspiration for new content, and the success of my post ‘THE REALITY OF LIFE OF LIVING WITH SELF-HARM SCARS’ last April, has inspired my thoughts around this new post about what it’s really like to continue living after you’ve attempted suicide. Another inspiration for this post came in the form of someone sharing an in-depth look into their suicide attempt story after finally recovering from jumping off a bridge and ending up in a coma and with a lot of broken bones and internal injuries. This person’s aftermath was obviously a completely different journey to my own, especially physically, but it inspired me to talk more about the consequences to a suicide attempt rather than my usual concentration of the run-up to one and the actual act of it.


I’d like to also give a trigger warning (TW) to this post because after the media shared the means which Caroline Flack used to commit suicide, there was a lot of controversary in the mental health community around the necessity of disclosing this information. Some people worried that it would trigger others to follow suit and some thought it completely inappropriate and unnecessary to talk about the method. Personally, I agree that it isn’t relevant to tell the general public such details, so for this post, I will talk about the method of suicide I used only where it is necessary and relevant such as when I talk about the physical aftermath. If you’re concerned that this information will be upsetting, then please don’t continue reading this post! If you do read on and it becomes triggering, please use healthy and safe coping mechanisms and speak to a professional for help and advice.

THE PHYSICAL AFTERMATH

This is probably the only area where talking about the method I have used is relevant, so I thought I’d get it out of the way quickly! I also thought I’d talk about this aspect first because it is probably the most immediate because all of my suicide attempts have been through overdoses of paracetamol. 

A GUIDE TO THE AFTERMATH OF ABUSE

“Don't judge yourself by what others did to you.”
C. Kennedy, Ómorphi

I struggled with the title for this post; I didn’t want to make it sound as though there’s some sort of structure or prediction to the aftermath of abuse. You could have two people go through the same type of abuse e.g. sexual, emotional, physical etc. yet their actual experiences and the impact they have is completely different. Some people don’t understand this and so I once had a Healthcare Assistant in a medical hospital say to me ‘being abused is no excuse; I was abused, and I don’t self-harm or have mental health problems!’ I hope that this post doesn’t leave anyone feeling the way that comment left me feeling – alone and as though I must be weaker. I think that my intention for this post is not only to aim it at those who have gone through abuse and encourage them to recognize that they aren’t alone; but also, to provide insight for those supporting someone or caring for someone who has been. I also just wanted to say that I did a poll on Twitter about whether to split this lengthy post into numerous ones or to post the entire content and the vote favored all at once; so, here you go:

So, I talk about the ‘aftermath’… I once had someone ask me when the abuse had ended, and I struggled to answer. I could tell you the exact date that the physical side of the abuse stopped (April 20^th, 2007) but for me, I sometimes wonder if it ever will fully ‘end.’ I guess it depends on what your definition of ‘end’ is and whether you’d consider the impact the abuse has had to be a continuation of it or just the result of it and a whole new chapter. So, for the purposes of this post, when I speak about the ‘aftermath’ it’s any time from the first instance of abuse – even where the abuse physically continues.

I think that the first thing to talk about is the emotions, thoughts, and feelings that someone experiences after abuse.