WHEN THEY SAY SUICIDE IS ‘SILLY’

You, with your voice like nails on a chalkboard

Calling me out when I’m wounded

You, pickin’ on the weaker man…

And all you’re ever gonna be is mean

Taylor Swift - Mean

So, a few days ago I was in a mental health crisis and there was a Policeman who…well, let’s just say I’ve put a lengthy complaint in and have been told mine isn’t the first against him. Anyway, he made a number of discriminatory comments around mental health and a few very personal ones specifically about me, but the one which stuck out and which seemed to fuel everything else was when he referred to suicide as ‘something silly…’

THE IMPORTANCE OF RESPONSIBILITY

My immediate response to the comment was to tell him that he ‘really shouldn’t use a word like that to refer to something so serious.’ Of course there was no apology. No hands up to say “yes, ok. I was wrong, I’m sorry.”

Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I hold apologies quite highly in considerations around respecting and appreciating someone or an organisation on a whole. I think this stems from all the years of Crisis teams telling me to take responsibility for my own safety and then trauma therapy and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) encouraging you to view your behaviours as a chosen response.

Initially that was a hard thought process because who ‘chooses’ to self-harm? But I learnt and realised that it was more about the fundamentals of the situation. You know? Like, if someone touched your skin with fire, you’d burn. If someone touched your skin with fire and you punched them in the face(!)… Well, you could argue that a level of that was instinctual, but it wasn’t something which everyone would do. And recognising that I’m responding to something because of something inside of me and not looking to blame another person who arguably, might have at the very least stoked the fire, was just one key to my recovery. 

HOW TO READ ABOUT SUICIDE & STILL BE SAFE | I’M WRITING A FICTION BOOK – COVER RELEASE INCLUDED!!! | WORLD SUICIDE PREVENTION DAY 2021

I’ve felt some pain,

I’ve seen some things,

But I’m here now

Good Old Days – Macklemore ft. Ke$ha

This year, having already written a blog post (which you can read here), specifically in preparation for the inevitable influx of content themed around suicide for World Suicide Prevention Day; I thought I probably wasn’t going to publish any other content… Then I found myself working on my next book – which is largely around the reality of suicide and realised that now might be the ‘right’ time to reveal some of the top-secret details(!) and talk about how you can cope with reading topics like this…

My very first book; When All Is Said & Typed (which you can buy here) it was definitely a case of purely copying and pasting all of my blog posts on I’m NOT Disordered from its beginning in 2013, to the date of publishing the book in 2019. It meant that when I began considering another book, I felt it could also be based around blogging for two reasons: Firstly, I had learnt so much about blogging and I’m NOT Disordered had come so far since that first book that I had a ton of new ideas, and secondly, I felt that this book would feel so much more different if it meant I was writing it from scratch. That yes, there were blog posts copied and pasted, but they were mostly to be used as examples of the content rather than being the sole content of the book.

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT SUICIDE | IN PREPERATION OF WORLD SUICIDE PREVENTION DAY 2021

When I first created, I’m NOT Disordered and began my blogging career in 2013, I was an inpatient and had been admitted to the psychiatric hospital because of a suicide attempt. It wasn’t my first – and it ended up not being the last… So, I guess that from the offset, I knew I would end up blogging about suicide…

I’m always very cautious around writing advice posts, for two reasons:

1.      I wonder what right I have to advise anyone about anything!

2.      What if my advice doesn’t help and leaves a person feeling hopeless?

With the first point, as my reader count has soared, I’ve found more and more confidence because whilst I realise not everyone who reads my posts will like them, I must be doing something right to be almost at one million readers! And that, coupled with my confidence to write advice around mental health (which I’ve found the confidence to do so from my own recovery), has given me the courage to write this post.

The second point is a worry I have which is based on my own experiences of being given advice and it not helping. In those instances, I’ve never looked to the person giving the advice as useless or criticising that they don’t know what they’re talking about, I’ve always looked inward. Looking for the reasons why it’s my fault that the advice wasn’t helpful. As though I was the failure and it was my fault for having such terrible mental health that advice which helped others, was wasted on me!

HOW MY BELIEFS HAVE CHANGED

I was talking to my Richmond Fellowship Tyneside support worker about the changes in my thought processes that she wasn’t aware of because we’ve only been working together for a short time and I realized that it might make an interesting blog post… As much as I hate the thought of people going through what I have, I hope that if there are people out there who have the same beliefs that I used to hold, then reading this might work as reassurance that you can get through it and come out the other side!

I will die young

This belief was such a huge role in my mental health deterioration that I had to discuss it in a Psychology session whilst an inpatient in a specialist psychiatric hospital. I had to put a lot of work into changing this belief and developing a replacement for it (in fact, I wrote all about my efforts here) because without that work, I was well on track to succeed at committing suicide. This belief spurred on my suicide attempts because it led to the thought process that eventually, one of them would work and I’d be free forever. Now that I’m happy and enjoying my life (for the most part!) I wish it could carry on for all eternity!



I deserved the abuse

This belief started literally immediately after the abuse did. Straight away I knew I’d brought this on myself. Though, I won’t lie; this was definitely an irrational thought because if I was confronted with it then I probably couldn’t provide much evidence to support it! I guess I just thought of myself as a generally bad person; and perhaps it being so irrational is what kept it so solid in my head. It meant that no matter what anyone said they couldn’t disprove my belief because there was nothing to really contradict! Eventually, I learnt that what was done to me says more about the person who did it than it does about me.

FIVE SCARIEST MOMENTS OF MY LIFE | HAPPY HALLOWEEN 2019

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along”

Eleanor Roosevelt

Halloween is all about making people jump in shock and scaring people half to death; but no one ever really uses the opportunity to talk about how fear can be positive and beneficial too! Being afraid can be a natural reaction to a situation – think along the lines of ‘fight or flight.’ So, for this reason, I didn’t want to use this post to only discuss the really negative parts of my life; I also wanted to talk about how positive fear has been for me sometimes… How it has often resulted in something positive:

1.    The time I stopped breathing in 2008

I had a weekend job at my local Primark (a huge retail store) and had been folding clothes when I got a huge pain in my tummy and passed out. I remember paramedics coming and giving me morphine and then they took me to the local A&E where they gave me more morphine. After seeing a Doctor they decided that I needed to be transferred to the local Gynae ward at another hospital and en route, in the ambulance, they gave me more morphine and then failed to tell the new hospital how much I’d had and they gave me more. 

THE TOP MENTAL HEALTH FAUX PAS

faux pas

[ˌfō ˈpä]

NOUN

an embarrassing or tactless act or remark in a social situation.

Someone asked me about the title of one of my recent blog posts (WHY “LOOK HOW FAR YOU’VE COME” & “DON’T LET HIM WIN” ARE BECOMING MY NEW PET PEEVES) because they’re two phrases that this person uses with me and I think that they were worried that I’ve been finding them unhelpful and just not telling them. I explained that I understand people – because it isn’t just this person who frequently uses these phrases – always mean well when they say these things and that they’re trying to help but mental health can be a minefield and sometimes, when you hear the same thing over and over again it will, of course, become a pet peeve, change it’s meaning and change its impact.

So, for the record, here’s – what I think are – the top mental health faux pas:



“Self-harm isn’t the answer”

I’m sorry but I don’t recall ever claiming that it was! I had a discussion recently about the other inpatients when I was in the long-term, specialist Hospital and how they had each encouraged one another to self-harm. To the point where one person had snuck in a blade and they had passed it around one another knowing full well what each person would be doing with it. I explained that even though I sometimes find self-harm ‘helpful’ in some way, I would NEVER promote it or encourage others to try to use it as a coping mechanism. One thing I’ve known since I first cut myself - but it’s something I’m only just really learning - is that self-harm can be an addiction. A cycle. When my anti-psychotic medication was reduced and the auditory hallucinations came back, I began self-harming again in response to them and because of that, self-harm has – once again – become my first port of call when I’m struggling. When things happen that are upsetting, rather than attempting to use my Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) coping skills, I’m resorting to self-harm and of course I don’t want to be constantly in and out of hospital, covered in scars and bandages, so I’ve wracked my brain trying to think of what really got me out of the cycle last time. And it was being admitted to a psychiatric hospital. But I was determined that it isn’t going to take something like that to help me; I can do it myself! I hate the feeling of being out of control so I lassoed all of the energy I have left and I’m very proud – and relieved – to say, that it’s been seven days since I last self-harmed; which is the longest period for the last five months! 

“JUST BECAUSE YOU’VE SAID YOU FEEL SUICIDAL, IT DOESN’T MEAN YOU HAVE TO ACT ON IT” | HOW IT REALLY FEELS, MY ATTEMPTS, & THE STIGMA | SUICIDE PREVENTION DAY 2019

“I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare, you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

I umm’d and ahhh’d about doing this post today for two reasons; 1. I wrote a very similar post in December 2018 and didn’t want to repeat it, but I also recognize that there’ll have been a lot of new readers since then who may not have scrolled that far back. And 2. I once wrote a post (I think I ended up deleting it) for this day when I first began blogging and talked about the two attempts I’d made and had a comment from a reader saying ‘good luck with the third,’ but I’d like to think that the world has come so far with such spiteful comments around mental health. After rethinking my reluctance around the post, I decided that not producing content for this hugely momentous day (especially in the mental health industry) would almost be dishonest! Suicide has been such a huge part of my life that I thought it would be demeaning to not shed some light on the subject and of course – as always – I recognize how many people come to my blog for inspiration and I realize that I’m almost… setting an example? So, for me to not talk about suicide has the potential to encourage others also not to speak up about it; and that’s definitely not something I want to happen!

THE POWER OF UNDERESTIMATING IN MENTAL HEALTH

Off the back of my most recent self-harm I was put under the care of the Crisis Team and when I had the assessment with them to decide whether they were going to put me on their caseload, one of the staff said something to me that inspired this post. She said; “I know you look very put together, but I know that you’re good at doing that when you’re actually really struggling inside.” It was really reassuring to discover that they knew this because it’s something that, I think, it’s something about me that takes a little while to learn and it’s something that’s kind of essential when supporting me with my mental health. I told them that my CPN (Community Psychiatric Nurse) always says I’m like a duck because they look calm above the surface but underneath, they’re paddling furiously to stay afloat. That’s me. It’s so challenging to be this way because I feel as though mental health professionals are looking at me thinking ‘if you can laugh and joke then you can’t be suicidal.’ And the hardest part is, I understand why they’d think that way and honestly? If I hadn’t gone through what I have, I would’ve thought the same of another person. I think that I cope this way because while the abuse was happening, and I had all of the reasons that stopped me from telling someone, I felt like I had to put on a ‘brave face.’ And coping like that for so long – I didn’t report the abuse for two years – has meant that it’s sort of become ingrained in me. Like a habit. Or a knee-jerk reaction.