If you’re contemplating suicide, please read this...
Speaking of the S-Word in 2020 seems to make the inevitable gut-punch that accompanies its mention all the more acute. In part, this is due to how the global pandemic has resulted in suicide rates ballooning beyond their already dizzying numbers. But also, it’s due to the fact that 2020 was the year of the most high profile suicide in British history.
I’ll never forget where I was and what I felt when I heard the news that Caroline Flack had passed away. Even before the nature of her death had been confirmed, given the slanderous publication of her private life and the relentless torture she was being subjected to online, it seemed inevitable that it would be suicide. Later that evening, it was confirmed that she had taken her own life.
Never before have I found myself in a state of genuine and perpetual speechlessness. But every time I think of beautiful Caroline, and begin to comprehend the sickening extent of the catastrophe, any attempt I make to articulate it in its entirety sees me gasping, reaching for words that just don’t exist. Even now, on World Suicide Prevention Day - which just so happens to also be the 6 month anniversary since she was laid to rest - the horrifying road that led her to her grave before heaven was ready is beyond any descriptive power. Out of respect for Caroline’s family and friends, I do not want to delve into any of those aforementioned details. But I do want to write this blog in accordance with her legacy: a legacy of kindness - the greatest that we can all aspire to leave. Just as long as we don’t leave it too soon.
If you are feeling right now as Caroline felt, then I hope you can find something here that will be of some help to you. You may feel like your soul is the rope being used in a tug of war between life and death. You may feel the darkness beginning to hypnotise you into hurting yourself. And while it would be inaccurate to describe suicide as a choice, there are things that you can choose to do in the here and now that will illuminate the darkness before it completely takes command of your spirit. These are those things - and why you should try.
1: Talk to someone
The first and perhaps most obvious thing you can do is talk to someone. While this may feel a little trite and difficult to truly embrace, the emotional release that can come from talking to someone can be extraordinary. Sometimes, the thought of opening up and allowing our demons to run free where we cannot hide them anymore can make our stomachs do somersaults, and that can dissuade us from reaching out for help. But it’s only when we allow the darkness to spill out of us that we lessen the weight of it bearing down on our soul. Not to mention that the hardest word we can say when we reach for help is always the first word. Once you’ve got past that, you’ve commenced your journey to getting better. And it will get better.
Sometimes, it’s easier to open up to a friend than it is to a member of our family. It is when we consider unloading our emotional demons in conversation with the people around us that the fear of being a burden raises its ugly head. But regardless of what your perspective on being a burden is, I can absolutely guarantee to you that people would rather listen to your story than attend your funeral. If you’ve already tried to reach out to people and you’ve found that they haven’t reached back in quite the way you were expecting, don’t give up. There’s always somebody else you can talk to. If need be, talk to the Samaritans or a similar mental health organisation - whose numbers for various countries I’ll list at the bottom of this article. It may feel quite daunting picking up a phone and dialling their number. But I can assure you that they are the loveliest people you could ever wish to talk to. And besides: if you’re contemplating death, what have you got to lose in reaching out to them?
If you have to, it will pay to talk to somebody even more professional, like a therapist. While the level of commitment associated with the thought of seeking professional help may make you recoil into yourself, to reiterate what I said in the previous paragraph: if you’re genuinely thinking about ending your life, what have you got to lose in exploring your every possible avenue of potential recovery? The same goes for if you find yourself requiring medication. For while it may seem like a huge commitment, there is no greater commitment than to commit suicide - as that is not something you can ever come back from. Whereas one day, you can live your life without suicidal thoughts and ideations.
2: Avoid drinking alcohol
You may believe the numbing properties of alcohol will help you keep breath in your body until the sun sets beneath the horizon at the end of another cursed day. But if you are drinking excessively, you will eventually find alcohol working paradoxically: whereby the supposed medicine creates the illness. To avoid the possibility of you falling into this dreadful trap where the alcohol exacerbates your suicidal emotions, yet you keep drinking it under the illusion that it’ll help, it’s best to avoid any situation where you could potentially cave to its allure. If you have alcohol in the home, try to distance yourself from it as much as possible. While it is difficult, to say the least, it’s worth it to avoid finding yourself in the kind of hellhole it can lead you into. Be assured though that just because drinking isn’t a viable option, it doesn’t mean there isn’t anything else you can do to improve your mood in a much more constructive way.
3: Exercise
Exercise can be an important part of maintaining good mental health, and improving your current mental health. It’s been proven that an hour of exercise is equivalent to a dose of antidepressants. Of course, when you’re in the midsts of suicidal darkness, exercise isn’t exactly something that you feel like doing. While the prospect of exercising for an hour may be too much to contend with at the moment, a simple stroll around the block will help elevate your mood - providing you stick to a routine of doing it everyday.
While depression itself may not be the catalyst of your suicidal emotions, exercise is still a good way of bringing your mood up. If depression is responsible for you contemplating suicide, the way exercise will alleviate it will depend on how your depression manifests. If your depression manifests as an agonising pain right in the centre of your being, then exercise will definitely help to lessen that pain. Sometimes however, depression can manifest as a complete emptiness that sucks all the life and joy out of everything that you love. If that’s the case, exercise will help to reinvigorate your soul, and bring back all the flavour that you previously thought had abdicated the world around you. And in doing that, it will help you process your thoughts and feelings through the 4th thing in this list.
4: Hobbies
When depression takes all the joy you find in your hobbies and passions away, it can be very difficult - if not impossible - to find sanctuary in them. Happily however, if you stick to an exercise schedule to inject yourself with some more dynamic emotions, then you’ll be able to rediscover the joy in all of the things you love.
If your depression manifests as a terrible pain rather than an emptiness, then this stage will be even easier. If you have some sort of hobby or passion - like music, art, dancing, writing, cooking, or anything that you can pour your emotions into - then I cannot possibly overstate just how cathartic it can be when you take your darkness, and project it onto your chosen form of expression. It may take a little while for you to start seeing the benefits - but in time, it will help you maintain good mental health absent of suicidal darkness.
Okay then, so, I’ve given you a small list of things that you can do to improve the way you’re feeling. Now I’m going to tell you why you should try. Hold on tight, because this is where things get even more real.
First and foremost, I’d like to try and give you an idea as to the scale of the devastation that is left behind after suicide. You may acknowledge that your departure will hurt the ones you love. But unless you’ve got first hand experience with losing someone you’re incredibly close to in this most horrendous way, you cannot even begin to imagine what your death will do to the people around you. It will make them feel something that stretches far beyond any descriptive power. It will eviscerate every part of their being, and leave them stranded with a uniquely agonising and mercilessly fierce heartbreak that can never heal due to it being supercharged by the fact that your death was preventable - just like all suicides. It is not a pain I would wish on my worst enemy - let alone the people I’m closest to. All it will do is take the temporary darkness that you are feeling, and transfer it over to everybody who loves you in a permanent and infinitely more potent form. If you could look into a crystal ball and see what the world looked like in the immediate 24 hours after your suicide, it would eliminate the urge you feel to take your own life.
As a general rule, you should never do anything to yourself that you wouldn’t want the person you love the most to do. And if you have that person that you can pinpoint as the one that you love more than any other, chances are, you hold the same awfully privileged position in their heart too. And if it was their life that depended on it rather than your own, the battle against the darkness may suddenly feel easier. But the crazy thing is, their life DOES depend on it. Partly, this is because every single thing that happens to them after your death will be defiled by the tormenting knowledge that you should be there to experience it with them. But mostly, it’s because the one thing that can see someone very quickly plummet to the depths of suicide is the suicide of somebody they love more than words can possibly express. Grief, insofar as I can tell, is the simultaneous equation between the love that you hold for someone, and the manner in how you lose them. When you take someone who you love more than anything, and you lose them to suicide - the worst way you can ever lose anybody - your every fibre screams out for you to just not be anymore. And the reason for that is simple: the pain that’s left over from suicide can NEVER get better; whereas the pain that’s led you to contemplate it CAN and WILL. While right now you may feel, in some way or another, like you’re a burden - if you were to take your own life, you would burden everyone who loves you with a heartbreak that cannot possibly heal. When you consider this in its absolute and devastating totality, you realise something truly profound: that your life is yours to live - but it is not yours to take.
One of the many torments of suicidal darkness is in how it distorts your perception of reality so that you view it to be drastically worse than it actually is - if not completely the opposite to what it is. Time will untangle all of the confusion that contributes towards that. Don’t throw your one and only life away over a temporary illusion - with significant emphasis being placed on the word “temporary”. Impermanence is the golden rule of the entire universe. For when you gaze up at the sky on a clear night, take note of all the stars that you see. For one day, every single light that illuminates the vast cosmic darkness of space will go out. And if the very celestial beings that cradle life are impermanent, can you even begin to comprehend just how impermanent your emotions or circumstances are? Everything is impermanent, apart from one thing - and that’s death. For every light that does go out in the night’s sky dims the brightness of every other light that surrounds it. They’ll never be another you, and you’ll never get another chance at this. You may feel that things can’t get better. But the only point at which that becomes true is the point at which your life ends. Until then, the journey to better days can begin whenever you want it to. While there is life, there is hope.
And yet, therein still lies another and overwhelmingly powerful reason why you shouldn’t take your own life. If you were to commit suicide, yes, people will miss everything about you that makes you special that you aren’t even aware make you special. But the main reason you shouldn’t take your own life isn’t just for all that others will miss, oh no...
...it’s for all that YOU will miss.
All the laughs, all the jokes, all the sunrises and sunsets, all the memories you’ve got left to make, all the places you’ve got left to venture, and above all else, all the days that will prove to you that life is worth living. That is what you will miss - and a whole lot more. For while you may be staying alive for the people you love right now, one day, you’ll stay alive for yourself without there being a single intrusion from any darkening thought. Until that day, use the wide open arms and the love of the people you’re staying alive for to incubate you from your own demons. I’m not going to pretend that it’ll be easy - but it’ll be a damn sight easier for you to overcome this than it would be for your loved ones to lay you to rest. You are not a burden. You are important. People love you more than you can possibly imagine. The world is better with you in it. There is help to cry for. This too shall pass.
Don’t become a statistic.
Don’t leave before heaven’s ready.
Don’t go before you’ve lived the days that will prove to you that life is worth living.
Stay.
Please.
One day, you’ll be grateful you did.
INTERNATIONAL HELPLINE NUMBERS:
UK: Samaritans - 116 123
USA: National Suicide Prevention Lifeline - 1-800-273-8255
Australia: Lifeline - 13 11 14
New Zealand: Need to talk? - 1737
Canada: Crisis Service Canada - 1-833-456-4566
South Africa: Suicide Crisis Line - 0800 567 567
Brazil: Centro de Valorização da Vida - 188
France: Suicide Ecounte - 01 45 39 40 00
Italy: Samaritans - 800 86 00 22
Spain: Teléfono de la Esperanza - 717 003 717
Portugal: Voz de Apoio - 225 50 60 70
Greece: Suicide Hotline - 1018
Netherlands: 113Online - 113
Denmark: Livslinien - 70 201 201 (11am-4am)
Sweden: Självmordslinjen (Suicide prevention hotline) - 90101
Norway: Mental Helse - 116 123
Finland: Finnish Association for Mental Health - 010 195 202 (Finnish) or (09) 4135 0501 (foreigners)
Ireland: Samaritans - 116 123
China: Lifeline China - 400 821 1215 (10am-10pm)
Japan: Tell - 03-5774-0992
South Korea: Hotline - (2) 715 8600
Singapore: Samaritans of Singapore - 1800-221-4444
The Philippines: The Natasha Goulbourn Foundation - (02) 8804-HOPE (4673) or 0917 558 HOPE (4673)
India: AASRA - 91-22-27546669
Mexico: SAPTEL - (55) 5259-8121
Russia: Samaritans (Cherepovets) - 007 (8202) 577-577
LINK TO ALL NUMBERS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines
“In a world where you can be anything, be kind.” - Caroline Louise Flack - 1979-2020
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