Suicide Is A Pandemic Reality. What Now?
Trigger warnings: Suicide, suicidal ideation, hopelessness
The questions I keep asking myself are — Why was no one there? Did people around him give up or is there just no hope left sometimes?
A month into the United Nations declaring us amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and a few weeks into complete lockdown, I learnt something devastating. An old classmate had taken his life earlier this year.
When we first went under lockdown, I began calling my friends to check in on them. Some of their situations were far from ideal and worsening in quarantine. Parallelly, the news started becoming a whirlpool of death tolls and suffering. As death shifted from a possibility to a probability, my calls started extending from friends to old friends to colleagues. That’s when I heard about my classmate’s suicide.
The news about my classmate made the encroaching darkness of this pandemic more opaque.
My friend struggled to recall our classmate’s name while telling me of his death. Neither of us was close to him in college. But I’d always been drawn to him in a way that those of us familiar with mental illness are to our clan.
“You may have heard, I dropped out of college too,” he inboxed me early in 2016.
“Good for you!” I replied. “You know I play on that team.”
It was one of our last conversations.
We both spent a good portion of our time in college battling the urge to end it all. Neither of us completed the course. While hopelessness is something that continues to visit and leave my life, there must have come a point for him where it would not leave.
“He was always depressed,” another friend said to me when I asked if she knew what his tipping point was. “I’m not sure if he was medically diagnosed.”
I scrolled through his Facebook timeline looking for a trail that would lead me to his decision. His last few posts were asking people to pay attention to those with anxiety and depression, requesting them to show up for those in their lives who were suffering. I was struck by how similar our social media accounts looked, I could easily have been reading my own posts. I wasn’t surprised.
I come from a bloodline of mental illnesses and a family history of suicide. I’ve been diagnosed with multiple mental health disorders, many of which leave me in utter despair from time to time. I’ve always come out the other end with a decorative badge of honour — I survived, here is how and this is why.
But the news about my classmate made the encroaching darkness of this pandemic more opaque. The answers I held so dearly seemed like nothing but survivorship bias. When the threats of loss and devastation loomed so tangibly above me and I now had a touchpoint of someone who couldn’t make it, I knew I needed more.
I found it hard to sleep in the days that followed. I did everything to silence my thoughts — meditate, journal, not engage with the voices — but they only got worse. One night, I sat up at 3 am and started to sob violently.
I wanted to pinpoint a reason, the specific knot that undid me, that I could tie back to get myself together. But I was unable to find it amidst the hurricane I was caught up in. I needed to speak to someone.
I thought of all the friends I’d just spent weeks calling. I knew they loved me but I wasn’t certain who would be able to watch me come undone in the middle of the night during a global pandemic. I thought of my classmate who must have, in a moment like this, retreated into himself and given up.
Do we convince ourselves that we aren’t doing so bad because people who love us can’t look our pain in the eye?
He didn’t make it to this pandemic. There was a part of me almost relieved that he didn’t have to be where we are at. I am not certain how his impossible concoction of profound empathy, acute distress, and piercing insight would have handled this mess. It is a mess, isn’t it?
People are stuck at home with abusive partners, parents, and minds. Calls to suicide hotlines in the US have increased by 800 per cent. My own illnesses were triggered by the constant stories of suffering and the news of my classmate’s suicide. And there was nowhere to be but my mind.
Over the next few days, I fell into a reverie of quarantine activities — baking, cooking, and working until I had no energy left to think. But there wasn’t enough busyness that could drown the bloody warcry in my mind.
So I started calling my people. I hoped that the daylight would shine a light on what the darkness of that night had sucked me into. But each time I tried to speak, I’d begin sobbing again. The time of the day didn’t matter, pain has solid vitals even at 3 pm in the afternoon.
Most of my friends were afraid to see me in so much pain. I felt guilty about alarming them. So I let them make small talk, assured them I had a therapist appointment in tow, and a few people on speed dial I could speak to. I said that I was not suicidal, praying that if I chanted it enough, I’d convince myself it was true.
I wondered if this is why people stop reaching out. Do we convince ourselves that we aren’t doing so bad because people who love us can’t look our pain in the eye? Does the guilt of needing what they can’t give strip us of our right to feel what we do?
Soon two paths began to vivify in my mind like a scene from Frost’s poem. My classmate walked one way and I walked the other. I wanted to drag him back from the path he took and tell him something that would change his decision. But when I looked at the image for too long, I found myself frightened if there’d be a day when like him, I think — maybe for some of us, there isn’t enough hope.
The number of people who feel this way isn’t small. Nearly 8,00,000 people globally die of suicide each year. We’re losing one person to this every 40 seconds.
We have to stop gate-keeping pain for only the suicidal or doctor-attested.
Thinking of my classmate and observing my own spiral made me realize that we cannot predict exactly when and why someone in pain withdraws into themself.
While mental illnesses can be the cause of such potent pain, so can common human conditions such as loneliness, heartbreak, and stress. So we have to stop gate-keeping pain for only the suicidal or doctor-attested.
We have to learn to lock eyes with people’s darkness without a vexing urge to look away because we cannot force suicidal thoughts out of someone’s mind. Telling them that they are alarming us, or that they shouldn’t think such things only perpetuates shame, deepens a stigma they are already fighting. It invalidates their very real feelings and thoughts.
The truth is that no matter how strong or resilient we are, some of us will need access to the inner toolkits of our people from time to time. We will need help to navigate our blocks and reach our own hope.
I decided that I wouldn’t stop reaching out. Eventually, I found a couple of friends who weren’t intimidated by my suffering and were willing to hold me as I came apart.
The worst of this pandemic may soon be over but everything we’ve experienced here will change us forever. Mental health professionals say that there’s a mental health pandemic right around the corner. How do we shoulder this?
Let’s give ourselves permission to reach out as many times as it takes because we are all worthy of being saved.
It isn’t one individual’s responsibility to keep another alive but it is our collective duty to hold each other up, billions of us latticed in a safety net that no one can slip through.
I thought of those who wanted to show up for me but couldn’t. I realized that it’s important to know who the people we can provide safety nets to are. We have to accept our limitations where we can’t give to someone we love so that those who can give, can step up and help.
I woke up again at 3 am a few nights ago. This time, I decided to write my classmate a letter. I apologised for not looking at his suffering long enough. I knew his pain, he was my people. But I assumed he was someone else’s responsibility, that someone must be checking on him. I promised him that I’d do better by those whose distress I could see.
I promised myself that I’d never stop reaching out as many times as it takes because we are all worthy of being saved. Even if some of the best ones couldn’t find it, I want to believe that there is enough hope around to make us all pick the choice to stay.
Originally published at https://www.arre.co.in on April 30, 2020.
