Perhaps they see it as the last thing they could do to free their loved ones. I know that’s hard to comprehend, but imagine your totally & utterly trapped by a black cloud that shrouds everything. You get no enjoyment from anything, anything. Anthing & everything is hard. You can’t talk about it because you can’t put it in to words. And who would you tell ? You can’t burden your loved ones, your a grown man FFS. When it gets so bad, there is nothing that offers ang hope, just darkness. Walking away will hurt them. Not walking away will hurt them. Trapped by knowing anything you do will hurt them. But it’s seemingly the only thing you can offer them, to release them from you. It’s despair, a desperate, desperate act that feels like the only thing you have left. Slowly but slowly anything that offers hope is switched off, closed off, shut down. Then there’s this thing, this act. You know it will hurt but you imagine the calmness & release that switching off will bring. This becomes the only thing that offers anything. And it grows, day by bad, minute by minute, it grows. Knowing you have this means of release becomes the only thing you focus on. You start to look at how, when, where. Why just doesn’t come in to it any more.
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I know he must of been in some kind of torture to do think that was his only solution. I feel most for his family. I couldn't dream of leaving my wife and little girl, but that just reinforces how desperate things must of looked to him.
I don't really want to add anything from my own experience right now. However, I recently came across this video which I thought might be useful for anyone struggling to understand what goes through the mind of someone who kills themselves:
The craziest thing is, if you watch any of his other videos, he seems like the last person in the world who would ever think about killing themselves.
Iain Lee of comedy and I'm a Celebrity . . . fame joins the fabulous humans in the world.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/dec/20/talkradio-host-iain-lee-suicidal-caller-phone
As he says it's not heroic just a serious bit of empathy and humanity in an increasingly rudderless world.
I started a post yesterday filled with helpline phone numbers, seems to have disappeared from the front page though.
Your wonderful, selfless post has been stickied, friend, first thread on the forum.
Our minds really are complex and weird machines. I can never fathom how somebody that has a wife and kids and a full time job feels the need to do such an act. Speaking from myself whom i've been single by choice for 4 years. On days when I feel low I can't have a chat with the wife or take the kids out somewhere, but it has never crossed or entered my mind to carry out an act to end it all. As i've no neurology experience whatsoever, I can only assume that genes, society and personal experiences may make a person want to carry out the act.
rmacattack- this is not an easy subject. I understand it must be virtually impossible to understand why someone would choose to take their own life, but as someone who has been almost to those depths, I can only imagine that what you describe as “low” isn’t particularly low on the scale of what some people experience.
One of my classmates from school committed suicide when I was 17/18, he'd split up with his girlfriend and I think she told him he wasn't allowed to see his child anymore.
I guess that was the final straw! I'd bumped into him a couple days before and he seemed fine and obviously did a good job of hiding how he was really feeling.
Iain Lee of comedy and I’m a Celebrity . . . fame joins the fabulous humans in the world
There's lots of them on here too. All the people that offer help and advice to others and especially the ones who post about their own personal struggles and feelings, that must take real guts!
I got very depressed in my teens. My GP put me on anti depressants which made me worst. I saw a specialist in Harley Street, and it turned out I had bipolar. He put me on mood stabilizers ( another drug for a different condition which can be used for this is his experience ) and I have been great ever since. Never in a bad mood either. When your depressed it can seem like the end. Sometimes you do not listen to anyone.
Always go and see a GP but a specialist is so much better I found.
I am proof you can come out of it.
I lost a good friend just over 12 months ago. Like me , a copper. Things got on top of him, the job, life, everything. I miss him. His family misses him. He left behind a family too. I suffered with feelings of guilt, could I have read the signs, done more etc...but no one had any clue.
Take people and their problems on a case by case basis - The whole "talk about it" thing can too easily come across as a platitude - People do talk all the time about how they want to end things and then follow through with it - I attended a funeral this year - He'd spoken for years about the darkness he encountered- on the face of it he had an OK life - nice girlfriend and a loving family - He was found hanging in a carpark on a cold damp winter's morning in a London carpark ..
I've had BPD, anxiety & depression for decades. My dad noticed something change when I was 7. I'm 48 now. I've cut ,overdosed ,drank 4 litres of vodka & had my tongue pulled out of my throat by a stranger because I was choking on it. The list goes on. For a lot of us it's not a passing phase. Like someone mentioned. You feel a burden,a waste of space, a hindrance, so empty that you feel like you don't exist. Getting help in the UK is a nightmare. I waited 14 months for 1 appointment. Then I saw a mental health worker for 2 months. I was passed on to another department. They didn't bother sending the letters out about my next appointments & now I've got to wait another 14 weeks to see the Same woman I saw in the first place. People say they care, but they don't make the effort to see you,even when they know you're so messed up you can't leave the house. I was driving around for a couple of months with 200 yards of rope in the car. I planned on putting the rope round a tree, round my neck & driving off at full belt. I did research into decapitation. It takes 4 seconds for the brain to die once the heads off. But I kept thinking of our little un wondering why dad topped himself. He's the only thing keeping me here. Seek help if you can find it. Talk to anyone who'll listen. This time of year is awful for people with mental illness. Debt, loneliness, thinking of dead friends & relatives,even lack of sunlight. Don't let the ignorant get to you. Try not to give up.
Please keep trying to find the help nofx, I know it can't be easy but you'll leave a big hole in a lot of lives.
To echo breadcrumb, nofx, we're here and we're a helpful bunch.
I had a friend kill herself. Or so the papers said. I didnt find out till years after, but for some reason she was in the psychiatric hospital.No doubt someone had convinced her to go there for some 'help',and they doped her up to the eyeballs. I imagine that the drugs hurt her so much(literally), and she thought she'd never be released, so she threw herself under a train.
Either that or another of the inmates decided to do her in
Perhaps I can understand her pain, but that was real for her
What I'd say is that we have feelings, and if we dont 'switch off' they can get strong. If we do switch off, we become unfeeling, brutal, robots, but, if we can stay with our feelings,like a dream,they evolve, and so can change.
One cant nail them down, in a 2 dimensional format, like a painting, cos thats when they die.
So yes its ok to have feelings,but dont try to take any action, cos thats the end of the feeling, thats escaping from your feelings, so you will never know what feelings mean.Every time that feeling will come back, and you will have the same negative response
Hang on until the bubble bursts. Then you will see things differently
Just wanted to thanks those who’ve shared their experiences on this thread. I honestly struggle to understand how someone can get to the point of suicide, but reading this has helped me understand a little more and will make me more aware of friends and colleagues in future. Scares me to think how often I fail to take the time to really listen to how someone is doing, must do better!
I think (after 25ish years and counting of depression) that part of the difficulty in understanding suicide comes from not understanding the sheer detachment depression brings.
From the outside you see someone with a partner, children and job but for them, in their head, these people are far away. In my experience depression causes me to detach from the people around me, i can be with them physically but inside its like there is a wall between us and the lower one gets the more isolated you feel. Then again i have a nice big stack of trust issues, so maybe this is not true in all cases.
to all of those affected keep pestering your gp's and try and see a pyschristist to get better meds. Try to do it though. Being sectioned is no fun at all. If your bad they try and drug you up lots. If your violent they drug you with an injection and leave you on the floor for hours. Other people in there can be scary and it can be a violent place. Some people have difficulty ever getting out if they are really bad, although the NHS does it's best. It was tough at first though as I was in a dark place. They gave me so many meds at first though that I could not stand up. As you progress these meds are then lowered and over time you do tend to get better. Not seeing much daylight for a few months was difficult though.
As I got better though at times I quite enjoyed it there. Free use of a gym, food and new friends. I had 8 hours of leave a day and locked my mtb outside so I could go riding and hung around with pretty girls watching 4 music.
So see your Gp and try and get a physatrist to see you. lnvolve your family and do not things accumumalte otherwise you may finally lose it and get sectioned.
trumpton- do they still do that to people? I thought they had stopped some years ago
One thing I learnt, while doing my scuba diving, rescue diver course.was about all the anxiety I got trying to do everything right underwater, like taking the mask off,controlling y buoyancy, etc.
So watching beginners first time in the water, learning what mistakes they made, allowed my to take a look from another perspective, like a third party, with a detached view. It was then something I could reference,say it wasnt me that was having the problem anymore,so I didnt get caught up in the panic again. I could just watch the thoughts go by,
they still do that. I dred to think of how long I would have spent in their as the meds they gave me got me better but were not ideal. So although I got better I still was not really happy with the meds at the time. Worst of all my physch was not happy with my progress and they are the only ones who can sign you out. I have aspergers and my physc ( physictristc spelling ) did not understand me at all. In the end he did me a massive favour and refered me to a specialist place for pople with autism. These guys were brilliant and carefully matched ( new ) meds to me and after a few attempts found the perfect one for me. It's common for people with autism to get sectioned and be in there for years on end, sometimes never coming out. There's been a few campains on tv for this to stop. It's not so bad if you just have aspergers but even then I was not understood and did not react properly to the meds, so the physc just saw me as not progressing and wouldn't let me out.
