suicide, young people, and getting through

Last week, as part of the "Great American Teach-In", I spoke to high school students at an "alternative" school about mental illness. NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) through its Breaking the Silence Program has an agreement with the school system in my county, and I am now part of that program. I spoke along with Dick, who has been doing these speeches for some years as he has a daughter with a mental illness. The school where we were is a place where students are sent when they are expelled from all the other schools, or when they are sent to the juvenile detention center and released. It is located directly across the street from the county jail. Students can stay there until they graduate, or until they become 24 years old.

I was nervous about doing this because I had not spoken in a school before, and I also thought that it would be difficult to keep the students interested in what we had to say for an hour an a half (the length of each class). Some, of course, were not interested, and slept right through the whole presentation. But others paid attention, and even spoke up about their own mental illnesses, or the medications they take. I discussed my high school era depression. That was my first mental illness diagnosis, Major Depression. I described what depression feels like, something I am sure many of these students know from first-hand experience, and also how I had an addiction to cutting, and anorexia, long before I developed Schizoaffective Disorder. I told them how I was first diagnosed with depression after a suicide attempt. I told them about my years spent psychotic and other suicide attempts. We stressed the following facts:

-Suicide is the third leading cause of death among high school students.
-Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students.

The teacher in our last class talked about a student at the school who hung himself last year. She also stated that students discuss mental health issues and suicide in their papers for her English classes sometimes. She said that she has had students leave suicide notes on her desk. She was also very adamant about being glad we were there to talk about mental health.

Suicide is a huge problem. I remember my years when I would contemplate death, romanticize death, read depressing poetry by authors who killed themselves, and sometimes think, that is the way I should go out. That was long before I became psychotic. Dick asked me how many times I tried to kill myself, and I said, I don't remember. I think about seven or eight. I was suicidal without doing the act for much of my teenage years and my early 20's.

To a certain extent, some of my suicide attempts were a cry for help. The ones where I overdosed on pills - I think a part of me was just begging for help, and didn't know how to get it.

Last night I was in the emergency room because of a stupid mistake I made. I forgot to get my Klonopin prescription refilled and couldn't get it because the community mental health center is closed on the weekend with no on-call doctors. As it's a controlled substance, I couldn't get another pharmacy to fill it for me even though I go there every week. I get my Klonopin at the mental health center pharmacy because it's cheaper there and it's not covered by insurance. Everything else, I get at the regular pharmacy which is open at night and on weekend. If you've been on Klonopin for many years, as I have, you can't simply not take it for a couple days. Not taking it means going through serious withdrawals. I was told by my doctor in the past, and also the pharmacist, to go to the ER if I ended up in this situation. My memory of the last time this happened made me decide that I would rather go to the ER and wait for it for hours than suffer through the physical and mental sickness and loss of my ability to function which would occur if I just skipped it for a couple days.

Sitting in the ER, hoping to get out as quickly as possible, I recalled the times when I was suicidal or psychotic, or really physically ill, and would be in ERs for hours thinking that I was going to get some help. The truth is, you don't get much help in an ER unless you have broken limbs or a heart attack. It is not the place to go for chronic conditions. But it IS the place to go when you're suicidal. Which is how I ended up there on numerous occasions. As I sat there the other night, I thought, you know, I could choose, easily to go back to that horrid life. I never would choose to do so. But I could. I could decide to stop my medications, and that would be all it would take. I'd be suicidal again in no time. I'd be psychotic too. And I'd be in the hospital. I think sometimes it's easy to confuse a hospital with a comfort zone, especially when you feel unsafe in the world. I sometimes catch myself thinking, when I'm having a lot of symptoms, maybe a week in the hospital would help me. But I know it wouldn't really. It's not really helpful for anything other than preventing suicide, in my opinion. I never got any other kind of real help except for my five-month hospital stay, in which time medications were able to start working for me. In my experience, regular hospital stays don't do much because they last an average of 3-5 days, and in that amount of time, psychitaric medications such as antipsychotics and antidepressants, do not take full effect. It takes weeks, sometimes months for them to take full effect. So those few days in the hospital may be helpful for a suicidal person, while not being worth much for a person who needs a medication. Our current hospital system is not set up to really help people with mental illnesses. They are useful, however, in a crisis.

Anyway, the point is, I don't want to kill myself anymore. And I don't want to go back to wanting to kill myself either. I am glad that I am beyond that point. I am glad I have progressed. I don't want to go back to deteriorating and giving up my life. My life is challenging. Working and going to college and doing volunteer work and public speaking is challenging. It's not a walk in the park all the time. But I'd prefer to be challenged than to rot away in misery waiting to die.

If you are suicidal, or you know someone who is, get help, and get help right away. You can always call:
1-800-SUICIDE
or
1-800-273-8255

anywhere in the United States.
If you're outside the U.S., you can find a helpline here.

There is also a page on this blog linked above this post that is especially for you, if you are suicidal. Click on Suicide Resources.The good thing about severe depression and suicidal urges is this: it goes away. Time really does help, and eventually you really do get to the other side. Then you can look back and say, "Wow, I'm glad I didn't give up my life then when I thought I wanted to". Because you'll be happy to be alive. I am.