An observation about a rather sticky subject

(Disclaimer: The below article is about suicide. If this subject disturbs or triggers you, please skip this post altogether. I'm going though a hard time right now, and I needed to express something I'm going through in a safe and healthy way. I don't know if it will help anyone else, but since I believe so strongly in mental health advocacy and education, I could not, in good conscience, just relegate it to a file folder on my hard drive where it would never be seen. That being said, I hope it DOES help someone out there - whether it helps change their point of view or lets someone else know they're not alone. Thank you.)


I hear a lot about how people who commit suicide are weak or quitters or somehow horrible people, and I have to tell you that I think the people who perpetuate that kind of garbage are ignorant and, sometimes, evil.


When someone repeats these things, they send a clear message to anyone around them who is at risk for suicide that they are less than, beneath, and unworthy of help. So, guess what? They don't ask for help when they need it. They just continue to suffer in silence until the day that it's too late, and then, they sit in their room and stare at a bottle of pills or a gun or the plan that they have carefully thought out a dozen or million times until that moment where they can no longer stop themselves.


Mental health illnesses are cruel punishment to a person – especially in a society where it seems that the only value a person has is how much money they can make or how successful they can be or how beautiful their physical appearance is. Self confidence is hard enough to come by without the pressure of proving that one is worthy of being treated with the same dignity and respect that 'normal' people deserve by simply not being sick.


There are continuous battles to wage on a daily basis over things as small as getting out of bed in the morning. Symptoms can range from insomnia or hypersomnia to paranoid thoughts to despair to inappropriate behaviors to even visual or auditory hallucinations, and each symptom comes with its own set of effects that can affect daily life - sometimes, so significantly that life isn't just disrupted, but halted and made all the more miserable.


Mental health treatment is also harsh in a lot of ways. Those on the outside of a mental health crisis seem to think that medication fixes everything, and the person with the illness should be fine as though it's a simple flick of a light switch, when in truth, every day is a constant battle on several fronts. There's the battle with oneself to justify the burden one is on their family, and then, there's the burden of not being strong enough to overcome what so many people around them seem to think is just a matter of willpower. There's the battle to sort what thoughts and feelings are a product of misfiring neurons and imbalanced chemicals and which thoughts and feelings are based in reality, no matter where the distortion of perception originates.


There's a battle over how useless and/or worthless a life can become before it can be justly snuffed out of existence. Hell, there's even resentment when the one thing stopping one from doing it is that one's loved ones have to be the ones to pay for one's “weakness”, and the battle between that and being a burden becomes neverending.


In the end, it's not a choice. In the end, it's not about being too weak or even selfish.



In the end, it's about losing the war.