So friends, it’s been a while. I hope that you’ve had a great Summer and are now infused with the enthusiasm and the keenness of a crisp Autumnal morning!
I thought that my first post after the break would be about writing but I’m actually going to talk mental health instead.
I feel compelled to revisit this topic because I’ve heard, via social media, that someone I went to school with has died. I don’t know for sure but I have a sense, reading between the lines, that she probably committed suicide. I haven’t seen this person for about 25 years, I wasn’t close to her, haven’t spoken to her, but her death has haunted me. I feel stupidly, uselessly, that maybe I could have helped her if I’d known her better - talked to her or something. This is highly unlikely and possibly only expresses a tiny fraction of how the people closest to those who take their own lives feel.
A year ago I wrote a post about depression; it’s something that a lot of people suffer from but many people (myself included) are uncomfortable talking about. http://msmuddles.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/the-missing-piece.html
It might sound inconsistent (to say that I’m uncomfortable discussing it) given that I blogged about it, but there is a vast difference between talking to someone in person and in writing it down. Although it can feel like a real exposure, when you blog, the immediacy of a conversation isn’t there. You don’t get to see the reader’s reactions, and if they do respond, with a written comment, you have time to formulate your response.
I think that we worry how people will respond if we talk about internal struggles; will they tell us to pull ourselves together? A G.P said this to a friend of mine when she was suffering from depression, in her early twenties.
Do we worry that we’ll be boring or burdening the other person? (Perhaps this is where counseling comes in)
Will people see it as a weakness and judge us for it? Might it endanger our job prospects?
If you haven’t read the original post, I wrote about suffering from a crippling bout of depression when I was sixteen, which lasted for about a year, during this time I had moments when I was suicidal.
I just want to clarify that I’m not depressed now and haven’t been for some time. I’ve had periods of depression since that first terrifying time; once after I suffered an ectopic pregnancy, then, after the birth of my first child, but it’s never been quite as bad as that first instance, and, thankfully not lasted for as long.
One thing I remember from all of those times though, a common theme, was that I didn’t feel comfortable admitting to the way I felt. At times (particularly the postnatal bout) I was deeply ashamed of it.
And, as I wrote in the original post, one of the hardest things about mental illness, is the acute isolation.
Because of my own experience, I tend to associate severe depression and suicide with the teenage years but the facts show that this isn’t the case at all. It certainly wasn’t the case with the girl I went to school with who would have been in her early forties. These are the statistics from the Samaritans:
The highest suicide rate in the UK in 2014 was for men aged 45-49 at 26.5 per 100,000.
And:
The female suicide rate in the UK is at its highest since 2011.
So what can we do about this? Is there nothing we can do? Or, would it help to start a conversation, make it more acceptable to talk about mental health, make a vow never to tell a person with depression to ‘pull themselves together’? What should society do? Subsidise long term therapy, stop telling boys that boys don’t cry, stop telling men to ‘man up’, talk about our own experiences?
I don’t know about you but when I walk into a room full of strangers, it almost always seems as if everyone else there is more confident than me - they seem be in control, be better at negotiating life and yet, statistically, this cannot be true! It just just to show how powerful perception and viewpoint is. There are probably a lot of people out there who are suffering from a myriad of disorders and suffering in silence.
I’ve heard some people scorning the fact that people get signed off with stress nowadays; saying that their generation just ‘got on with things’ and I wonder, just how many suicides are people who were perceived to be ‘getting on with things’. I also think about the men who came back from the First World War suffering from shell shock - mute with stress. Sometimes you can’t just ‘get on with it’ or move on without getting some help.
I stopped blogging for a while, partly because I felt that I was revealing too much about myself in the posts. I felt exposed. But perhaps, if no one talks about depression it perpetuates the notion that it’s something to be ashamed of.
So, once again here are some places to go to for help:
The Samaritans
The British association of counsellors and psychotherapists
A free service where you can text for help, as many people don’t like talking on the phone
When I discussed the writing of this post with my partner, he said he’d listened to a podcast about suicide:
In it someone likened suicide to jumping out of a burning building - the jumpers probably know that they are probably going to die, but anything is better than being burned alive.
I’ve never heard a more devastating or apt analogy - when life feels like hell - death is preferable.
I really want to end on a positive note so I'll share the fact that when I looked up the Samaritans, to find the link to their website, one of the facts on their homepage is this:
I really want to end on a positive note so I'll share the fact that when I looked up the Samaritans, to find the link to their website, one of the facts on their homepage is this:
Suicide rates fall to six-year low
Take care!
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