Suicide Prevention Month

 September is suicide prevention month. Every year it comes around, and every year I have a new story to tell. This year my story is darker than any before - I want to say, "but also more hopeful," but I don't know just yet if I believe that.

In June of this year I was admitted to a mental hospital. I was planning to kill myself and reached out to my doctor as one last chance at life. She didn't let me go home. I could either drive myself to the hospital or be taken by ambulance. Suddenly my life was spinning completely out of control and I grasped at what small bits of control I had left. I chose to drive myself. 

I think that was the worst day of my life. 

Everything went by in a blur once I arrived at the hospital. It was a whirlwind of paperwork and talking with nurses and social workers. My belongings were taken and locked up. Everything I had with me and everything I was wearing was checked, my naked body was examined, my shoelaces and the string of my hoodie were taken away. I frantically texted family and friends to assure them of my safety before having my phone taken away. I cried through the whole process. I knew my life was going to end, it was the only way for the pain and emptiness to end. But I was absolutely terrified of dying and these people said they could keep me safe, and maybe even help. 

My  room was sterile and unfriendly. Everything slanted, built into the ground. Nowhere to hide under or behind, nothing to hang off of. The whole room could be seen from the hallway and the bathroom had just a curtain that didn't even reach the floor so some part of me could be seen at all times. The sheets and blankets were thin and breathable to reduce chances of suffocation. Nurses checked in every 20 minutes for safety.  I wanted to laugh - this couldn't be real - I felt like I was looking at my life from the outside, watching a character in a TV show get swept up in things outside their control and land somewhere they were comically out of place.

Everything hit me suddenly, my consciousness jerking back into my body, the shock of it all sending me into a fit of sobs. 

Another blur of meeting other patients, going to meals, outside time, and attempts at sleep went by all while I shifted back and forth between crying uncontrollably and going completely numb. At some point I saw a psychiatrist, a doctor, a nutritionist... 

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, acute depression, borderline personality disorder, PTSD, and acute anxiety.

At first I felt like I was just being covered in labels, like my self was being erased. Eventually I would come to accept the diagnoses 

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I started this post in September 2023 but was still a bit too raw to finish it. I was still just learning to cope with the diagnoses I had recently been given. I was still recovering from the chronic fatigue that came from being utterly emotionally and physically drained. The toll of my experience in the hospital was significant physically, emotionally, and financially. But I was catapulted into healing in a way I had not thought possible before. 

Living with the mental illnesses I have was scary when undiagnosed. The feeling of instability, of having emotions that I just couldn't get under control no matter how hard I tried, was terrible. I didn't like getting diagnosed, it felt like my identity was being reduced to a bunch of letters. But getting the help I needed, the right medications and therapeutic treatments, has been completely life changing. The experience of stability and the ability to control my responses to intense feelings is something I am wonderfully grateful for. 

Getting help is... helpful. I am so grateful that I got the help I needed. I don't want to discourage anyone from getting the help they need. But my actual experience in the mental hospital was terrible. I wish there was another way I could have been helped out of the "acute distress" (as the hospital people called it) I was in. The staff was overworked and under equipped to help the variety of patients they oversaw. There were two daily mandatory group therapy sessions and several times the tech who helped monitor our vitals and had no mental healthcare training was called in to help cover. I was physically safe and getting the medical treatment I needed but emotionally and mentally I was not well cared for. When I hear people joke about "going on a grippy sock vacation," it makes me furious. The mental hospital, in my experience, is a stressful place that did not even give me socks. I was stuck wearing the jeans and sweatshirt I checked in with for three days until the clothes a friend dropped off got cleared by security. 

My mental health journey has been a messy one. Getting help for my mental health has been difficult, painful, and expensive. I think when we talk about things like suicide prevention it is important to talk about how much better it gets. But also, perhaps for the sake of the people who are supporting our journeys, it is important to talk about just how difficult the process of getting help is. 

Telling My Story to Myself

 I feel like I have a lot to say about  personal experiences. The question is whether it should remain between myself and my journal or if I should package things more suitably for public consumption and share them with the world. Is there anyone that needs to hear what I have to say? Or is that a self-centered view that comes from living in the society I do, where social media gives each person a platform and a false sense of personal fame. I wonder if I will look back in a few years on my current reflections with the same embarrassment I feel now looking back five or more years.

There is the matter of growing up in a fundamentalist Christian community. I could say so much about being homeschooled, using Sonlight curriculum, having church and Christian homeschool groups as my only socialization. I could talk about the years my parents were on staff with YWAM and I lived on a missionary base. Attending Bible college at a Pentecostal charismatic school. Marriage just after graduation when I was far too young and inexperienced with life to be getting into that type of relationship. A post-graduation search for purpose and meaning as the more education I received, the more my faith fell apart. I could tell people about my personal journey into healing from purity culture and discovering my own sexual identity and the ways it contributed to the end of my marriage. 

If I talked about all that, it would be colored through the lens of my mental health experience. That is to say that my own perspective on my life influences how I process my experience and my perspective has been shaped by depression and other ongoing mental health disorders. I could talk about the good along with the bad. There certainly has been plenty of good in my life, it has simply been tainted by a struggle with mental illness and unaccepted neurodivergence. The struggle culminated in a breakdown. All the moments of my life one after the other built up to a climax that nearly brought the story to an end. Certainly a dramatic way of framing the fact that I ended up in the mental hospital during an acute depressive episode that triggered intense suicidal ideation. 

I think I’ve been looking at it wrong though, my breakdown. Seeing my life as a story with the regular dramatic arc puts my breakdown at the climax. There was a moment where death seemed the only possibility, where I thought the story would end with a funeral. And then I made a choice: to drive to the hospital instead of driving home. A climax, a choice, a week of anguish, a release into life as a (barely) stable member of society. But that would frame the last few months of my life as the resolution to the story. It works if I’m writing a memoir of my young adulthood. But as a framework for understanding my life, it holds me back in ways I hadn’t quite realized. I’ve been getting through the last few months as if the story has ended. The mentality feels similar to how I think of characters at the end of cheesy romance novels. The plot points have all resolved and the characters continue on as vaguely happy creatures that float through time without anything really happening. I feel like I have to start a new story and it has me frozen with fear. Part of me is apprehensive that I might end up at another breakdown. Rather than living and choosing to have experiences that bring me fulfillment and happiness, I feel like I have to choose what my new story will be and then mold my world and experiences around that. 

As I reframe my way of understanding my own life, I find that I am able to experience more fulfillment. The “story mindset,” as I call it, served me well for a time. As a young adult attempting to create an identity and live with purpose, seeing myself within a story gave meaning to things in my life. At this point, I find that creating a new story is less important to me than being myself. For instance my career is not exactly fulfilling or exciting. I’d like to be doing something more meaningful. But at the moment I am okay with waiting to make a big change because I have to make a lot of small choices every day about who I am and who I want to be. I am trying not to worry about what plot points I am creating in my story, whether I am delaying an important moment or perhaps creating a twist that ends in another climax like my choice to hospitalize myself. Hopefully this reframing is helpful for me. Looking at choices and asking “will this bring personal fulfillment right now,” and “will this bring personal fulfillment in the future” instead of asking how it fits in the story is a lot less pressure for now. (A side note about framing my life in terms of personal fulfillment. I realize that on the surface it can sound entirely selfish. But personal fulfillment, to me, is about living one’s values. If I did not value the happiness and wellbeing of others, then seeking my own fulfillment would likely be selfish. But that is not the case here.)

Perhaps I will eventually find motivation to expand on the different points of my personal experience. But I am hesitant to say anything that might hurt the people in my life and sharing my story from my current perspective which is of the pain and difficult things I have experienced will likely do that. For now I have tried to remain vague enough about things beyond my inner experience to avoid offense. Maybe this is a reflection that will add value to others as well as myself. For now I will leave it here where people can find it but likely won’t.