If I went to the E.R. every time I felt suicide ideation, I'd have to live there. However, it is impossible to talk about feeling this way for fear of being involuntarily incarcerated (and yes, I do think of it as incarceration) in a mental health facility. I made a promise to myself when I was sixteen, involuntarily placed on the psych ward at the hospital after cutting my wrists, and treated in a shameful and dehumanizing way, that I would never return to one of those places. I have kept that promise to myself for nearly 40 years, and I don't intend to stop.
I also heard many times over the years:
"Oh, just stop looking for attention."
"You're overly dramatic."
"Just stop feeling that way."
"Life's hard for everyone. What makes you think you're special?"
"You bring your problems on yourself."
I stopped telling people how I was feeling and just kept it inside.
Furthermore, there may be non-psychological reasons why a person feels less than thrilled with life.
Try living in extreme poverty (I made less than $5000 last year) but when you go to try and get EBT (food stamps) you and your autistic adult child (who was not even present at the meeting and thus not allowed any say in the matter) are threatened with jail time for "trying to defraud the system" and your physically disabled self is told that if you were "truly disabled you would need a caregiver." I don't need a caregiver, but I can't work a regular job. I do freelance work from home. How the hell many psychologically "normal" people wouldn't start to feel like taking the exit from life if this kind of crap was happening to them?
I've also come to be very angry because of how I was treated when I was sexually assaulted on more than one occasion in my life. It happened in 1980 when I was 15. There was no intercourse so I knew no-one would believe me, but it was sexual assault. I had been a formerly "good kid" except for the pot-smoking and the drinking because I needed an escape from the way I felt because I was constantly psychologically and sometimes physically abused at school, let's call "bullying" what it really is. I started acting out, cutting classes and then cutting myself. Instead of asking questions I was sent to the school counselor who called my parents. When I got home, my mother aggressively pulled up my sleeves and demanded angrily to know "what is wrong with you?" I knew better than to ever tell the counselor anything again. I may have been troubled, but I wasn't stupid.
I later engaged in consensual activity with a boy that I really liked, although this was an ill-advised idea. When I yelled in pain because it hurt, this made him angry or uncomfortable and he abandoned me. It was then that I made the suicide attempt that put me in the hospital.
When I asked: "why do boys only want girls for a piece of ass?" nobody caught on that I might have been sexually assaulted. I was told that I needed to keep myself out of situations where I might be used in that way. All of the onus was on me, none on the guy who assaulted me or the guy who wanted to use me for sex but then dumped me because I wasn't ready.
When I was sexually assaulted at 18, I was told by my father that I shouldn't have put myself in that position. I had a mental breakdown and ended up dropping out of college.
When I was sexually assaulted at 32, I was having back to back panic attacks for most of the day. I needed help. I was given drugs. I don't respond well to drugs. Prozac left me feeling numb and I sat there staring at my arm wondering if I should cut it to see if I could still feel. Xanax made me sedated and then suicidal. None of it stopped the panic attacks, so I stopped taking it. I had back to back panic attacks when I was awake for an entire year and the advice that I was given by my family was that I had gotten over it before when this had happened to me and I would get over it again. I had one so-called mental health "professional" who referred to me as a "basket case."
Although I do have legitimate psychiatric issues (type 2 bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and complex PTSD), there are also environmental factors that contribute to my suicide ideation. People never want to look at those realities. It's more comfortable to believe that the person experiencing suicidal thoughts is simply "disturbed" or "mentally ill."
Cie Has Blown Her Stack
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