A. PROLOGUE
Quick note: If you feel suicidal, please get help. Call 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). There’s no judgement here. Only a compassion. Suicide is a symptom; not a choice. Call the number.
In Alcoholics Anonymous when you share your recovery story, you are encouraged to share “what is was like, what happened, and what it’s like now.” Nobody wants to listen to what happened over and over and over. That’s really depressing. The quicker you get to recovery the better. Share the solution not the problem.
This is our approach with 72 Hour Hold. Right now, we are still in the “what it was like” and the “what happened” phases. In this post, I had planned to move into “what it’s like now.” (Because things are getting better!) But after I read this article in The Nation, “Suicide is Becoming America’s Latest Epidemic” by Rajan Menon, I knew I had to write about my own experience with suicide.
This post is tough. I wanted to save it. I don’t want to admit to it. But I believe it’s important to hear as many voices around this issue as possible. Silence kills. The stakes are high. And it’s a battle we’re losing.
In 2017, 47,173 Americans killed themselves. In that single year, in other words, the suicide count was nearly seven times greater than the number of American soldiers killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2001 and 2018. A suicide occurs in the United States roughly once every 12 minutes. What’s more, after decades of decline, the rate of self-inflicted deaths per 100,000 people annually—the suicide rate—has been increasing sharply since the late 1990s. Suicides now claim two-and-a-half times as many lives in this country as do homicides, even though the murder rate gets so much more attention.” –Rajan Menon
B. SEPTEMBER 2017
Last September, I tried to hang myself.
I grabbed my black leather belt, went into the other bedroom, and I made a noose that attached to the coat hook in the closet. Then, I slipped my head inside the noose and let my body down gently until my entire body was supported by the belt around my neck.
It wasn’t violent. It didn’t hurt. And the belt worked quickly. Like a powerful sedative, it began to pull me away from here.
I wasn’t afraid. I was relieved. The pain was about to go away forever. I was not thinking about what comes after death, the cosmos, or anything like that. And I’m not being existential. For me, suicide was the next thing on a list of things I’d tried to stave off emotional pain.
The word hell doesn’t begin to describe the emotional pain I was living in. No words do. If you’ve been there, you know. If you don’t, then I don’t know what to tell you.
I had lost myself to untreated PTSD. Triggered left and right. Jumping out of my skin. Panic attacks. Losing my shit. Scaring the love of my life. Breaking phones. Smashing ironing boards. Canceling plans. Not being able to work. Financial problems. Feeling like I was falling inside. Forever. It was fucking horrible.
This was all long before a diagnosis.
At the last moment, before I lost consciousness, I pushed my body up to relieve the pressure, and I came back to myself. I’m not sure why.
I want to make something very clear here. I have amazing people in my life. I have the two best sons ever. The best fiance ever. The best parents ever. The best future in-laws ever. The best friends ever. Untreated mental illness chips away at all of this, and in the moment of the suicide attempt, tragically, I was unable to comprehend it.
I returned the belt to the closet, and I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Later when I tell the three psychiatrists at Hollywood Mental Health what happened—you get more than one when you attempt suicide—their faces express real concern. “You’re lucky,” they say. “Not everyone makes it back.”
And I know they’re right.
At this moment, as I’m writing this, I feel anxiety in my gut that rises through my chest and shoots out of my arms and fingertips. I wonder if I should post this. I worry about what my parents will think. My kids. My fiancé’s family. I don’t want them to worry about me. My stomach turns inside out. I take a deep breath. What I really want to convey is how complicated suicide is, how we don’t understand it, but then all I have is my own experience. I want the reader to understand that to feel suicidal, to attempt suicide, to succeed at suicide, is not an exotic occurrence. We’re all vulnerable. Suicide is part of being human.
C. MAY 22, 2019
I’m in the group room in the psychiatric ward in some town I’ve never heard of east of Pasadena, California. It’s been a long fucking day. One day that feels like many days strung together. I arrived this morning at ten after an all day and all-night stay in the ER at Cedar Sinai Hospital. The ambulance drivers strapped me down on a gurney, put me in the back, and drove me along Beverly Boulevard past the street where I live with Linda, past Market Provisions, where we had our first date, past the coffee shop where I meet with writing clients.
The group room has a rag tag collection of chairs and tables. It’s very much like you would imagine. There’s a TV hanging on one wall, encased in protective plastic. There’s a bookcase with board games, puzzles, and three books—a crime novel by Steve Berry, 12 Steps and 12 Traditions in Spanish, and a Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
To my right is sixty-year-old Scott. A cool guy. Successful. Smart. Handsome. Well-dressed. He has a house by the beach. He reads a lot. He loves to talk about current events.
We’ve both been 5150ed. Placed on a 72-hour hold. Scott for a suicide attempt. Me for admitting that I was thinking of hurting myself.
I went to the ER after sending this text message to my trauma therapist: “I feel like hanging myself.” I was walking along 3rd Street, at the corner of Crescent Heights. Sobbing. I never cry. But I was sobbing. I knew something was wrong. I was tired. Worn down.
This episode had been going on for a week. Linda was in Las Vegas for a conference, and every day that passed, I slipped further and further away from myself. Terror and anxiety for days. I didn’t want to ruin her trip so I tried to keep it to myself. Of course, she knew. She always does.
It sounds pathetic, I know. And I agree with you. What I’ve learned in trauma therapy at Peace Over Violence, is that my trauma replays itself in different ways. My triggers are a constellation of situations that originate in the trauma. One of my biggest triggers is when someone leaves. In my head, it’s like they’re disappearing from my world for good. I’ve lost the sense of object permanence. My brain just doesn’t process.
So when Linda was gone for a week, she was gone. It felt like I was going through a break-up. It felt like I would never see her again. And as you might imagine, that didn’t feel good. Somehow, I kept it together until she got back. The next morning, I lost it.
Milena texted me back. “GO TO THE ER. AND BE HONEST.”
When a person, as a result of a mental health disorder, is a danger to others, or to himself/herself, or gravely disabled, they may be taken into custody against their will for up to 72 hours for assessment and evaluation.
From Rights for Individuals In Mental Health Facilities Admitted Under the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act
Scott shows me his wounds. First, his right arm, what he calls “a practice run.” The skin is marked up with several knife cuts, too many to count. “This is nothing.” He carefully peels back the white gauze on his left arm. This wound is long and jagged. “I really went deep here,” he says. “I figured once I got started, I had to keep going.” The wound is swollen and red, but clean and stitched together. “The strange thing,” Scott says, “and I know how fucked up this seems, is I didn’t want to die.”
We talk about Mental illness, and what it feels like to be suicidal. We struggle for the words. It’s kind of like a loud noise, we decide. At first, it’s just really annoying. After a while, however, you need it to stop. That’s what it feels like to want to commit suicide. You want it to stop.
But it doesn’t stop. And so you stop it.
D. BACK TO NOW
I think because suicide has such high stakes, there is a disconnect between the act and its consequences. For me, I was experiencing such emotional pain that I was not thinking about death as much as making the pain stop. That’s a difficult idea to convey to someone unless they have felt that same pain. And pain itself is relative. The ability to withstand pain is relative. Still, everyone has a threshold.
If the pain is great enough–and unrelenting–any one of us would end it. Every single human being is capable of suicide. We just don’t want to admit it.
[Suicide] rates are only the tip of an iceberg. For every suicide, there are many more who attempt suicide every year. A cautious estimate suggests that more than 20 million people engage in suicidal behavior annually. Moreover, it is estimated that in the future, the suicide rates are expected to rise, given the WHO’s declaration that suicide rates will pass the 1 million mark in the next 15 years. –The Psychology of Suicide: From Research Understandings to Intervention and Treatment
The rise of the suicide rate in the United States correlates with [a whole bunch of shit that is not really worth bringing up here because people will lose focus on the real problem]. Whatever your fill-in-the-blank is, there’s a good chance that mental illness, and its surrounding complications, are making it worse.
In 2019 United States:
- Mental Illness is less taboo. But it is still taboo.
- More people are trauma-informed. But we are not trauma-informed.
- 43.8 million people will experience a mental illness.
- One in five adults experience a mental illness.
- 60% of adults with a mental illness do not receive treatment.
E. THE ANTIDEPRESSANT SHUFFLE
The warning that comes with Lexapro reads:
Report any new or worsening symptoms to your doctor, such as: mood or behavior changes, anxiety, panic attacks, trouble sleeping, or if you feel impulsive, irritable, agitated, hostile, aggressive, restless, hyperactive (mentally or physically), more depressed, or have thoughts about suicide or hurting yourself.
I started taking 5MG of Lexapro after my children moved across the country with their mother after our divorce. For the first time in my life, I experienced crushing anxiety—so much so that I couldn’t leave my apartment.
Luckily, I went to the doctor and told the truth. He prescribed me Lexapro, and it saved me. Soon I was back to my old self.
I didn’t read about Lexapro at the time. And nobody said much about it. Doctor. Pharmacist. Friends. At this point, antidepressants are part of our vernacular. I had briefly taken Wellbutrin after I got sober in 2005, but didn’t have any issues.
What I didn’t know at the time of my sons leaving was that this event would dislodge my decades-old childhood sexual trauma. The trauma didn’t fully manifest as PTSD until a few years later when I was living in Los Angeles, but the door had been left open.
Enter full-blown PTSD. Again, I reached out for help without knowing the real problem. I was prescribed 10MG of Lexapro, and though it seemed to help a little, it didn’t stop the PTSD bubbles both Linda and I have written about.After another trip to Urgent Care for severe anxiety and emotional dis-regulation, the doctor raised the dosage to 20MG.
The new dosage worked in ways I could not have imagined. The Lexapro didn’t fix my PTSD symptoms, but it gave me room to get better. Instead of being triggered all the time, I had “down time.” I started to recover. Therapy started to work. I got into a male survivor’s group. I started EMDR. I was really getting better.
And then the suicidal thoughts began to creep in again. The noise. Faint at first, but then it grew stronger.
The strange thing about meds is how they come up through your brain. Report any new or worsening symptoms to your doctor. How do you know if your feelings are because of medication or some other reason? It’s very complicated.
And asking the patient to diagnose the symptom seems like a punchline to a joke, and not a real legal disclaimer for big Pharma.
F. TELL THE TRUTH
“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable….Remembering to tell the truth about terrible events are the prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.” –Judith Herman, Trauma & Recovery
Silence has made me sick. It almost killed me. And I know I’m not alone.
I started writing the first post for 72 Hour Hold the morning after I was discharged from BHC Alhambra Hospital in May. I woke up with what felt like a mandate from the universe. Write your story. Tell the truth.
I thought of how, shortly after my PTSD diagnosis, Linda told me she wanted to share my diagnosis with her family. “I need the support,” she said. Part of me loved the idea, but part of me was terrified.
“What will they think of me?”
“They love you,” she said. “And they will still love you.”
So we told her parents, and we all grew closer. We told my parents. Same. Then friends. You get the picture. Our people were there for us.
72 Hour Hold is the story of our recovery from PTSD. What it was like. What happened. And what it’s like now. 72 Hour Hold is the opposite of silence. Remembering to tell the truth about terrible events are the prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.
On we go.
Thank you so much for writing and posting this. Your courage makes a difference!
Thank you for sharing your story. Your story help me to understand more PTSD and the struggle of people with this illnesses.