There are people out there who will look & read about the two attempted suicides of famous people, and wonder, “what have they got to feel suicidal about?”
There are some people who still don’t understand mental illness and how easily it is for someone to have a happy go lucky exterior, yet feel totally bereft of life internally. One of the major drawbacks to mental health is the fact that because no one can actually see you’re ill, they assume everything is OK. For the vast majority of people with bi-polar on the right medication, we spend our days controlling the lows (and the highs) so that we “fit in” with what society expects us to be like, often hiding our illness from the world because we are afraid of how we will be judged if it were to be discovered just how bad it can get at times.
I myself have tried to complete suicide on a number of occasions.
Note the use of the word “Complete” and not “Commit”. That’s because suicide is no longer a crime in the UK, and the use of the word commit has a criminal overtone to it. It’s been altered so as to make suicidal people who attempt and fail less like criminals during recovery, not that you’d notice from the continued use of commit in the media, who, let’s face it, are happy in the main to actually make those with mental illness feel like criminals at times.
Take Stephen Fry, all those who still ask the question at the very start of this are the ones with very little actual contact with the mentally ill. Or so they think. One in four people WILL suffer from an episode of mental illness at some point, so look around you, chances are, that one of those you love and care about has either had an episode and not said anything, or will have one.
The other famous person to attempt to complete suicide was Paris Jackson. Now, there is someone who really has had a lot to deal with. Losing a parent at the age she did is hard enough, but when that person is the king of pop and your family are going through the courts to prove that he was killed by an inept Dr, then you can see where the pressure is coming from to not only try to have a childhood, but to live in the shadow of your now deceased parent.
My turning point was being offered a course in Mental Health first aid in 2011 and also taking the STEPS (http://www.pacificinstitute.co.uk/solutions/steps/) course (http://www.commlinks.co.uk/Sites/Training/events/clinical-risk-assessment) that although isn’t designed to stop me from suicide, but more to be able to recognise the early stages of wanting to complete in others and to help them stay safe and free from harm has allowed me to see in myself when a problem is arising and to head it off by giving me the tools to cope with and overcome to a certain degree my depression. That’s not to say I don’t get depressed, far from it, My bi-polar is as bad as ever, but by taking my meds, having a caring & loving group of family and friends who I know I can trust and talk to, I get through the worst of it without doing too much damage to either myself or those around me.
So, before you ask why someone who may appear to have everything would want to end their life, just stop and think about mental illness and how it affects different people in different ways, then look and see if anyone you know might need your help coping…
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