Ending it all

September 1976. I am eleven years old, sitting in the front room with a kitchen knife in my hand and I am thinking of ending it all. The reason? I had found the transition from primary school (population approximately 180) to secondary school (population approximately 900) rather hard to take.

This happened every afternoon for a few days and I think what I was doing was telling myself just how bad I felt. I was anxious, frightened and out of my depth, surrounded by people who seemed more confident and trying very hard to grow into a uniform that would probably never fit me. I was mentally and physically exhausted. Quite honestly, I just wanted it to stop. It didn’t go any further but, having watched a documentary about self harm I wonder if I would have done that rather than commit suicide. Perhaps that was what I had in mind but didn’t know that you could do that.

Self harm, in terms of cutting, scratching, etc. is not the same thing as suicide and seems to serve a different purpose. In fact, according to some of the self harmers that Meera Syal spoke to in that documentary, self harming has prevented suicide because it acts as a temporary release. That I didn’t do it has everything to do with the fact that I had never heard of the practice, unlike today’s school children, amongst whom “cutting” seems to have reached epidemic proportions. It has crossed my mind that in attempting to inform and support those who self harm we have in fact spread the word about it and are in danger of making it a part of everyday teenage life.

We seem to find it easier to discuss self harm of this kind than we do its ultimate form - suicide. Yet even though the increase in suicides amongst young men is described as “worrying” the most fuss was made in the media when sixteen young people killed themselves over a relatively short period in the town of Bridgend. There was a suggestion that suicide was being romanticised. Every death of this kind seemed to be marked by tributes on networking sites and there might have been something about being immortalised in this way that appealed to those suffering from undiagnosed clinical depression, so that they went from considering suicide to actually doing it.

The programme was broadcast a few days after the joint suicide of a couple at Beachy Head and an attempt by a woman with MS to clarify the law on assisted suicide. Kazumi and Neil Puttick had nursed their son lovingly following a car accident that had left him needing constant care. His death from meningitis had been more than they could cope with. They fell together with his small body and toys from a place that has become notorious for the number of suicides that take place there. An average of 20 people every year succeed in ending their lives by jumping from the chalk cliffs. The Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team has prevented a number of suicides in recent years by patrolling the area and responding to reports of people acting suspiciously.

I have come to think that this is the answer to suicide prevention. I feel that we have to actively inform the general public that it is possible to prevent many of these deaths by raising awareness of the indicators that someone is considering ending their own life. It astonishes me that even when someone has told another person that he or she has considered doing this, the person they have made the admission to has not acted on the information. To me it would seem that the person making the admission is asking to be talked out of it or even for professional help. We live in an increasingly selfish age and I wonder if there may be a hesitation to get too involved. Apart from that I think that many people are lucky enough never to have felt that low and just can’t take seriously the thought that someone they know would do something of that nature. You have to go through it yourself to really understand that the tipping point can be reached far more easily than is generally supposed.

We are gradually (a little too gradually in my opinion ) getting away from the notion that children do not get depressed unless they have experienced some obvious and significant trauma. Victims of bullying often claim to have been suicidal but policies in schools to tackle bullying seem to vary and I wonder how many of them are in place to keep school inspectors happy when the true attitude of the staff is that it is all part of growing up. We seem to expect so much more of the young in terms of education, and they expect more of each other in terms of their appearance. Why has it got to the stage where children all over the country are slashing and scratching themselves, scarring themselves for life in the process, just so that they can get through the day?
The only kind of suicide that it seems easy to talk about is the right to end a life that is filled with physical pain. Perhaps it is easier to see yourself as suffering from a debilitating condition like Multiple Sclerosis and be able to articulate your wishes to a partner or family member in case it happens to you. Thoughts of suicide are often connected with concerns about those who are left behind. In the case of those who have the kind of condition which they recognise will leave them in a particularly distressing physical state there is what some may regard as a selfish need to put an end to that distress before it becomes unbearable. There is also the concern that by asking their loved ones to take them to a place where that pain could end they will leave them facing a prison sentence. Discussion about this issue seems to be endless yet, when it comes to the quiet, unpublicised misery of the kind of suicide that happens everyday, we are too embarrassed to talk about it.

Perhaps we can’t deal with the sadness and anger of those left behind. Most of us don’t know what to say and if we do know we don’t have the patience to keep on saying it to someone who, in turn, loves and hates the one who has done this. It may seem obvious but I really do feel that we need to increase the funding for mental health services and prevent the suicides that occur because mental health staff are too overworked to notice how far someone in their care has sunk into the depths of despair. I think we absolutely need to raise public awareness of the signs of suicide in the same way that we have promoted stroke awareness. Above all I think we need to relax a little when it comes to our expectations of children in educational terms and recognise that, whatever a child may say to our faces, what they are truly feeling may need a little more investigation.

The thing that I wanted most in September 1976 was someone who would listen to me and hear what I was feeling without making me feel as if I was a nuisance, as if I was just number 900.

http://survive.org.uk/suicide.html
http://www.papyrus-uk.org/
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mentalhealthinformation/mentalhealthproblems/depression/self-harm.aspx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/headroom/newsandevents/programmes/meera_syal.shtml