Why suicide is never the answer

The game of life is hard to play, I’m gonna lose it anyway. The losing card I’ll someday lay, so this is all I have to say… The sword of time will pierce our skins. It doesn’t hurt when it begins. But as it works it way on in, the pain grows stronger… watch it grin…”

Some of you might recognise the lyrics, and the haunting melody that topped the music charts in May 1980. Personally I hated it. The song was called ‘Suicide Is Painless’, better known as the theme from the TV series M*A*S*H. Ironically, in the melancholy stakes, it ousted Johnny Logan’s morose ‘What’s Another Year’ from the No. 1 slot only to be replaced three weeks later by Don McLean’s equally depressing wail of misery, ‘Crying’.
Even more ironic, a version of the song by the Manic Street Preachers became a hit in 1992. Then, band member Richey James Edwards vanished in February 1995. His abandoned car was found on the Severen Bridge, outside Bristol – a spot notorious for suicides. The police presumed he was dead, although unsubstantiated sightings have been common. (One fan claims to have seen him working behind the bar in a pub in the Canaries.) The other members of the band believe he may still be alive.
So why does suicide attract such a voyeuristic interest, when it becomes a theme in an art exhibition, or a plot in a novel? Just what is this morbid fascination with self-destruction all about? The answer, I believe, lies more in our fascination with the innate belief that suicide is the ultimate pain remover: a bit like the tagline, ‘It does exactly what it says on the tin’. Except – as many people who have survived the attempt will testify – it doesn’t. I have met many individuals who have been pulled back from the brink while in their dying moments. Their experiences are, to say the least, nothing short of terrifying.

Lisa’s Story
Lisa waved goodbye to her two flatmates. “Enjoy,” she shouted. She smiled and closed the front door. It was 7.45pm on a typical Friday night, she remembers. The girls were going to the cinema to see a film she had recommended, and on from there for a few drinks in their local pub.
They had begged her to reconsider. “Please, you’ll enjoy it. And if you feel shit, we’ll take you home.”
No, she told them. She was going back to bed. She wasn’t feeling great. Awful tummy cramps, she faked; and a headache, she said. She told them she’d follow them in as far as the pub later on, if she was feeling any better. She’d known all day she had no intention of going outside the door ever again.
She climbed the stairs quickly and closed the bedroom door behind her… and locked it. She opened the drawer beside the bed and took out a small bottle packed with tablets. The pint glass of water was already sitting beside the lamp. Quickly she popped each tablet, washing it down with a sip of water. Another… then another… and then another, until she had swallowed 20… maybe more, she thinks now… maybe not…
She began almost immediately to feel woozy, full and bloated, light-headed; and then very, very nauseous, very quickly. So quickly she thought she might throw up, until the cramps became severe, and the coldness in her legs came on suddenly, and they buckled when she tried to stand up as she doubled over with the extreme pain in her gut, and then, the sudden pounding in her chest that started to make her cough.
She thought they might just make her sleep. But they were causing such horrible, horrendous reactions almost instantaneously, she was panicking now. She can’t remember anything else, just strangeness...
Anna stood at the bus stop and held her hand out, palm up. It was starting to rain. She looked at her watch. The bus wasn’t due for another five minutes, she told Claire. She had time to run back for an umbrella. She’d only bought the skirt that day. She didn’t want to get soaked, so she threw her jacket over head and ran back to the apartment.
She tapped gently on Lisa’s bedroom door, not wanting to wake her, just before she ran down the stairs again. Last thing she’d expected was to find the door locked.
In the ambulance, the paramedic urged Lisa to talk to him. He opened her eyelids and felt the pulse in her neck. Anna cried. The driver cursed the traffic. There was a football match in the local stadium, less than a mile from the hospital, and the traffic that Friday evening was gridlocked.
Lisa opened her eyes. The paramedic squeezed her hand. Anna squeezed her nose and took a sharp intake of breath. “Hello there, Lass,” the paramedic said quickly. “What’s your name?” he asked.
Lisa scanned her surroundings. Blue lights flashing outside in the blackness. The siren in a narrow street was deafening. The pain she was feeling was horrendous. Her body, as she described it to me herself, was in meltdown. “It felt like I was in the final moments of something that had finally caused me to completely fall apart. Nothing seemed to be connected any more. I felt like I was made up of billions of different bits and pieces that didn’t recognise each other any more. It felt like I was bleeding inside, like I was going to explode from the pain. What had I done to myself?”
“Am I going to live?” She wanted reassurance.
The softly-spoken man with the moustache and the greyish hair who held her hand seemed upset, she told me, as he stared at her. “What do you think, girl? Do you want to live? Or do you want to die? Because 20 minutes ago, I thought you’d already made that choice.”
“I want to live,” she muttered, trying to form the words so that he’d hear them clearly. “I’ve made a mistake.”
The ambulance arrived at A&E almost 10 minutes later. Another ten minutes, according to the paramedic, and she would have died.
I want to live. The words will stay with her for the rest of her life. Every day she hears herself saying them. She’s still not quite sure of what happened at the moment she proceeded with the “plan”, as she calls it; but, sure as hell, it all fell apart once she had instigated it. She really believed she was going to die; but she didn’t. And she’s grateful… eternally grateful that she’s had a chance to live on, and change the things in her life that drove her to suicide.
Shortly before our chat finished, she told me that she had heard a voice in the blackness. “You have to live,” it kept telling her. “You have to live; it’s so important to me that you live.” She thinks it might have been the ambulance technician. But she more readily believes now it was her father, who had died of cancer one year earlier.
That was three years ago. She’s happy, successful and determined now – all the things you can’t even imagine when you’re feeling suicidal. Lisa asked me to tell her story, in the hope that more and more people will realise that suicide is a horrible waste of a good life. Nothing more, nothing less: It’s simply death for death’s sake.
I am often asked why would someone who has everything to live for would want to die. The question looks very different when you see it written down, because it also offers an answer.
Suicide is the world’s greatest, most powerful secret. Everything we undertake in life requires us to interact with someone or something. Suicide is the one single exception. We don’t need validation or permission. We don’t need to test for compliance. It becomes self-empowering, especially when everything else – literally everything else! – moves far beyond our control. Suicidal thoughts can provide a comfort zone for a young man who feels that his life is in a state of meltdown. It’s like the instruction: In the event of fire, break glass. Hopelessness and angry frustration are the two main ingredients required to move from thinking about suicide to acting.
No one wants to end their life. And that’s why I believe that suicide is not about death. It’s about ending the crippling, invisible pain that has caused our will to live to decompose. That part of us that cherishes optimism and hope is no longer breathing. And the worse it gets, and the longer it goes on, the less interest we have in fighting it.
We all try to bury secrets we are not proud of; but the secret we can entertain that offers us an instant opt-out clause when the shit of life is drowning us slowly and excruciatingly is indeed a powerful antidote.
Statistics recently revealed that one in six people have seriously considered suicide. I believe the figure is much higher – possibly one in three – because admitting that you have considered killing yourself is breaking the chain of secrecy that is so important to someone who feels they have little or no control over the way his life is going.
One young man told me recently – he was 15 – that he would rather kill himself than let any of his family or mates know that he was gay. What sort of way is that to live a life? Homophobic bullying is rife in secondary schools in Ireland. Comments and slurs don’t just come from the mouths of babes – they also come from some of the teachers. A young male teacher recently asked two young 14-year-olds during his Maths class if they had “lesbian tendencies”. He faked an effeminate voice when he asked the question. One of the girls had simply asked for a loan of her desk-mate’s ruler. The girls are now known as “lezzers” throughout the school.
One tenth of all suicides every year are, according to statistics, directly related to bullying in the workplace. (I also believe this figure to be much higher.) When a 41-year-old man is bullied by a 25-year-old woman who threatens him with accusations of sexual harassment if he doesn’t do what she demands, it’s difficult to know where to turn or what to do. It appears the woman has total, unequivocal control. The man stands to lose everything. He explains that he adores his wife and small children. He doesn’t want to die, but suicide gives him his only “hope” of freedom from a situation that shows no signs of ever abating, a situation that has stripped him of his dignity and his self-worth.
The medical profession regards suicidal ideation and the tendency to dwell on death, and to loosely plan your own demise as a mental illness. It’s nothing to do with illness. I’m fascinated to know that a small gland in the limbic circuitry of the brain, called the amygdala, processes fear, hate, love and anger. Because it’s involved in emotional processing, it’s also responsible for our suicidal thoughts and ideas. But scientific definitions and explanations are not good enough.
Suicide needs to be discussed at a social level: in classrooms, lecture halls, around the dinner table. I find it hilarious that parents will allow small children to watch EastEnders, but feel it’s not appropriate to discuss suicide or depression.
One school principal recently asked me, in advance of a talk I was giving to his fifth and sixth year students, not to mention suicide. I told him, if that was to be the case, then my talk would take less than five minutes.
He told me he was afraid that by talking about it, I “might be planting ideas in the young people’s minds.” He told me he had the full backing of many of the parents in his beliefs. I asked him how many parents. He looked a bit sheepish. “10… Maybe 11.”
How ignorant can you be? And this guy is the principal?! And it’s becoming more and more the norm in the schools not to talk about suicide. Let’s get real here, folks. Young children are dying because we don’t want to know.
Back in the ’70s, we were told that if we didn’t talk about sex, young girls wouldn’t get pregnant. Guess what – they did. In the ‘80s, we were told that if we didn’t highlight the drugs problem, then young people wouldn’t know where to get them. Guess what…?
And so be it; if we ignore suicide, it will go away, and the number of deaths will drop, and young people will lose interest in it. Sadly, we have a liking for being ignorant, and turning a blind eye. It will always be someone else’s problem.
A word that is often used when talking about suicide is Surcease. It means literally ‘to bring to an end’. And we have never seen this more clearly of late than in schools and colleges around the country. The teachers tell me, it is a very, very serious problem.
However, I don’t believe that this ‘bringing to an end’ refers to life. I believe it refers to the unbearable, untouchable pain that creates this overwhelming despair. It’s not a physical pain. It’s a mental pain that exists at a level where it can’t be touched, but can be felt to such an extent that it immobilises us from behaving rationally.
No one else can see this pain that we are enduring, so we continue to smile, and to act out our parts, and to give the impression that everything is just fine, and “you don’t need to worry about me…”
Can you imagine what’s going through the mind of the young man who stands at the side of the pier, after dark, watching the high tide, and the swollen angry current; he’s had a few drinks; he’s waiting for the right moment when he’ll jump.
And that’s what the final moment is: it’s a spur-of-the-moment trigger. I always say that if you hold on another moment or two, you’ll think differently.
Suicide might seem like a good option because it balances the scales of horror in the fight that’s going on within. We know we can terminate the journey at any moment; and for some people that offers a sense of sanity and control in a hollow existence where insanity prevails and the torture controls us.
Suicide, however, can never be an acceptable option, when you examine more closely all of its implications. No one knows what the precise pain of death is really like.
It’s usually this fact that stops people from instigating the final act. Nor does anyone know where we go once the heart stops and life ends. Maybe suicide seems more acceptable if we believe there’s nothing after this life and that the misery will simply just stop.
But we’re complicated individuals and for that reason, I don’t believe our journey ends at the point of death. Does the act of voluntary termination really mean an end to the misery? Are we really capable of moving beyond the pain, or are we only creating more problems for ourselves somewhere else?
These are purely hypothetical questions, but they are questions that are asked by millions every day – by those who are suicidal, and by those who remain behind after the suicide of a loved one, struggling to find their own reasons to go on living in the shadow of such unnecessary tragedy.
Lisa told me she found a new faith, in the aftermath of her attempt. She now believes in the presence of something so much bigger that she feels helps her to plan a life that is more content and meaningful.
Maybe it’s not trendy today to believe in a god of some shape or kind. Ray D’Arcy said recently on his radio show that he didn’t believe in God. That’s fine by me, but he should keep his beliefs (or ‘non-beliefs’ as the case may be) to himself, particularly when he’s dancing barefoot on a subject that still forms the cultural tapestry of who we are, whether we like it or not.
Ray should be aware of how big and loyal his college student audience is every morning, and how vulnerable and impressionable many of these individuals might be. For a broadcaster (who makes such a serious impression on such an impressionable bunch of listeners) to come out with such a loose-cannon statement is nothing less than a blatant abuse of his privileges, demonstrating a level of immaturity and recklessness that makes alarm bells ring. Ray D’Arcy is no Gay Byrne… nor will he ever be.
If life is to have meaning, and if we are to go on living contentedly, then we have to believe in something: there has to be a meaning at the core of our existences, whether it’s in the soothing affects of the music of Josh Groban, or in the invigorating comfort and peace we get when we walk along a beach, or in our ability to complete a marathon, or in the belief that things can change and that life will get better, despite all the obstacles we are faced with.
Suicide doesn’t allow for a second chance. It might end the pain (or does it?). But it also ends everything that might ever have come into being: achieving the goals you only ever dreamed of; the children you might like to have been a parent or an uncle or a cousin to; the moments you might have cherished that assure you there is something much bigger to this life than we often realise, and that there’s a very good reason why you’re an important part of it.
Life is all about change: being strong and confident enough that we’re up to the challenge of changing when we need to, or when we find no other choice but to change, and to know there are people there who care and want us to live.
Suicide is neither brave nor selfish; it won’t make you a martyr or a better person; it won’t heighten the respect or admiration that people already have for you. It’s simply just a waste of a very precious life, and it will destroy the lives of the people who love you and often depend on you for a meaning to their existence, despite how much better you think their lives will become after you’ve gone.
Rene Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, famously said: “I think, therefore I am.” I think he got it wrong. Perhaps what he should have said was: I am, and I can think; therefore I can change who I am. Lisa did.
Pics: Jamie Howard
Gareth O’Callaghan was recently appointed a director of the Irish Association of Suicidology. Email: [email protected].