Thoughts on Suicide: 4am
One of mine
When I read / hear that X, or Y or Z, took his life (and it usually is his life) because the balance of his mind was disturbed, it grates on me. It's grated on me for years. It grates on me because it denies the lived experience of the individual and bolsters the smug, self-satisfied (unexamined) narrative of the powerful 'collective'.
When a fish swims in poisoned water, it dies.
People commit suicide not because the balance of their minds is disturbed but because the balance of their life is disturbed.
Faced with problems, we speak, sometimes of getting things 'straightened out'. We should do more of it. Not just speak about it, but do it. Our current understanding cosmology / physics describes the planets as travelling in straight lines through curved space. Well, I think that if your life becomes distorted enough, suicide is perfectly rational. Suicide can be a straight line in a fucked up world.
There is a very strong resistance to acknowledging that our lives are becoming increasingly distorted, that the water we swim in is becoming increasingly poisoned. It serves some powerful vested interests to say otherwise - just as sewage companies don't want to be caught poisoning rivers, or agribusinesses polluting waterways with chemical run-offs, so the powerful don't want us to see the fundamental flaws in the current set up.
It suits their purposes if you continue to think the dead fish were weak / sick / unhealthy. And, of course (by extension) that you are not - you're still swimming in the sewage and believing it's Evian.
Not seeing it, personally.
The same game is widespread. Have you been on resilience training at work? Plenty of my NHS colleagues will have been. The main point of resilience training (as far as I can see) is to make you believe that the stresses you feel are an indication of your inability to cope rather than evidence of the unsustainable burdens placed on you.
Or there's the 'sickness policy' that evolves into 'supporting attendance'. The message here being that you are not ill, rather that you're failing in your obligation to your employer.
If you believe all the above, so much the better for them, so much the worse for you.
I am not looking to deny individual agency in suicide. Or anywhere else in life. Very few of us have absolutely no power to choose /act.
What I'm saying is that our opportunities to exercise personal choices / our power to effect change is being systematically eroded. And, further, that the sense of collective agency, which can effect changes to the system itself, is being deliberately dismantled. (Rights to protest, rights to vote, the simple fact of being ill, the right to speak the truth to power). Think of the apartment dwellers who are made personally liable to pay to have their death-trap properties made safe, instead of the developers and builders who made their homes unsafe. Or think of the incandescent rage directed at Insulate Britain protestors rather than the leviathans who are driving the climate catastrophe. What, exactly, is the problem about making homes more energy efficient? About having a planet that is not simultaneously in flames and under water?
But, back to the individual and personal. When you remove support, when you make it difficult to access help, when you characterise people as weak, when you heap coals on their heads, when you make their world increasingly shit, some people will choose suicide. Don't act surprised. Don't paint a sad face. It makes perfect sense.
What doesn't make sense is ignoring the spiralling crisis and subscribing to "I'm alright, Jack"; is colluding with the people who characterise suicide as weakness; with those who pour petrol on flames; with those who denature life and impose ever-greater burdens.
Suicide is not easy to survive, for those close to the person who elects it. It can bring almost unimaginable levels of guilt: 'I should have known'; 'I ought to have spotted that'; 'I should have done more'. Keep away from that. Acknowledge the feeling but don't indulge it. Standing alongside someone in their suffering is not the same as making yourself responsible for it.
And being angry at the person (and you very well might be) won't help, either. Feel it, yes, but lay it aside as soon as you can.
We cannot safeguard all that we love. It is not within our power.
What is within our power is to challenge the narrative; to demand (and effect) the change that we need; to straighten things out; to ease burdens; to provide support; to refuse to be complicit.
Don't pollute the water we all swim in.
Don't engineer black holes for others to be sucked in to.
Remember those who are overpowered. They're us.