Hello and I am here to share my suicide story! Thinking about suicide is a big part of my life and it is hard that I am not allowed to talk about it. I am a man and I am turning 30 next month.
I remember I was first thinking about suicide when I was 9. I was not thinking about it as something I would like to do. I was just thinking about it with curiosity.
By the time I was 15 I was feeling suicidal. I remember I was living in a suicidal fantasy most of the time. I couldn’t stop imagining horrible ways that I would die. I would try to imagine ways I would die that wouldn’t be my fault. But it helped me to imagine the worst ways I could think of because I felt less guilty for having a fantasy about it if the way I would die would be painful. I was putting cigarettes out on myself.
I went to university and tried to study a degree but I had no concentration. I was not able to concentrate on my work. I was doing a psychology degree. I had one of the worst classes ever and I embarrassed myself badly in front of the seminar group by showing how poor my understanding was. I remember how hard I had tried to understand the material but I just could not grasp it. I could not concentrate on reading it properly. I read it again and again but it would not go into my brain. It kept slipping out of my mind, I just could not concentrate. I dropped out of university and I worked in hospitality where I was unhappy.
Then, I became more depressed. I was taking a lot of medication. I can’t remember what the name of the medication was but I was taking more and more of it but it was not doing anything. I wanted to kill myself badly. The medication made me sweat a lot, I was always dripping with sweat. I fell in love for the first time but we broke up and I was devastated. I tried very hard to do things to make myself feel better but life was difficult. I cried for 6 weeks. My father said something truly horrible to me and then I fell apart at that time. I had become convinced that the world would be a better place without me and I should kill myself. I tried to kill myself but I was not successful and I was admitted to a psychiatric clinic against my will. I was 20 and I was in hospital for my 21st birthday. Then, for years afterwards, I was angry about it, because I knew I would never have the same conviction again that killing myself was the right thing for me to do.
Over the years, I was still sick. I was in hospital two more times. I have some funny stories from that time about the way I was treated in hospital by the staff there. I will tell you one. Well, the first time I was admitted, a very young nervous guy from pathology came to take some blood from me so they could find out if I was okay physically. But he messed it up and put in the needle wrong. Then he looked away and he was messing around with things in his box of tricks but meanwhile blood was going all over the place. It was funny at the time because he was so nervous and not much older than me and he knew I was on suicide watch, and he was so embarrassed that a highly suicidal patient was looking at their blood going everywhere. But I just thought it was very funny. Most of the other stories I have are as funny but not as nice as that, I did not have a good time in hospital.
I was also very sick at times. I was pretty anorexic partly because I thought I was overweight but also because I was obsessed with decay and I convinced myself that my food was already in a state of significant decomposition by the time I was eating it. I had physical symptoms of my depression because my joints swelled up and my muscles were extremely painful when I tried to use them and it was hard to walk, one doctor told me these are physical symptoms of acute depression. The things that were happening in my imagination were very bad as I was obsessed with death and decay and I was thinking in detail about all of those things, it was a very bad world for me. It was really difficult to get to sleep and then I had the most terrifying violent nightmares that made me afraid to try to sleep. But at other times I just slept for whole days at a time, like about 26 hours of sleep. I had voices in my head called pseudohallucinations that were extremely real to me, just as real as it is for you when you put headphones on and the voices from the music are singing in your head, only the voices were telling me things about myself like that I was a bad person in great detail, and I could not get the voices to be quiet. At times I was also quite psychotic, delusional and having genuine auditory and visual hallucinations and also hallucinations of touch like bugs crawling on me. The worst thing about having discreet psychotic episodes was that when I was not having an episode I knew that I had been psychotic and I was very afraid that I had schizophrenia. For that reason I did not tell my doctors because I did not want them to find out I was schizophrenic. But then I find out that I was just psychotic because I was so depressed and I was treated with some antipsychotic drugs. After I was treated with those drugs I became a lot more well and I learned to manage my depression much better.
I decided I had to get better because I did not want to go hospital anymore so I got a degree. I barely passed most of my classes because I was concentrating on trying to get better and I needed a reason to get out of bed which was making myself get a degree. But I had some good teachers who cared about me and one of them even called me up and yelled at me saying that I was an extremely talented student and I was not performing well! Another time before I left university I got a high distinction on a subject! I was proud of it! So by the time I graduated I was much healthier mentally.
Every week I notice that I achieve more things in recovering from the illness of my depression. My depression as an illness is much better now, at this time in my life. I have managed my symptoms and addressed them. I am no longer delusional or psychotic at all. I have not had any psychotic event in a long time and I have even lost count of the time. I think it has been at least 6 months since I had any hallucination.
Unfortunately now that I am better I am not supposed to talk about that part of my life anymore. But what people do not understand is that although I have conquered the illness part of depression, that really took over my life, I still want to kill myself, and I still have to live with that every day, but I am just not allowed to talk about it anymore. I want to die and it is difficult for me to have no one to explain about how I want to die because for me dying is a natural thing but I am supposed to be better now and so I am not allowed to talk about it. But I still want to die, I don’t want to go on living. I think happiness is a decision and I try to be happy in the way I approach my life. But, life has in many ways been very unkind to me, and I hate this life. All of my life has been nothing but heartache and hard work. All of my life I have been used and abused by people who didn’t care. I think the world is an evil place full of people who treat me like dirt for reasons I can’t ever understand. I never asked to be brought into this world and it has treated me pretty poorly considering all of the expectations it has made of me. I want to make the most of my life and I want to reach my potential as a human being, and I do not want to waste my life or any opportunities that I have to contribute to the world or to make the world a better place. But deep inside I want to commit suicide and I think about it always. The day when I am able in good conscience to lay down and die will be the happiest day of my life. I can’t wait for that day. I will never have to feel pain or love or any other emotions again after that day. And when I know that I am dying I will feel peaceful. I will be in bliss when I am dying. I wish I would somehow die now and I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. But it will be worth the wait because some day I know I will die. It is only a matter of time, it is inevitable, it is the one certain thing in life. It seems like a long time to wait but I just have to be patient.