This is my second post. My first is a life story of sorts. But the basics you need to know before you read the rest of this are: 1. I’ve struggled with severe mental illness for over half my life, and I’m young. I’ve made five very serious suicide attempts and have been psychiatrically institutionalized 11 times. So, I’m a very experienced mental patient. 2. As ironic as it is, I work in an acute care mental health facility. Most of our patients are either suicidal or have just been medically cleared and sent to us after attempting suicide. So I guess you can say I’ve been on both sides of the fence.
Now I feel horribly guilty for saying this, but I think people (excluding minors) should have a right to end their lives, with some limitations. When all treatments have failed and when a person literally has nothing left to live for, why should we stop them? But my job is to convince people to find reasons to live, and to keep them from killing themselves during their stay at our facility–sometimes we have to use physical force to stop them from hurting themselves. As an individual who often feels overwhelmed with hopelessness because I’m still so freaking ill after trying literally dozens of medications and combinations, years of therapy (over a DECADE of headshrinking), and hundreds of thousand of dollars in medical bills, I feel like I have a right to die if that’s what I want (the only things left for me to try would be residential care and/or electroshock therapy, both of which I can’t afford). This is where my morals as a mental patient and a mental health provider conflict. Sometimes we exhaust all treatment and are still sick. What I’m asking is: do you believe in terminal mental illness? Because I think I do. Thankfully I have my fiancé and other close friends who keep me alive, but if I didn’t, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be sitting here posting this.
3 comments
I have lived in residential treatment twice, had ECT many times, had a new invasive procedure called VNS Vagus Nerve Stimulator implanted in my body (which seemed to cure me of the depression, oddly enough… Very expensive without insurance, even then it’s a battle). I am a 30 yr old woman living with her parents again going to school. I don’t think I could ever tell anyone that I think suicide should be okay. After all my suicide attempts I have realized that if I had really wanted to die I would have picked a higher bridge. I thank God (on my good days and my manic days) that my depressed days didn’t take me and a bunch of other people out with ’em. Mental illness isn’t terminal unless it is a symptom of an actual terminal illness. What makes me the mentally ill person terminal is our tendency to risky and suicidal behavior. So this is the point I should have made before my ramblings; If you had a daughter or son sitting in your exact position or an even worse one what would you tell them? “Honey, it’s okay you can off yourself it’s your right”? I mean they don’t have the right to off anyone else…
For arguments sake
But the only reason we don’t want those around us to die is because we would miss them. We cry because we are going to miss that person’s impact on our lives. It’s selfish. It’s completely selfish and we should have no right to force anyone, whether we know them or not, to live in absolute misery every single day for our own personal gain. Especially since none of us asked for this. Especially since for many of us, a serious diagnoses can ruin our lives, permanently. I have bipolar disorder, and if there ever comes a day that I can’t afford my meds or doctor’s appointments (which is becoming more and more of a possibility because no one takes insurance anymore and they cost upwards of $200 for one visit and I end up having to pay almost $800 a month, which is almost as much as rent in some places) I can safely say goodbye to my stability, and then my job, and then my house. And then I’m on the street with a mental illness that gets worse with age and no road to recovery. Or if I ever have a serious manic episode that causes me to spend my way into thousands of dollars of debt, or get myself arrested and thrown in prison with an official criminal record to match, how exactly do I come back from that? These are all things I have to consider when thinking about my future. I knew that one lay-off, one day without meds, can ruin my entire life. Everything I’ve built can be destroyed in minutes. And that sucks. At the end of the day you can’t force someone into a horrible situation and expect them to just survive it for decades because you want them to.
Thank you so much greyghoste. “….you can’t force someone into a horrible situation…”. You have explained this so very well and better than I ever could.