My suicide story

Here’s my suicide story

Last year was the most difficult and sad time of my entire life not only for me but for my family and friends. Having struggled for many months with severe depression and for many years with self injury, I decided to try and take my own life and overdosed on my antidepressants. I just wanted a relief from the pain I had to deal with on a day to day basis that consumed every aspect of my life. I had never felt so desperate in my entire life. 2015 would be the start of a series of suicide attempts and hospital admissions throughout last year. the day my life completely changed. By April 2015 I had been hospitalised 6 times including the intensive care/critical care unit twice when my kidneys started to fail so I was placed on dialysis, I was unable to breath properly and became temporaliy deaf due to the large repeated overdoses; the worst being almost 80 300mg aspirin tablets. I was unable to stay awake; I was vomiting blood and intubation was being considered if I did not improve. I was very close to death – but at the time this is what I wanted, it felt safe and i felt relieved the pain was gonna end. When I was told I was getting better I was disappointed.

After treatment I was referred to the Hope service which are a team of dedicated mental health professionals, one of the aims of the service was to prevent or shorten psychiatric hospital admissions which is exacktly what they did for me. Not only did they prevent me from being admitted to a psychiatric hospital they helped save my life, giving me someone to talk to in those darkest loneliest hours.

Today one year on it is still a massive struggle,I am still dealing with depression and post traumatic stress after what happened to me.I have bad scarring on my wrists/ arms but no long term physical damage to my organs. Life is still a day to day battle;battling suicidal thoughts every single day. I still have days where I want to give up but I am trying to get through each day with the unconditional support of my family and friends, even people I barely know have shown me incredible support.

Depression and suicide is such a stigmatised subject but it is something which needs to be talked about.Hopefully by sharing my story others will feel they can reach out and talk about how they feel, not be embarrassed or ashamed so hopefully not ending up in the dark lonely place where me and so many others end up.Today I am am lighting a candle to remember those people who weren’t as fortunate as me to survive and die from suicide because it is not uncommon, there is one death by suicide in the world every 40 seconds. I was one of the lucky ones, but it could so easily have been me.