Mike Snelle knows how it feels to be just a few moments away from taking his own life. He also knows how it feels to recover.
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I was in the world’s smallest hotel room when I came closest to killing myself. The warning signs had been there for days. I hadn’t eaten. I’d stopped answering my phone. The outside world had taken on the harsh lighting and violent sensory overstimulation of a crowded supermarket on Christmas Eve. I had the physical sensation of being poisoned, as if there were some black organic mass rotting inside my stomach. What had started as a relentless train of negative thoughts had become a state of extreme panic with no easily identifiable cause.
It wasn’t any particular thing causing my distress, it was that everything was distressing. And then a familiar friendly voice whispered that I should kill myself. It told me that every time I feel hopeful about the future, or believe there is any meaning to any of this, I’m deluding myself. At this point I knew the voice was telling the capital T truth. And the room was so small. It was kind of a cupboard with a bed in it and a fancy flat screen TV on the wall. I hated the room. I hated my own mind.
But I couldn’t leave either. Because that’s the thing that a lot of people don’t understand about depression, people whose best advice is to tell you to cheer up, or think about others who are worse off than you. Depression robs you of your will to do the things you know will help you fight it. At no point during a depressive episode do I forget that interacting in the world, eating, exercising, and not drinking will be helpful. It’s just that I cannot find it in me to take my own advice. I look for some seed of will, but it’s just not there.
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In that tiny room I became aware that I’ve been orbiting suicide my entire adult life. I had a psychotic breakdown when I was fifteen and since then I’ve periodically found myself searching out David Foster Wallace quotes and listening to Elliot Smith and Bonnie Prince Billie – warning signals that my depressive mind is seeking company. I’ve ridden out depressive episodes before, just hung in, clung on to the knowledge that I’ve been here before. But this time it was different. This time I realised that the act of suicide is a split-second decision, the real thinking had already been done in the preceding years. Mentally I’d bought the gun and loaded the bullets. It was already in my mouth. I just needed to pull the trigger. And I was scared. I didn’t trust myself not to do it.
I called the Samaritans, and the voice of a compassionate stranger helped me survive the night. The next day I went outside and burst into tears during the morning rush hour. I decided to seek help. The therapist I saw agreed to meet me again only if I also sought medical help and so, after a visit to the GP and an emergency psychiatric referral, I found myself in a psychiatrist’s office. It had taken six weeks to get an emergency referral and it took her a little over six minutes to diagnose me with bipolar disorder. It didn’t come as a surprise. I’d been avoiding the diagnosis for years.
I had a psychotic breakdown when I was fifteen and since then I’ve periodically found myself searching out David Foster Wallace quotes and listening to Elliot Smith and Bonnie Prince Billie – warning signals that my depressive mind is seeking company.
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My depressions have always been matched by moods so electric that I am convinced other people can see me glowing. At those times I am touched by a god I don’t even believe in and his touch bestows on me the realisation that I am a walking miracle. I can think with a fluidity and grace that makes my skin prickle and my dick stiffen. I can make creative mental leaps that in any other mood would elude me. I can feel thoughts and think feelings. I am acutely aware of the enormity of what it means to be a human being, and how tiny a fraction of ourselves we can ever truly express. What’s inside me is infinite, an entire limitless universe. It’s as if for a brief time I understand what it is to be made up of atoms thrown out by the big bang and reconfigured tens of thousands of times since. I am part of something so huge and so beautiful it is beyond any normal human comprehension.
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The psychiatrist explained that bipolar is an illness like diabetes. Both are genetic and as a result run in families. Not everyone with the gene will get the illness – it takes certain environmental factors to trigger the gene (trauma and too much sugar respectively), but once triggered it is lifelong and needs to be treated with medication – in my case the mood stabilizer Limotragin. The genetic hypothesis is our culture’s dominant explanation of people with an unusually wide mood spectrum. It states that people diagnosed with bipolar have a hereditary illness that requires chemical intervention. Under this view a person with the illness can, if they take medication and avoid potential trigger situations, hope to neutralize their more extreme emotional states. The psychiatrist told me that with a little luck and a lifetime of medication I could hope to live an ordinary life. But I’ve never wanted an ordinary life, I’ve always wanted an extraordinary one.
In the weeks that followed I couldn’t shake the feeling that the explanation I’d been offered was unsatisfying. To describe my thoughts and feelings as symptoms of an illness felt dehumanizing, and to sentence me to a lifetime diagnosis robbed me of the possibility of meaningful personal change. Reading around the subject I realised that I wasn’t alone. There is a growing movement of mental health professionals calling for a review of the dominant approach. They question the validity and efficacy of the current system (which uses DMV checklists to diagnose patients and medication to treat them). They argue that there is an overreliance on labelling and medicating the mentally disturbed rather than focusing on the individual nature of their distress. They call for the statistical approach to be overthrown by one which treats each patient as an individual.
I was fortunate enough to have a supportive therapist. Not only did she have an insightful mind but she was compassionate enough to understand my concerns. She too believed that meaningful change was possible and that the route towards it was understanding the trauma that had triggered my moods.
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I grew up in a turbulent household. When I was six I came home from school and Mum had written ‘I hate you all’ in big ugly red letters on the kitchen wall. A few years later she pretended she was dying of cancer. On the eve of my fifteenth birthday she threw my belongings out of the window into the river below. Several times she attempted suicide. I went to thirteen schools and moved house dozens of times before I left home at sixteen. Mum was also a smart, funny, kind human being whose love I never doubted. I was her ally. I adored her. I still do. I grew up associating feeling emotionally distressed with being loved, and spent my life subsequently seeking out those suffering mental and emotional distress and trying to win their affection by absorbing it.
Later I learnt that Mum had grown up with a physically abusive, alcoholic father who himself had been traumatized growing up. Because that’s what my therapist and those arguing for a review of the system are really talking about – the link between trauma and mental health problems. Their claim is that most people who suffer from mental illness have suffered some kind of emotional trauma. And it’s true that other people, given the same backgrounds, might have developed into happy healthy adults in spite of their circumstances, and some people who have had stable upbringings might develop mental health problems.
But we already know that individuals cope in different ways when faced with the same things. That’s missing the point. The important thing is to recognise trauma as one of the key causes of mental health issues. This opens the possibility of a system which shifts the focus onto the root cause rather than one which focuses its efforts on medicating the symptoms. The benefit of such a system is that it allows for the possibility of meaningful and lasting individual change.
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All this got me thinking. There are striking parallels in the way our society treats all of its most difficult members, whether they be prisoners, addicts or the mentally ill. The tendency is to focus on the symptoms rather than uncovering and treating the underlying cause. It is estimated that over 85% of the prison population and 90% of addicts have suffered some form of emotional or sexual childhood abuse.
My belief is that without treating the underlying hurt which causes dysfunctionality we cannot expect the deep and lasting change required to help those in pain to overcome their problems. And whether we like it or not their problems are our problems. The current system at best treats symptoms rather than causes, and at its worst it further brutalises those who have already suffered often unimaginable abuse.
An alternative system might start by remembering that even our society’s most difficult members were once children, and often those innocent children grew up in environments where they suffered unimaginable trauma. As a society we failed to protect them when they were most vulnerable. If we can do the difficult work of reminding ourselves of this then perhaps we can begin to repair the damage our failure to those children caused, and in doing so facilitate meaningful change in the adults they have become. It is easy to be compassionate to people we see as victims, or as having suffered due to circumstances they could not control.
As a society we need to re-evaluate how we see and treat our most disruptive and disturbed members. We need to find compassion for the suffering children who still exist in the adults before us. We need to believe that change, however hard won, is possible. Only then can we hope to begin the long road towards recovery, and towards a more compassionate society.
As for me, I still feel the shadow of depression at times, but I’m slowly learning the tools to help me keep it at bay. It’s a little over a year since I almost killed myself in the world’s smallest hotel room. I’ve still got the gun, but I’ve started to take the bullets out.
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Photo: Flickr/only alice
Beautiful. Thank you for this.
“I,ve still got the gun, but I’ve started taking the bullets out.” Don’t know if your speaking metaphorically , personally , I got rid of my gun. Although I’m feeling better these days, I just don’t trust myself.