Yesterday—in front of my two younger children—I nearly choked to death on my grilled chicken dinner. What should have simply released a heavy sigh of relief in my wife’s ear at bedtime contorted into a sleepless night of revisiting another recent near miss: Last month I wanted to take my own life.
The two brushes with death are incredibly same, but different.
Similar, in the end result: cold bodies either way.
But different, in the legacies:
The choked version simply was seeking nourishment. That nourishment took an unfortunate wrong turn at the split between esophagus and trachea, blocking the proverbial airway. The mechanics are well understood.
“Accidentally choked to death” is relatively straightforward to say to a stranger. It carries no moral overtones. Yes, it was the recently deceased who put the food in the mouth, but Joe Doe is absolved from that moment onward.
On the other hand, “Accidentally died by suicide” sounds like a phrase that might be used in a really bad standup routine, or maybe a Darwin Awards situation. It doesn’t ring quite right, even for me as I sit here trying to advocate the perspective-giving potential of thinking of death by suicide as accidental, like choking on chicken at dinner time.
I allow myself to think: suppose I didn’t make it last month. Suppose that, instead of going into respite, I had driven off a cliff like my troubled mind kept telling me to do. Suppose the pivotal nourishing thought went down the wrong pipe, so to speak.
Friends and peers, some time after the initial anger subsided, would perhaps have written things about me. Maybe those things would transmute the grief and transcend the impossible-to-understandness of suicide. Or, maybe they would read more like Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker article eulogizing his friend David Foster Wallace. It was written two and a half years after David’s death:
“He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend.”
I don’t know Mr. Franzen, and I didn’t know David either. But I do know that when I have been just a chosen chicken bone from death, it has been calculated to RELIEVE my family and friends of the supposedly-interminable ineluctable burden of supporting a depressed person, day after day, with no laughter, considerateness, or even personal hygiene in sight.
I recoil every time I re-read Mr. Franzen’s words. Perhaps I am missing the context which softens them, in which case I do hope he or someone else will write to me and fill me in.
I can’t speak for everyone who has died by suicide. What I can say is that when I’ve drawn another breath instead of leaving the planet, it has been more like an accident than a willful choice.
And the accident is to forget, for the briefest of moments, that part of my own family has told me they’ve felt “disrespected by my mental illness behavior.”
The accident is to forget that people think I should just “try harder” when I am depressed.
The accident is to forget the ubiquitous shame and stigma around mental illness.
To forget that the medical model essentially says I’m broken until medicated.
Suicides are perpetrated to relieve, not to inflict, maximum pain. What bystanding survivors (clearly) don’t easily see is that it is their pain which is targeted for relief.
—
This post is part of a joint series by The Good Men Project and Stigma Fighters in sharing stories of real men living with mental illness. To submit your story, see below.
—
Stigma Fighters is an organization that is dedicated to raising awareness for the millions of people who are seemingly “regular” or “normal” but who are actually hiding the big secret: that they are living with mental illness and fighting hard to survive.
The more people who share their stories, the more light is shone on these invisible illnesses, and the more the stigma of living with mental illness is reduced.
For Stigma Fighters’ Founder Sarah Fader’s recent profile in The Washington Post that discusses how more and more people are “coming out” with their mental illness, see here.
The Good Men Project is the only international conversation about the changing roles of men in the 21st century.
Mental health and the reducing the social stigma of talking about mental health is and has been a crucial area of focus for The Good Men Project.
As Dr. Andrew Solomon stated during his interview with us, people writing about their own experiences mitigates each of our aloneness in a profound way: “One of the primary struggles in all the worlds I have written about is the sense each of us has that his or her experience is isolating. A society in which that isolation is curtailed is really a better society.”
We are partnering together on this Call For Submissions, because our missions overlap and because we want to extend this conversation further.
♦◊♦
If you are a man living with mental illness, and want to share your story, we would love to help.
To submit to the Good Men Project, please submit here.
To submit to Stigma Fighters, please submit here.
Submissions will run in both publications. When you submit, please make sure to let us know you submitting as part of this Joint Call for Submissions with Stigma Fighters and Good Men Project.
♦◊♦
Any Questions?
Feel free to contact us:
[email protected] (Good Men Project)
[email protected] (Stigma Fighters)
[email protected] (Stigma Fighters)
___
Join the conversation at The Good Men Project. Here’s how:
◊♦◊
The Good Men Project is different from most media companies. We are a “participatory media company”—which means we don’t just have content you read and share and comment on but it means we have multiple ways you can actively be a part of the conversation. As you become a deeper part of the conversation (Which really is “The Conversation No One Else is Having), you will learn all of the ways we support our Writer’s Community—community FB groups, weekly conference calls, classes in writing, editing platform building and more.♦◊♦
Here are more ways to become a part of The Good Men Project community:
Request to join our private Facebook Group for Writers—it’s like our virtual newsroom where you connect with editors and other writers about issues and ideas.
Click here to become a Premium Member of The Good Men Project Community. 1) Get access to an exclusive “Members Only” Group on Facebook, 2) View the website with no ads 3) Get free access to classes, workshops, and exclusive events 4) Be invited to an exclusive weekly “Call with the Publisher” with other Premium Members 4) Free commenting badge, listing on our Friends page, and more.
Are you stuck on what to write? Sign up for our Writing Prompts emails, you’ll get ideas directly from our editors every Monday and Thursday.
Join our exclusive weekly “Call with the Publisher” — where community members are encouraged to discuss the issues of the week, get story ideas, meet other members and get known for their ideas? To get the call-in information, either join as a member or wait until you get a post published with us. Here are some examples of what we talk about on the calls.
Want to learn practical skills about how to be a better Writer, Editor or Platform Builder? Want to be a Rising Star in Media? Want to learn how to Create Social Change? We have classes in all of those areas. Classes are included free of charge with our $20 a year Gold Membership.
However you engage with The Good Men Project—you can help lead this conversation about the changing roles of men in the 21st century.
◊♦◊
—
Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/David Drexler
Kudos to you for the bravery and audacity to share openly. The topic of suicide should be front and center in our education of life’s stresses and the various coping mechanisms we desperately need to master. Salutes from afar.
That is some manly shit right there. Not that you almost committed suicide, but that you are willing to stand up and speak about it, break the seal, address it when few others will. i don’t want to say the wrong thing here, Kevin, because I’m just as much in the dark as anyone else, but it’s one of the ballsiest things I’ve read in a long time, and it is stories like this that will open the door for other men, end the shame and fear so that we can tackle this issue head on. Honored to have read… Read more »
Thank you DJ. Taking the time to write and say that you are honored to have read it can never be the wrong thing. Peace, brother.
Kevin, Thanks for sharing your experiences. I’ve had to address my own bipolar disorder, which was partially inherited from my father who tried to commit suicide when I was 5 years old. Even as a therapist it took me many years to accept my own illness and get help. One of the things that helped me to reach out was reading Kay Redfield Jamison’s book, An Unquiet Mind. Prior to “coming out” and sharing her own Bipolar illness, she was one of the world’s experts on mental illness and Bipolar disorder, having written a text book. But in the Unquiet… Read more »
Jed, my copy of An Unquiet Mind is dog-eared for sure. What are other good readings? I’ve lived with manic depression since 1989 and have read much of what I can get my hands on. I’m always on the lookout for “peer-recommended” stuff 🙂 . Does GMP have a reading list section? If not, should it? I’m finding my new life, which includes sharing my story, quite tumultuous. Part of me wants to be outgrowing/moving on from all my challenges, which is hard to do when talking about them all the time. And part of me responds to and finds… Read more »
Kevin, I don’t think GMP has a reading list on this topic. I have lots of resources myself and in my own books. Happy to share more with you if you want to drop me a note.