Celebrity Suicides

Thinking about suicide is part of the background noise of my daily life. When I’m well I catch myself thinking about how people in my life would react to my death, or inventing elaborate scenarios that kill me. I often invent some heroic, self sacrificing death that validates my life and existence at the very end.

When I’m not well, or let my mind wander too far afield, my thoughts become actively suicidal. There is almost always an active plan in my head. How I will do it. Method, avoiding trauma to others who will find me. The plan evolves and changes over the years, but there is always one. I sometimes enter a kind of practical, macabre state and assemble the things I need for the plan and make sure I have them around in case I choose to end it all. I have those items now around my home.

Mostly, I waffle between the two extremes. Not really doing all that well, and not really plunging down the rabbit hole into the dark. Just bouncing between the two, because I can’t really trust either one - feeling good, or feeling bad. So I hang out in a melancholy garden of life that never blooms, but never quite dies either.

News of high profile suicides always has an impact on me. Especially by successful people, or people I respect. My mind always starts asking the same questions.

“If he/she, with all that money, those resources, all those people around them, couldn’t survive their mental illness, how can I possibly avoid killing myself?”

“Maybe they are right. Maybe there is a limit where you eventually have to follow through. Am I there?”

“Is my next bought of depression destined to be the last? I don’t have money, resources, or people around me. Is it inevitable?”

Robin Williams was really hard. And I know that I’m not the only mentally ill person who deals with suicidal thoughts who feels that way. A good friend of mine has a child fighting mental illness. When I came out to him and really showed him my illness, I mentioned how the Williams suicide had hit me. It had hit his kid very hard as well.

“Fuck Robin Williams,” he said with some bitterness in his voice.

Kate Spade is having a similar but less intense effect on me. I generally hide my illness from everyone in my life. My closest friends know the details now. They saved me a couple years ago after I checked myself into the local mental health ward so I wouldn’t follow through on some particularly powerful urges to end myself.

I didn’t know much about Spade, and didn’t have the respect and admiration for her that I did for Williams. But it’s still grabbing me more than I like. She had supports. People who loved her knew about her illness and challenges. She could afford any treatment or resources she wanted. She had no financial worries. She was in active treatment and on medication.

She still killed herself.

People don’t understand this illness. Or the random, role-of-the-dice nature of treating it. There is no model that we know works. Sometimes, there is no truly effective treatment. Unfortunately, unlike other illnesses, it take only a moment of surrender for the disease to jump from managed to fatal, and no way to predict and intervene in that internal momentary process.

This tragic death, like all the high profile suicides before it, will inspire others to follow through on their own suicide. Not inspire, no. It will convince them that their despair will never be conquered, and be the tipping point in their own struggle.

Should we be covering these things in the media openly?

I remember the days when celebrities were dying and no one would talk about the disease that killed them - AIDS.

There was so much shame and disgrace associated with that disease then. If you had AIDS, it was because of your choices, your lifestyle. It was your fault.

Mental illness carries the same disgusting labels and prejudice. Often its much worse. We are convinced we are weak, broken, less than everyone else. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life since I checked myself into that hospital. People I loved, whom I thought loved me.

We must discuss it openly and beat down that stigmatism. But we have to look around, watch the people we love who are struggling and make sure they know you love them as they are. You accept them as they are. Not in spite of their illness, not because of who they have the potential to be, and not because of the great person you think they will be when they get over their illness.

Replace “mentally ill” with “has cancer” and re-read that last paragraph. We must treat the mentally ill like they have a disease. We must treat them the same way we would expect to treat someone with cancer.

Neither one is a choice. But many of the mentally ill must find a reason to choose not to kill themselves at times like this.

Be that reason for someone.

You will never be responsible if someone chooses to kill themselves, that is their disease and their tolerance for it.

But you can be responsible for someone choosing to live.