It’s important to talk about issues such as suicide ideation because it helps to normalize the issue as well as remove some of the stigma, which makes it easier to talk about and as a result easier to ask for support. So, let’s talk about suicide.
My experience with Suicide Ideation
As someone who has dealt with mental health challenges for most of my life, I can’t imagine a person not thinking about suicide at least at some point.
When I was at my worst mental health wise, I regularly thought about suicide. I felt like my life wasn’t worth living and that no one would miss me if I was gone. At the time, I didn’t think life could possible get any better and that I would never be able to get my mental health under control.
Now, even though my mental health has improved significantly and overall I do fairly well in managing my ongoing symptoms of anxiety and depression I still sometimes casually think about suicide.
I consider myself ‘casually suicidal’ because at no point over the last several years has my life been at risk as a result of suicide ideation and I have not engaged in any self-harm behaviours, yet I still sometimes wish I could ‘take a time out from life’. To me, this is a longing for a pause from real life because it’s stressful and the way that my anxiety often manifests in my life is exhausting. I don’t necessarily want to quit completely but I would like a pause. So, I often casually think about the end without actively wanting to end my life.
Suicide Prevention
What helped to prevent suicide for me?
- Mental Health Support.
- Seeing a regular mental health professional helped me to recognize then negative patterns in my thinking as well as build the skills to combat these feelings. It also gave me the language to have these conversations with other people in my life which made it easier to bring up these topics and ask for support when I needed it. (I definitely wouldn’t have known how to ask for help before going to therapy).
- Supportive Friends.
- Being able to talk about my mental health and be truly honest about my feelings helped me to grow a support network of humans who I’m able to talk to. I now have several people I can go to if I need support or simply need to vent about my feelings. I am confident they aren’t going to judge me and they genuinely care about me and want to have me in their lives. They know exactly how to acknowledge the difficulties in life as well as remind me that I am loved.
- Distractions.
- When I am feeling particularly depressed, or anxious, distractions really do work in the short term. Sometimes things I deem as ‘silly’ make me anxious but knowing that it’s nothing to be anxious about doesn’t actually help me to not be anxious so I distract myself whenever possible.
- My go-to distractions are reading/writing, exercise, and watching something like my favourite TV show or a trashy but loveable rom-com.
- Self-care.
- I classify self-care as something different than distractions because I see self-care as those ongoing things I try to do to maintain my mental health at a manageable level.
- These things include maintaining a regular sleep routine, taking my vitamins, using a SAD lamp in the winter months, eating healthy/regular meals, exercise or engaging in some movement every day, etc.
But there is so much more to suicide prevention than simply self-care and mental health support. There is more to it than checking in on our friends and loved ones.
More Than Suicide Prevention
In order to truly work toward suicide prevention, we need to do more. We need to look at the systems involved in impacting our overall mental wellness. Realistically we need a systemic overhaul of our health care system, food access, housing systems, treatment access … the list goes on).
Even our mental health system in Canada could use a significant overhaul. Mental health support is not financially accessible for many people in Canada because they (1) don’t have health benefits that cover mental health (or any extended health benefits), (2) their benefits don’t come close to covering the cost of the support they need, (3) they are simply unable to afford mental health support with their low paying job and high living cost.
My Experience with Mental Health Support
When I first decided I needed to get professional support I had a job that covered mental health. That being said the plan only covered my initial assessment the first year (which happened to be at the end of the year which worked out nice) and then the following year they only covered a portion of the cost of 10 individual therapy sessions over the entire year.
At that time I was doing Dialectic Behavioural Therapy (DBT) so was engaged in both group therapy and individual therapy, which was weekly. That would have been a minimum of 28 sessions; I don’t even want to think about how much that cost me even though I only went for approximately seven months (I would have continued the group therapy if I was able to afford it).
Every other therapist I have seen since I’ve paid for out of pocket because I haven’t had a job with benefits and this limited who I was able to see based on cost. I am confident that this impacted the level of treatment I was receiving.
Years after my initial diagnosis I considered going back to DBT therapy for a refresher on some of the skills I learned in group and I’d heard there are free programs I could get into but there was a potentially long waitlist. Of course, waitlists are problematic for a lot of folks but I wasn’t too worried as I was doing okay overall. Though I saw value in getting some more ongoing support so I reached out to get on the waitlist.
When I did my intake call, they asked a lot of invasive questions that were incredibly triggering and by the end of the call determined that I wasn’t ‘bad enough’ to warrant support (i.e. I couldn’t get support because I wasn’t actively suicidal). Looking back on this situation now, I am still partially angry because the call absolutely made my mental health worse and I got zero support but on the other hand I somewhat understand that there are limited resources and a number of people seeking support.
This is the problem! We cannot feel as though we are obligated to support one another as peers and call it suicide prevention. We need to work towards fixing the systems that impact our mental wellness as well as the system that is support to provide us with support.
Mental health should support be free.