How do we talk about feeling suicidal?

Trigger warning: suicidal thoughts

Photo by youssef naddam on Unsplash

I wasn’t sure whether to post this, but decided to just do it. I think it’s important for people to talk about feeling suicidal, because bottling everything up can often make things worse. It’s only through luck that I’m still here to write this. the point is, I didn’t talk about it, and things could have ended up very different.

I also want to make it clear that I’m no longer feeling suicidal. There is just enough space between that time for me to be able to write about my experience, but also to be able to recall how I felt.

I wrote an article earlier this year about autism and suicide, Not long after, something in me finally snapped. I couldn’t see the point anymore and decided to give up. I began planning how I would end my own life.

It was some freelance work not working out that was the final straw, but it was really a combination of lots of smaller and bigger things nudging me closer to the edge. If everything else had been okay, I would have felt a little sorry for myself, but bounced back in a day or two.

In my previous article, I wrote about how important it is to talk to someone. Yet, when it was me feeling that way, I felt completely alone. It doesn’t make a difference whether I really was alone or not, because that’s how I felt. A big part of that was my own thoughts telling me I’d just be bothering anyone I tried to tell and not knowing how to bring it up.

I think I tried in my own (too subtle) way, and I didn’t want to call The Samaritans because the idea of telling a complete stranger felt icky. Similarly, talking to AI felt so cold, impersonal, and isolating.

So, I stewed in my own juices for a while and remember lying about being okay, because it felt kinder than having anyone look back after I was gone and wonder if anything they had said or done might have played a part in my decision. In most cases, it hadn’t

Things did change, and it was in an unexpected way, but the fact that I ever reached that point at all was a wake-up call that I had to do something, so I didn’t find myself in that situation again.

The one question that came out of all of this for me was, how do we talk to people if we’re feeling suicidal?

Plenty of people say talk to someone, but I feel like that rarely means talking to them. That’s not a dig at anyone. It’s difficult. Does anyone really know what to do if someone tells them they’re feeling suicidal?

We might want to help, but it’s hard to know the right thing to do. I know I would be scared of saying or doing the wrong thing and making the person feel worse. I don’t have the answers, but for me, I think what I needed was someone to talk to and listen to me. Nobody had to do or say the right thing, or try to fix me. One of the hardest parts of feeling like my life wasn’t worth living was feeling isolated and like I had to put on a front for other people. If I could have let the mask slip for a little while, I’m not saying it would have magically fixed everything, but maybe it would have reduced some of the burden.