I am hesitant to offer advice because I am not a professional and my first-hand experiences are not enough to pretend that I know what your situation feels like. However, I can tell you the things that I did to get me through my worst:

1. I kept lists of local and national crisis numbers spread around my house. Seeing them reminded me that I have other choices, and they were immediately available at crucial moments if I needed to call one.
2. I had family and friends stay with me to make rational decisions for me when I was unable to.
3. I destroyed my firearm acquisition certificate, and discarded most of the painkillers and other pills in my apartment.
4. I checked myself into the local emergency room. In my case, this turned out to be key.

I promise that a life where suicide wrongly appears to be the only possible choice can be turned into a life where that option never even crosses your mind. The mid-twenties are a difficult time for many of us. I’ve been told it gets better and I’m looking forward to my thirties. I hope to see you there.

Thank you for reading my words and taking them to heart. Take care of yourself, you are worth it.

With that out of the way, I can tell you that in a particularly dark episode of my own life, I found myself facing the apparent impossibility of the tasks ahead of me and seriously considered taking my life. In my case, this manifest as almost a dialogue in which a series of three choices were presented as “escapes” from my situation, one of which was suicide, and prior to the experience it never occurred to me that any of the three could be a conscious choice.

I think there are two main failings in the current approaches to depression and suicidal thoughts:

1. Failure to educate people to recognize the signs of trouble in themselves and those they love.
2. Failure to track the symptoms back to their actual cause.

There’s a lot that can be done in education, but I’d like to focus on the #2 for now. We know of several different types of causes for depression, and while medication is sometimes the right answer, even in those cases it’s necessary to ensure that the right medication is administered as there are several options that behave slightly differently in different people. If the wrong medication is given, it may make the situation worse, which is why most antidepressants list “suicidal thoughts” as one of their possible side effects.

To use a rough analogy, if my car isn’t reaching the destination I want in a timely manner, I can steer it left, steer it right, apply more pressure to the accelerator, change gears, start the engine, or apply any number of repairs. Too often, I see patients given the equivalent of one of these being chosen without the necessary information to determine which treatment will really resolve the underlying problem.

If any reading this are presented a choice as I was, please make it carefully and without haste. Don’t deny the world your unique contributions, even if you can’t yet see what those might be.

For anyone else, the only advice I can give is to try to be the kind of person with whom others can share their feelings and concerns. This may just put you in a position to help someone you wouldn’t have otherwise known was having trouble.

However, having lost a brother a few days ago (not by choice, no matter the subtext), I can agree on one thing: People should leave themselves out of the picture, when communicating grief. He is gone and I will miss him. He will leave an open seat between us. And not: This is what I think about the circumstances of his death. The circumstances are nobodies business.

False dichotomy. Giving in to compulsions is a choice.

I’m glad to see someone talking about this. From one who still suffers a little to one who seems in complete remission, congratulations on your recovery and your ability to address the subject in such a forthright manner.

Myra