I'm sure I don't have to tell you about all the ways that recent news
headlines have been awash with successful suicide attempts. I'm sure you
already know that our society's focus on current events has suddenly shifted
from the gun-control debate to mental-health awareness. And if you've followed
my blog at all for the past nine years, you already know that my suicide
attempt from almost 18 years ago was quite unsuccessful.
Nevertheless, I would like to add to the discussion.
In case you didn't already know, I tried to kill
myself nearly 18 years ago. About 20 years ago, I felt like God told me that I
needed to leave my parents or it would "lead to death." I didn't, so a
few months later, I got hit with a suicidal thought for the first time. The
next two years were very emotionally turbulent, and I suffered from depression
really for the first time in my life. I would get better, then worse, then
better, then worse, etc.
In retrospect, I know now that I was in a spiritually abusive
environment that made everything worse. I was enrolled in a missionary training
school through my then-church, I had just returned from a weeklong mission
trip, I was exhausted; and one day instead of driving to school, I drove out of
town. Thinking I was better, I drove back the next day, but on the way home I
told God, "I'm going to take my life, and only You can stop me." I
bought two bottles of aspirin at a convenience store because I thought taking
all of the pills would kill me. After I took the pills, I regretted doing so,
and since I was still alive, I figured God still wanted me around. Then a
friend drove me to the ER and the people from the missionary school enrolled me
in a psychiatric hospital, where I stayed for four and a half days.
Fast-forwarding to today, I gotta say it's good for dead people to get
all this sympathy after they're gone. You feel sorry for them, you wonder what
you could have done to help them, you miss them, and you celebrate their lives.
I think, in a twisted sort of way, that is EXACTLY the kind of celebration that
people who commit suicide were CRAVING while they were alive.
It's sad, isn't it? It takes physical death to achieve something that they won't
really get to enjoy. Because they were deceived into thinking that death would
end their pain. And possibly because they surrounded themselves with people who
were WAY too clueless to appreciate them.
While I was scrolling through Facebook on Friday night and seeing all the
posts about dead celebrities and people coming out of the woodwork to raise
awareness for mental illness, I began to get pretty angry. I'm still a little
bit ticked off.
And I'm not afraid to express it, because the basic definition of
depression is "anger turned inward." (If I'm not keeping my anger
bottled up inside, I won't get depressed, right? Right.)
Here's the thing: People who successfully commit suicide get all the
love, attention, and glory. (Oh, poor them! If we only knew what they had been
going through!) People like me who have unsuccessfully attempted suicide get
all the lectures, shame, and ridicule. (Oh, you're a freak! If you could only
get your life together!) We get it from secular professionals as well as from
the Church.
The only people we don't get it from are other people just like us. The
people who have struggled with depression and/or suicidal thoughts are the only
ones who really understand what we've gone through.
Rewinding back to 18 years ago, I gotta say the people who surrounded
me during my recovery process were really terrible friends to me. While I was
at the psychiatric hospital, the person assigned to my case happened to go to
my then-church (I think the head of the missionary school asked her to check on
me). One afternoon while I was watching TV in the lobby (which was a miracle in
itself, because my then-church basically taught us that TV was evil), she came
up to me and asked, "What do you know?"
I replied somewhat facetiously, "The TV's on."
She asked more seriously, "What do you KNOW?"
I think maybe she expected me to answer something like, "God loves
me" or maybe, "God has a plan for my life." Well, guess what,
lady? If I really had known that, I probably wouldn't have tried to end it all.
During one of our individual sessions, she laughed at me and told me
that I wouldn't have been able to kill myself with two bottles of aspirin. She
basically said that I stank at suicide, so I shouldn't try it anymore. I know
what she was trying to do, but my reply was, "Great. I can't do anything
right." Thanks a lot for rubbing my nose in it, lady.
During another one of our sessions (if not the same one), she told me
that my roommate had complained about me not paying my share of the bills
(because I had no money, probably wasn't tithing, and sucked at meeting my financial
obligations). "Are you behind in your rent?" she asked. So, when my
roommate and another church leader came to visit me at the hospital, I
confronted my roommate and demanded to know why she had told everybody that I
hadn't paid my rent.
Anyway, a day or so later, my roommate called me at the hospital and
explained that my sister had called for me at the house. (This was back before
I owned a cellphone.) She told her that I was at the hospital, which worried my
sister. "What should I tell her?" my roommate asked. "Tell her
I'm in the hospital for depression," I replied. She did, and my sister was
basically like, "Oh, is that all?" and stopped worrying.
¿Cómo que IS THAT ALL?
Then for some reason, the therapist lady insisted that I call my
parents and tell them where I was and what I had done. I did so, my mother
blamed the school I had been attending, and then she and my father drove all
night and arrived at the hospital the next morning.
The therapist lady arranged for a family session with me and my parents. After she left the room, the first thing out of my father's mouth was basically,
"Statistics show that suicides happen between the ages of 18 and 24. How could you do this
to us?" Jerk. Maybe if you hadn't treated me like a science project in the
first place, I wouldn't have believed that I was expendable.
Later that day, I had some sort of session/meeting with the therapist
lady, my parents, the head of the missionary school and his wife, I think my
roommate, I think my friend who had driven me to the ER, and two of the church
elders/leaders and their wives. They explained to me that after I would leave the
hospital, I would move in with a church family for a while (I guess because my
roommate couldn't handle me living there and because I needed some love?). My
mother explained that she didn't understand and said, "She already HAS a
family."
After I left the hospital, I continued psychotherapy, dropped out of
missionary school, stepped down from lifegroup leadership, stepped down from a
worship team that I had been a part of, moved into a temporary housing
situation WITHOUT my kitten (Choochie), quit my job, and started looking for a new
one. Now that I think about it, I had wanted to end my life; and in a
roundabout way, I ended up getting what I wanted... because my life as I knew it
really HAD ended. I was at rock bottom and had to start over completely.
I continued to have official meetings with people in the church who
were following up with me to see how I was doing and to make sure that I had
found another job. (I was accountable to about seven people to make sure that I
wouldn't attempt suicide again.) During one meeting, the head of the missionary
school mentioned that I hadn't found a job yet and said, "This is starting
to get frustrating." Um, excuse me? Your life isn't the one that's just
been turned upside down. And YOU have the nerve to be frustrated?? At that
time, I was learning in psychotherapy how to be assertive (versus being
passive-aggressive), so I didn't know yet how to tell him how I felt to his
face. Instead, I got in my car, angry-cried, and almost drove out of town
again. I turned back around, drove to my new home, and faced the music.
After a few months, the church family that opened up their home to me
suddenly decided that they wanted their privacy back and made me move out. My
roommate, thankfully, was willing to let me move back in. And my emotional
state, thankfully, was able to handle it all at that point in time. (And I was permanently
reunited with my Choochie! Pet therapy.)
Reader, the reason I've shared the details of this entire story (perhaps
you've read them before?) is to show the ways in which the people who
surrounded me -- my family, my friends, and the Church -- failed me when I
needed them the most. I needed to be treated like a valued human being, but
instead I was treated like a problem.
In today's society, people who successfully commit suicide are mourned
and celebrated. Those of us who unsuccessfully attempt suicide -- those of us
who realize how wrong we were, those of us who have changed our minds and truly
want to live -- are punished and ridiculed. I am not cool with that, and I hope
you're not cool with that, either.
It's ironic, isn't it? If a suicide attempt is successful, the devil
wins. If it is unsuccessful and the survivor intends to give God and His plan a
chance, God wins... but if church people treat the survivor like dirt, the
devil wins.
I wish I knew the answer to this problem, but perhaps that IS part of
the problem: We think everything has a neat, easy formula that can be followed.
But it doesn't. One important thing I've learned in my journey out of depression
is that depression situations are like people: No two are alike. The way a
person will become free from depression and the length of that person's
recovery will just depend on the situation and the person.
For me, I understand now that if I had obeyed God about 20 years ago
and left my family THEN (instead of about seven years ago), I would have come
out from under their unhealthy covering. I would have been free much sooner from
the spirit of Jezebel; a constant torrent of spiritual and emotional abuse; and
a cesspool of anxiety, guilt, religion, arrogance, and hypocrisy. I believe
this could have cleared my head so that depression probably wouldn't have
formed in the first place.
But at least now, God can use my experiences with depression and suicide
to help other people.
And my experience was MY experience. Medication helped. Artistic
expression helped. Psychotherapy helped. Removing stress from my life helped.
Talking about my feelings helped. People praying for me helped.
But what helped me more than anything else was being gut-level real
with God. I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Psalm 62:8 tells us to
pour out our hearts before God and that He is a refuge for us. I began to
finally experience freedom from depression when I poured out the crap that was
in my heart and let Him pour His love back into me. I still continue to do
that. The gloves come off, and He has never punished me for it. I tell Him to His
face how I'm feeling, and He tells me to my face what the truth is.
It's called A RELATIONSHIP.
One night in 2001, a few months after I had been released from the psych
hospital, I was experiencing emotional turmoil while I was alone on a road
trip. (Does this sound like a familiar scenario?) I don't remember if I
screamed this out loud or just in my spirit, but I asked God, "WHO ARE
YOU?!? And who am I?"
He replied quite simply, "I am yours, and you are Mine." And
that's all I needed to hear. I broke wide open, crying pretty much the rest of
the ride home, and that was a major turning point in my healing process.
Perhaps what has healed me more than anything else is the fact that God
has been the Father and the Mother that I never had. He has let me lean on Him
more closely and more strongly than any human friend ever has. And He hasn't
been surprised or disgusted at any of the crap that has come out of my heart or
my mouth whenever my mental health has depended on me puking it out.
So, in conclusion, I love the Church. I love the concept of Church. I
don't really know how to be myself apart from the Church. But, Church people,
if you know someone like me who has attempted suicide, or who has contemplated
suicide, or who has been struggling with depression, or who has been battling a combination of any of the above... please don't punish them. I think the fact that they are
still alive and breathing shows that they are clinging to some shred of hope on
the inside. There is a chord deep inside their heart that only God knows how to
play. Let Him do it. Encourage them to open themselves up to it. (Encourage
them, don't force them, because they might be angry at God.) Let them lean on
you, set some healthy boundaries (because they will probably be pretty clingy
and might accidentally think that YOU are God), pray for them, listen to them,
let them talk, and encourage them to get the help that they need. Because they
DO need help. They might only need you in their life for a short while, or
maybe they'll need you to walk with them for the rest of their life. Maybe you
can pray about it and see how much of a friend you can commit to be to them.
I can guarantee you that they won't forget how you treat them -- good
or bad -- while they're at their lowest. If you do a good job, hopefully
they'll respond with gratitude; if you do a bad job, they might need to work
through some pain and bitterness later on, like I did.
So, no pressure. Heh, heh.
Just know that you might not understand everything that they're going
through... and I honestly hope that you never do. Because nobody ever should.
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