Suicide

Brushes With Suicidal Depression

Trigger warning: suicidal thoughts, thoughts of self-harm

I know what you’re thinking. It’s around Christmas time. Write about something cheerful. I think this time, more than ever, it’s important to address this issue. It both happens to fall in line with the timeline of what I am writing about in Partial Hospitalization, and something we all need to remember.

The first couple days of PHP, they give you an intake into what’s been going on in life. I will try to explain as much of the pertinent background to the stories as I can so it makes sense as I am going along so you can easily read this, since I haven’t fleshed out a full history of my life yet, and I am so sorry about that. My life has been… complicated. So they got to the generic questions about depression and suicide.

Have you ever thought about hurting yourself or anyone else? Yes, myself.

Have you ever harmed yourself?                         No

Have you ever thought of killing yourself or someone else?         Yes, myself.

How many times?

And that’s what really got me. Up until then, there had been an experience in college where I didn’t really consider it a “thinking of killing myself”, but actually it had been a constant thought in the back of my head to kill myself. I denied it, seeing as my “plan” was coincidentally to walk across a busy road and see if any vehicles would hit me, but even then, they would only injure me and not kill me. I had no other plans. But one night I wrote a letter to a friend about how I was a worthless human being, a scum of the earth friend, how I should just off myself, and how I just felt depressed. He immediately sat me down and angrily said all the reasons why the letter wasn’t true, convinced me why I was a good person and a great friend, and told me why I shouldn’t kill myself. That was one night I should have considered on the checklist of “thinking about killing yourself” but hadn’t until they asked me.

Another one was “THE ONE”. I finished college in 2015 in Missouri, and my internship turned into a full-time job at this non-profit. I was mostly doing office administration. In 2016, I was in a major car accident coming back from lunch, and my coworker passenger died on impact. Legally it was my fault. I left with barely any scratches. I don’t know what happened to the other vehicle.

A month later, I was called into someone’s office and berated for not smiling enough at work, for not being as productive at work, etc. I was told to grow up or get out. She broke me. I cried for the first time I had in years. I confessed that I was constantly depressed and thinking about suicide. The only thing that kept me alive was my obligation to this job, and that’s where 100% of my energy went every day. If I looked presentable, it was only so I could keep the job. Sorry I wasn’t “appreciative enough” for riding in her vehicle that she offered to give me a ride in to the hospital, but I was still too stunned by my coworker’s death to barely do anything. Then they drove me to the hospital and put me in psychiatric care for a few days “until I felt better”. I just felt obligated because I was missing work and her threats still lingered in my ears about being fired if I wasn’t careful. 

A few months after that, I moved to Pennsylvania by plane with a suitcase and a carry-on. I had quit that job barely before they could fire me for not doing the job “correctly”, but I was too grief-stricken to care. I moved into a family’s home, and worked a part-time job scraping together some money to get off my feet until I found a full-time job that I thought I was ready for.

I don’t know if I wasn’t ready for it, or if the company saw that I was trying to prove myself constantly, but they took as much advantage of me as they could. After six years, they added something to my list of backups. I had an extra ten minutes sometimes in my day, so they added a task that usually takes one to two hours for a beginner. After constantly telling them I wasn’t being trained correctly, the person retired, and without telling me, the responsibility passed onto my daily tasks. This went on for months.

A coworker died who I was friends with, and a week later, they slammed me with my first written warning. I disassociated after that, which basically means it was like I was looking down at my own body. My own mental health problems disappeared for about two weeks because I couldn’t feel anything. I got more done, but still not enough done that they expected done on a daily basis, much less catching up on the back-log they wanted addressed that I couldn’t get to because I had an extra hour or two of work to do every day for months on end.

It led to my depression spiking again. Without being aware of it, I was thinking that this world would be better off without me. I was becoming suicidal. I was even on probably 15-20 medications that a cocktail of some sort would probably have killed me. But I couldn’t leave my husband. I stayed alive because of him. For months I went to the same job overwhelmed day after day, losing my mind, getting closer and closer to a meltdown because I couldn’t let him down. I refused to let him down. But it came to the point where I let him down or I let me down. I called the number of the Partial Hospitalization nurse crying during my lunch one Thursday. I had been on holiday Monday, in pain Tuesday so much so that I had to leave at 11am, off Wednesday because of the pain, left at 2 Thursday because of the pain and was off Friday because of the pain. I begged them to get me into PHP, and they moved heaven and earth to get me in the following Monday.

So when I was asked about suicide, I became just how aware suicide affected me. If you need to talk to someone, talk to someone. Call the hotline 1-800-273-8255! We love you!