Suicide isn't painless

As my loyal reader will know, mental illness, its causes, effects and consequences, is a subject I discuss and visit more often than is good for me.

I don't hold to the adage that you don't know what it's like to be mentally ill until you are because it engulfs not just the sufferers but also those close to them.

It is often the hopelessness that does for you.  The feeling, belief even, that you are hopeless, you're no good at anything, there's nothing worth living for. I've often felt the first two but rarely the latter.  I know a good few people who did feel there was nothing to live for and so took their own lives.

More people than I realised too.  Not just one or two, but five or six that come to mind straight away.

Of course, I shall not name names or even given the first clue as to who they were, but I remember them as if they were still alive, looking like they did the last time I saw them.

One was regarded as 'mad' by people in that 'he's mad, he is' way in which some people are affectionately regarded.  I knew he was depressed from time to time, although we never talked about it (you didn't when I was a lot younger: it wasn't the done thing) and I knew he rarely, if ever, sought help.  He just lived with it.

We drifted apart and lost contact for a few years.  And then I heard that he had taken his own life.

I had gone to the football with him, attended his wedding, been drunk with him; just been his friend.

And there were two brothers I knew who both killed themselves years apart. The older brother completely lost his way when his younger brother died, over a ten year period, and spiralled chaotically and tragically to an early grave.  There was no one to help him, we didn't believe, I am guessing, there was anything we could do to help.  He was 'off the rails' but never thought he might end it all.

And there were others, some older, some younger; all genuinely nice people but with far bigger demons than mine.

Courtesy of Mr Google, I now find that some 6000 people killed themselves in 2011 - and that was just in this country.  Go to Bristol Rovers and that's their average crowd and when you see them standing together that's a lot of people.  6000.

Of course, you must be desperate when you don't want to live anymore.  The worst I did was to self-harm and walk in driving rain for miles and miles, not knowing where I was going but knowing that there was, just about, something worth living for.  And there was hope, however tenuous, however distant.

But if you have no hope, nothing to look forward to, apart from things that may make you unhappier still, then what?

In the modern age, mental health is still not taken seriously.   Politicians talk a good game but if you're ill, you're at the bottom of the queue and sometimes with no services available there's no queue at all.   Thanks for calling by, take a tablet - NEXT!

How can you ever forget losing someone who has taken their own life?  How can you not ask whether there was anything else you could, and should, have done?

And above all, how can we live in a so-called civilised society that doesn't take mental health seriously and sits by whilst annually 6000 desperate people end it all?