Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The Long Term Mentally Ill and Suicide © Megan Snider

If you are considering suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

According to “Stop a Suicide”, 90% of people who commit suicide have suffered from a psychiatric illness in their lives. Accordingly, it is not hard to trace the snaking path of suicide back to the vein of mental illness and the agony present in the disorder. This takes us back to my earlier post where I expounded on my idea that mental illness is borne out of fear. Fear, desperation and agony are all very good bedfellows. 

Waiting for the end of a psychiatric disorder is bleak. Round after round of medication can be tried and re-tried, new uses can be applied to old pills but still we come back to the same darn shame. We just have a low rehabilitation rate of our mentally ill. If one more person suggests that mental illness is wished into being or that the mentally ill should simply just “play the hand they were dealt” then that is one person too many. Often times playing the hand your dealt may involve a tooth split by the intrusion of a revolver.

The “long term mentally ill” is a term coined to refer to those who do not get well. Fancy papers are drawn up concerning as to what fancy doctors and their fancy facilities should do with them but little concept is actually given to their daily lives, their daily struggles and their adjusted outlooks. Psychiatrists are simply perplexed by the long term mentally ill and it is no wonder they turn to suicide as an effective means of ending the slow erosive torture of mental illness.

By no means however am I advocating suicide. I believe there is an afterlife and suicide will not win you your place of choice in it. That’s what has stayed many hands across the world from stumbling their way across the handle of a dagger. However, suicide is still a voluptuous temptation to those who are counted among the long term mentally ill. When treatment reaches the frayed end of its own ropes so too does humanity. The burden to toil under too great a toll begins to take effect and take flight into fanciful fantasies fit of only a madman.

We must take all threats of suicide seriously. If you or someone you love is contemplating suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 and you will be redirected to a regional help hotline. 

Long term mental illness is not the best of terms, but it certainly is not the worst. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline will provide you with someone to talk to, someone to hear you and someone who will listen to you. That is perhaps its best commodity. No one will talk down to you any longer. 

Remember, where there is life there is still a little hope.

© Megan Snider

For more resources and hotline numbers, please visit my "Resources" page to this blog.