How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind

by Clancy Martin

It doesn’t help matters that the most negative emotions are also the most sure of themselves. Happiness and security are notoriously tentative and fragile states. But anger, depression, fear: what could feel more certain? (Yet this is of course mistaken: emotions, like thoughts, come and go.) Life is just so fucking hard so much of the time. Many of us have moments of panic. And we all get tired.

What I can do, and have done, is read something that will either help the impulse to pass on that particular day or, better yet, help me to pause and even start to rethink the appeal of killing myself. I don’t expect my suicidal thoughts to ever go away, though I’m happy to report that they may be diminishing. But I do believe that my attitude toward those thoughts can change, that they can feel both less appealing and less insistent—and indeed my attitude toward suicide has changed, in part through writing about it, but mostly through my exchanges with other people who are or have been suicidal.

I’ve also finally developed an educated respect for the physiology of good mental health: in my own case, remembering to pay close attention to such simple things as the food I eat, the physical exercise I do, the time I spend outside in the sunshine, and the sleep I get.

As I like to tell people who come to me in crisis, if it ever gets so bad that I simply can’t take it anymore, I can always just kill myself tomorrow.

I had momentarily forgotten to lie about what I was thinking. That’s the cardinal rule of intensive psychiatric care, like the “deny, deny, deny” rule for adulterers. With psychiatrists, “lie, lie, lie” is the only way to survive, the only hope of ever getting out of there.

“He has failed in his own eyes the test of will and spirit. He blames himself for his weakness, and he assumes that others blame him, too.”