When you come to me for help, I want to help you.
I hope you will let me.
I cannot know your secrets without your words.
I hope you will tell me.
Tell me, please, your thoughts of suicide.
You might feel scared to tell me
When I ask if you are thinking of suicide.
I will try to help you feel safe.
I will not judge you.
I will not interrogate you.
I will not panic.
I will listen gently as you tell your story
In your own words, in your own way.
Suicide might tell you not to tell me.
Suicide might tell you I am your enemy.
Suicide lies.
Suicide might tell you that nobody could possibly help you,
That dying is the only way to end your pain.
Suicide might even tell you that you are a bad person
Defective, undeserving of life
Or love, or hope, or compassion.
Please, tell me.
I cannot help you fight the enemy
If you do not tell me about the enemy,
The enemy that is trying to kill you.
Do not trust your suicidal thoughts.
They are not rational.
They are a symptom, a sign, a cry from inside.
Something inside you needs healing.
Healing, not killing.
Tell me, please, what suicide tells you.
Does it tell you everything that is wrong with your life?
Everything that is wrong with you?
Suicide plays tricks with truth,
Telling only the truths that make you want to die
Hiding the truths that make you want to live.
The pieces of hope.
The pathways to healing.
The possible.
Tell me, please.
Or tell somebody else.
I am only one of many people who can help you.
But nobody can help you if you tell nobody.
Thank you.
One day you will thank you, too.
For telling.
For surviving.
***
© Copyright 2014 Stacey Freedenthal, PhD, LCSW, All Rights Reserved. Written for www.speakingofsuicide.com. Photos purchased from Fotolia.com.
I am a doctor with 6 years suicidal ideation but not wanting to die. However life has become more difficult with brain injury, major criminal case when I was convicted for the way I was dealing with my suicidal thinking.
I was trying to “throw away thoughts” but had a brief visit to the dark web and was arrested following what I believe was a police trap.
I would still like to develop a website for suicidal people to throw away bad thoughts as I feel this could help some people, but I need others to work with to develop this idea.
Anyone with website skills interested?
David,
I’m sorry about all you’ve experienced. It’s a testament to your spirit that, even so, you are thinking of ways to help others. Have you been to the site http://www.chronicsuicidesupport.com? You might find some like-minded folks there. Please let us know if you move forward with your idea, and what it might involve.
I have made a few attempts years ago (while reliving cult abuse memories). Fortunately, over the years I’ve had a couple of really good therapists.
My current therapist is good, but pretty black and white about suicide. “If you make any mention of it, I’ll call 911 and have you locked up.
Been there, done that and it NEVER helped!!!!
I’m seriously thinking about suicide in a few months out. I’m a teacher and I keep getting fired. Four times!!!!
My problem is that I tend to get overwhelmed by my job (Special Ed teaching). I work harder, become exhausted and start abusing Adderall and Red Bull. I’m also bipolar. I get so hyped up that I tend to speak my mind. That gets me into trouble and fired.
I’ve been hired for a new teaching job that starts in August. Recently, I’ve been diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. It doesn’t take much to exhaust me. Stress really takes a toll on me!!!!
I’m terrified that I won’t be able to keep up, will become exhausted and repeat the cycle and end up getting fired. I have decided that when I do get fired that I’ll pretty much have to kill myself. I’ve told my therapist this. I have tried to seek out another vocation, but I can’t get a job.
Carrie, I wonder whether a DBT therapist, someone who specializes in working intensively one-on-one with Borderline clients, might help you? Reason being, Borderline clients have a very diffcult time managing their day-to-day stressors (like you), they are tempted to make poor choices to deal with such stressors (like you, re: Adderall and Red Bull), and then quickly burn out (like you). So, even though you might not have Borderline Personality Disorder, it might be incredibly helpful for you to work one-on-one with a DBT specialist, someone who could help you examine your stressors and use your Wise Mind to solve your issues. The very best DBT therapists will stay in touch with you during the week, between sessions, and be available by phone to help you work through issues as they arise.
Wish I had some DBT therapist names to throw at you. These therapists are, I suspect, relatively few and far between, but they’re out there, and they are incredibly good at what they do. Perhaps Stacey can give you a few names.
Now, there are DBT classes out there, and they are helpful, but what I am recommending is a DBT therapist to work with you intensively one-on-one. Go for the class only if you truly cannot locate a DBT therapist.
Excellent idea, Ben. Thank you for sharing.
Marsha Linehan’s group, Behavioral Tech, maintains a list of DBT therapists who have received her training and who wish to be listed. It’s here: https://behavioraltech.org/resources/find-a-therapist/
The way DBT works, there is individual therapy and there are also skills training classes. They’re meant to be completed in tandem, but with different therapists.
While I agree with you that working with a therapist is best, if someone can’t afford or find a DBT therapist, there are some good self-help books, too. A good one is The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook. For teens, another good one is Don’t Let Emotions Run Your Life.
Part of the bunch. Tried for years to get help, to talk. No success.
I wish I could find the help that everyone says exists. I feel like I have begged and pleaded with everyone I come across. Suicide hotlines just rephrase what you tell them and say it back to you. I have battled suicidal thoughts for 17 years, and what I thought was depression, but I had no idea what depression was until 4 months ago when my entire life imploded. Now I’m alone, grieving, scared and hopeless. :'(
I hear that, I’m also alone scared and hopeless.
42 days after this was posted, I drove to a hotel in New Jersey, rented a room for 2 nights and at 2:00 PM upon arrival, I ingested 360 30mg Oxycodone, 120 2mg Diazapam, 80 Oxycontin 40mg and a couple hundred other pills on top of affixing 9 additional 100mcg Fentanyl patches to my chest under my shirt and went to bed.
At 11:00 PM that night, I awoke to urinate. After using the restroom, I headed out of my room to the first floor for candy machine snacks in the lobby. Knowing I was far too drugged to use a room key, I simply left that 5th floor door open for easy entry.
I then sat at the desk where I had set up my laptop before taking pills and began to write how I was amazed I was not only still alive, but remarkably coherent. It wouldn’t be many more seconds later that I would lapse into a coma, fall to my left, wedge the chair between my left arm and the floor cutting off all circulation. For the next 3 days.
The fire department broke through the door. EMS turned me over and I instantly flat lined. Though I had my DNR/DNI plastered throughout the hotel room, I was paddled 3 times, revived, carried out of the hotel on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance which drove me to a nearby open area where a life flight chopper waited to take me to emergency surgery, then 8 days later, life-flighted again to a hospital out of state for very specialized treatment.
The woman I dedicated my life to abandoned me in the hospital, and although I wouldn’t learn of it for another month, I was now also homeless.
4 years, 9 hospitalizations, the loss of my home, family, career and most friends later, I sit in a 12 x 16 room with every problem I had before suicide. And countless more medical, physical, mental and emotional problems as a result and aftermath of the attempt.
I lost my left arm as well.
To this day, nobody knows how I made it through the night, when every specialist told my family that there was almost no chance of my living by morning, and in the unlikely event I did, the 15 minutes of Hypoxia I suffered would perhaps render me a vegetable regardless.
I no longer have any semblance of normalcy. I exist every moment of every day in agonizing pain and discomfort. I am alone, lonely and isolated. My day consists of the agony of trying to get out of bed. A 17-pill breakfast, a seated position in a desk chair where I will spend the next 20 some-odd hours enduring pain no human should ever have to suffer.
Survivor,
How awful, the amount of suffering you’ve endured, both leading up to your suicide attempt and afterward. It hurts even to read what you’ve gone through. I don’t know if you posted your comment here as an expression of continuing suicidal thoughts or as a cautionary tale to others who are considering attempting suicide, or both, or for some other purpose altogether. Whatever the case, thank you for sharing.
If you want to talk or text with someone, please consider calling the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800.273.8255 (TALK), texting the Crisis Text Line at 741-741, or checking out other resources on my site at http://www.speakingofsuicide.com/resources/#immediatehelp.
I’m sorry that you went though that, but keep in mind most people are selfish, and none are worth dying for. Also I am wondering why you did not just leave the country? It is really easy to get away from everything if you have a passport. If someone around here near where I like wanted to get away, and just drop everything it would be quite easy. All they need is some money about 2 grand probably less and they can disappear and never be seen again. Just drive South on the I-15 then continue south on the 905, and cross into Mexico. The international Tijuana Mexico Airport is to your right, and another right after going through De Mesa Otay border crossing just remember to get 1 days auto insurance before going over the border. Just follow the signs to Aeropuerto, and the airport is on your left. Go anywhere you want in the world, it is your choice. Reason I did not say a US airport is that it is possible for your partner that you don’t get along with to locate you. Also the police there are not going to force you to go either till you are no longer wanted in the country.
Paul,
I know you mean well, and I thank you for reaching out to Survivor. But …when people feel so much pain, despair or ennui that suicidal urges overcome them, moving to another country is not likely to help. “Wherever you go, there you are,” as the phrase goes. My advice to anyone considering suicide is to get help, not a passport. That said, if some folks who were suicidal do feel better after they leave the country – that is, if they experience a “geographical cure” – all the more to them! But it’s generally not so simple for folks.
I’m very sorry to hear that your salvation came at the cost of serious, never-ending pain and disability. I hope your situation improves dramatically over time. Best wishes to you.
This is all very poetic. But do you promise not to commit me if I have a plan? Do you promise not to have me locked up like a criminal, to be verbally abused and witness verbal abuse, with no fresh air/no good sleep/barely any contact with the outside world like I get on the outside, until I am kicked out, with no follow up from the hospital? If you can’t promise that, do you promise to help me pay the 10K bill I get slapped with that sends me into debt, and the countless calls to insurance and hospital, making life even harder and, coupled with the PTSD from seeing people treated like animals, makes me even more determined to die because the institution that was supposed to help me made me sicker? Can you do that? Because no one talks about that. And I don’t have people in my life who care to deal with such inconveniences.
One of the things that I do not understand about the USA, Australia, and England. Is the idea that life is more important than anything else, to the point that it makes no sense at all. Why is it that we are suppose to go on living if there is no quality of life. To me and many others that is by all things that I can think of as the reason people fear hell. They are worried about burning in hell, to many of us with Chronic pain. We get that here if we are not allowed to have access to pain medications, and I do not wish that on anyone other than those that think all people that use pain medications abuse them. If anyone were abusing them they would need more than enough than they personally need to kill the pain. That varies from person to person, and a person has enough in there system when the worst area are not hurting, and the least injured are feeling a little numb. If someone needs more than that they have other things going on that need some other medications. It is true that many are unable to get proper control of pain, and I blame many for that. The control freaks that are more interested in stopping the possibility of addiction at the expence of the many lives that are lost every day due to prescription medications and other ways. The doctors that will not prescribe long acting pain meds, but ones that only last two hours at most, to the medical plans that do not cover long acting, but only acute pain. I did not want to become one of the many that die from this so I quit my insurance plan and found another where I could see a doctor that understood what real pain is and was willing to help me. I have been at the same prescription for over 2 years now, and only need occasionally something else to help with break thru pain such as a muscle relaxant. I could have morphine if I want it, but I don’t like the way that it makes me feel, but some obviously do and we know this because they become addicted to the stuff.
Basically I am saying the biggest problem in the world today is that far too many are treated as though all of us are the same through and through, and all enjoy exactly the same things, when this is not true at all. Just being alive is not enough for everyone, as many of us want far more than that out of life. That is because we feel that life is something to be enjoyed, and it is even more enjoyable with others that we enjoy being with and having things that we like as well. Sorry if that is too materialistic for some, but it is just the facts of the matter. Why have anything if you are unable to enjoy it, and for some they just take that thought a bit further and think of life as no different than being able to enjoy the many other things in the world that there are to enjoy. After all this is what we are taught by our TV, schools, Government, and industry as well. They want us to even be all that we can be. Yet when we are not able to do any of that, and then such people are seen as criminals and not allowed to escape this place saying that there is no place better. Living here is better than the Heaven that they say people will go to if they are good. That is the only reason that I see that others here have suffered so, correct me if I am wrong on this. Just trying to make sense of the insanity of the people in this world. That is going by the Abnormal Psychology, where it is said that there is no such thing as normal, but all varying amounts of abnormality. Also the definition that someone is considered insane if they are not able to function in the overall society. I am able to function and most others as well, but there are a few that are seen as a danger to themselves and possibly others and as such are locked up. That is for the good of the overall society.
This is also my issue. After having people break into my home twice while I was sleeping based on ignorant and removed people’s advice, I am also suffering ptsd as a result, worsening my suicidal ideologies and prompting me to gather necessary materials in case I ever face such a situation again. I cannot understand how these people plan to help while threatening us to keep silent.
Chuck, while I appreciate your comment, I fear you misunderstand. Egocentric? Too good for the world? Picking fights with my district? No, advocating for a student with Bipolar, being mistreated (him first) then realizing after giving 17 years of dedication to the poorest district in the state, they were trying to find a way to fire me. I was counseled to leave with a good record.
Egocentric? Sorry…I hate myself, I was only a good teacher because I was able to hold my “mask” in place
Until I was victimized by two principals who started the panic, and now delayed PTSD
If I had the personality you describe I would have sued them for mental abuse, kidnapping, and not following accommodations. Actually I’m sitting her panicing now, waiting for a “mental exam” by someone who does not know me just to try to get help to be able to work again.
I think you missed the point of my letter…my fault, I know I can be all over the place. I was hoping that a child could understand their worth, and Adrian would see her words probably saved my life..
In reality, just last night in a two hour session my therapist keeps telling me to stop trying to “chase windmills” and save the world. My guilt, failures kill me.
However, maybe its my bipolar self hating brain is not seeing what you say is true. Do you have Bipolar that causes your depression? I only ask because if you do, then maybe you do get it, that gives me hope
But now, unfortuantly, iny current state, your name calling will stick with me. Yeah, maybe your right, I am a victim, yet egocentric is a word I never self impossed on myself.
I get the self victimization part. But being held in a room against your will, pleading to leave, but being threatened of firing (yes, I knew it was wrong but my brain shut off to survive) was not self imposed, nor deserved. I can’t help the kids I lost to drugs, violence, or by their own hands haunt me. Teachers should care and hurt for the ignored. Easy to do with classes of 45
And the ones that credit me for their success, it’s my self hate that doesn’t believe it.
I wish and pray some day it will, I know then maybe I’ll find peace.
I’m glad you have found your way through depression. I have yet to find my way through my bipolar and everything else. Especially my brain that attacks me often with words I wouldn’t say to my worst enemy.
Oh, and if you’ve been watching the news, AZ teachers are walking off the job today (even being threatened to be fired) unfortuantly its narrative is about pay. Really, I wish I could let people know, respect goes a long way
That’s all I wanted. For myself and my kids.
I apologise for the rambling, racing brain does that
You may be right, I may not see that. I just ask 1 thing of you today
Words do hurt, please remember not all of us have found our way through yet.
I wish you continued peace
Karen
Egocentric was not meant as an insult. I have a very similar history that you do fighting unwinnable wars, and I’m finally starting to see that I was the cause of it all. That idea that I would change the system, and that I’m good and they’re bad, is egocentric. It’s unrealistic, however noble our intellect wants to see it. We all live in then same world. How we see it is a choice. Maybe not always conscious, but it is a choice. A lot is wrong with our educational system. We have to set aside idealism and accept what little difference we can make in individuals a good enough reason to live.
If the people “you lost” are remembered more than those you help, its a sign of your choice to see life through a negative lens. While you may see yourself as dedicated and honorable, there’s something very egocentric about picking a fight with others, like your school district, for not doing enough. I’m not unsympathetic, but there is such a thing as self-victimization, and the point of view expressed in your letter seemed to express that to me: the I’m-too-good-for-this-world kind of depression. I suggest do more to help others, live by your own standards, and don’t judge others by your own. That’s the best way I’ve found to end depression and severe mood swings.
This is a GREAT letter!!
Send it to as many suicidal people as possible; it could prevent some tragedies.
Thank you for this, really. Beautiful words.
Im really trying