Notes from Carolyn Spring podcast on suicide.

For anyone who has ever suffered the distressing effects of suicidal thoughts, this podcast by Carolyn Spring is amazing.

I had fallen deep deep down within myself, utterly bereft, hopeless, empty and despairing. All I could think about was wanting to die. It was like I got wrapped up in those thoughts and fell down a chasm deep within myself. Escape, the need to get out is such a common theme to suicide.

You cannot understand suicide unless you understand how trapped you feel. You are in this place of deep deep pain and it feels like there is no way out. It feels like you don’t have a future. It feels unbearable, absolutely terrible like you are in a tiny little prison cell within your own mind, you are being tortured to death by your own emotion. It is just a place of intolerable suffering.

It wasn’t about a cry for help, attention seeking or being melodramatic, which is what we often get accused of. It was the unbearability of it, the sense that you are in so much pain that it is intolerable, so you have to do something about it, but you do not know what. It is like all your options have just closed off. You cannot think of any options, and the only option that presents itself to your mind, which is why your mind gets fixated on is suicide.

Looking back now it is very clear that it was a very obsessional thinking for me, that my brain got a hold of this thing called suicide as an escape from intolerable psychic pain and it just kept on obsessing about it. There was some kind of comfort in that obsession, that it gave me some kind of control so that i could manage the pain while I had the option to kill myself, but actually thinking about suicide reduced the pain.

I think that is what a lot of people do not understand. They think that if you are thinking about suicide it is because you have decided to do it, but that is not how I experienced it a lot of the time. I would think about suicide the great escape, and it would decrease my distress at some level in the short term and make it a little bit more bearable. Looking back then, I would say I wasn’t actually intending to kill myself to be dead, it was more about these obsessive thoughts, but at the time it is like you are not thinking, your brain is shut down. There is a brain science explanation for what it felt like.

When I was suicidal I couldn’t think about anything else, like literally couldn’t. I guess there was an experience of it being quite a dissociative experience because I felt like I was lost within myself, like I had fallen down into a big hole. I think it is called a ‘pit of despair’ for a reason because there is a very real sense of falling down within yourself of being enclosed and in darkness. The metaphors are a really good description of the visceral experience I had, was I serious when thinking suicidal thoughts, absolutely yes because this is the point, I was in unbearable emotional pain, and suicide seemed like the only option.

I know now not to engage with them or fight them, I just acknowledge them. I know now where they are coming from. I know they are trying to help me. I know those thoughts are trying to help me find a solution to be rid of the pain, but I also know I don’t want to choose that option, because although it is effective, suicide is extremely effective at ending pain, it is by far the worst option.

I think it is key when talking to a suicidal person that you don’t rubbish it as an option, that you don’t tell them that ‘no suicide is not an option’, because we know it is, it will always be an option. Telling someone it isn’t an option can increase their distress. They are in terrible pain and it is the only option they can think about right now to reduce that pain, and then you tell them that it is not an option. What effect will it have?! it will increase this distress, you have all this pain and there is no way out, how does that decrease our sense of helplessness and hopelessness. I always find it much more helpful to be told, yes it is an option, suicide is always and option, but it is not the only option, but it is by far the worst option.

My recovery really has been about discovering those other options for reducing my distress and alongside that what i really began to learn is that although suicide takes the pain away it doesn’t eradicate it, it just passes it on. I am in unbearable pain, I choose suicide as the way of dealing with that, but that doesn’t mean the pain is gone, I’ve just passed it on to everyone around me.

When someone kills themselves it causes immense suffering. It is caused by suffering and then it multiplies and causes suffering to other people. That is why it is the worst option. I think a much better way or reducing the pain and distress is to do it in a way that does actually reduce the pain, rather than just pass it along. But obviously for a long time, I didn’t think there was anything I could do. I saw the pain as irremediable. I saw it is as this big evil, this big enemy in my life. I saw it as bigger than me. I did not know the first think about how to deal with pain. I thought the only way was to kill myself so I didn’t feel the pain anymore.

My recovery has been based on learning that suffering can be resolved. Pain can be reduced. It can be handled. We can do that in ways that doesn’t then cause pain to others and that seems like a win win to me.

“Being suicidal offers a temporary reprieve from distress, a glimmer of hope of a way out”, so it can become addictive as a result, but overall all it does is serve to increase that distress. The brain science shows that when we are in what researchers the suicidal mode, we are in the same state as when we are traumatised, it is almost that carbon copy of a brain scan.

We go into a traumatic state of mind when we are in a life threatening situation, how when we are faced with a threat, the front brain switches off, the back brain lights up and we shift from daily life mode to danger mode, we can’t think clearly with our front brain, we act on instinct, we go into fight flight or freeze, the very sequence of events.

When we threaten to kill ourselves we are activating that same sequence, because it is a threat to our life. We are effectively traumatising ourselves, that is distressing, and when we get distressed we contemplate suicide as the way out and as the escape and that starts the cycle all over again, so it is a horrendous ambitious cycle. Instead we have to find ways of soothing our distress, rather than threatening ourselves all the time. The foundation of it a complete about turn in our approach to dealing with pain. We continue to abuse ourselves, and that can be by threatening to kill ourselves too.

Recovery is not about the absence of suicidal thoughts or the absence or disorders, that is not life, life doesn’t consist of not wanting to kill ourselves, life is full of health, joy, passion, and goodness and love and freedom. Life is good, it is not just absence of the bad, it is so much more.

Being happy is unimaginable for someone feeling suicidal, because the suicidal mode like the traumatic state of mind shuts down our imagination. Parts of the brain involved in imagination literally don’t fire, we cannot imagine a better future for ourselves. We need to get the parts of the brain that are shut down to fire up again.