I Am Not Always Very Attached To Being Alive: Living With Passive Suicidal Ideation
I Am Not Always Very Attached To Being Alive: Living With Passive Suicidal Ideation
Chronic, passive suicidal ideation is like living in the ocean. Let’s start talking about how to tread water.
At 27, I’ve settled into a comfortable coexistence with my suicidality. We’ve made peace, or at least a temporary accord negotiated by therapy and medication. It’s still hard sometimes, but not as hard as you might think. What makes it harder is being unable to talk about it freely: the weightiness of the confession, the impossibility of explaining that it both is and isn’t as serious as it sounds. I don’t always want to be alive. Yes, I mean it. No, you shouldn’t be afraid for me. No, I’m not in danger of killing myself right now. Yes, I really mean it.
How do you explain that?
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“We really don’t know [the impact of] having more casual conversation about suicide,” April Foreman, licensed psychologist and executive board member at the American Association of Suicidology, told me. “Stigma is lower than it’s ever been and suicide rates are as high as they were during the Great Depression. If reducing stigma alone saves lives, the suicide rates should be going down.”
This part stood out to me, because I've wondered for a while now if Internet culture and/or mental health destigmatation has increased the number of people talking about suicidal ideation, or if suicidal ideation in the general population has increased to the point that it inevitably leaks out, that we can't help but talk about it more because it's so pervasive.
On the one hand, things seem pretty bad right now in a variety of ways, but on the other hand looking at history, "bad times" are quite prevalent and often in ways "worse" than we're facing now. But there might be something unique about the bad times we're currently facing: perhaps the things that make them bad seem uniquely catastrophic or uniquely hopeless, perhaps our support systems are uniquely weak, perhaps our day-to-day lives are uniquely unfulfilling or unsuited for our monkey brains, or perhaps we got too accustomed to "uniquely good times" in the latter half of the 20th century and now things feel uniquely bad by comparison.
I don't know if there's really a way to tease out cause and effect here, especially when the vast majority of people are not comfortable being 100% honest about their suicidal ideation even in professional settings due to residual stigma and the fear that being too honest could mean trading one's freedom for grippy socks.