Thoughts on Suicide

Long before I began living under the rainy skies of the Pacific Northwest, I had heard the statistic: highest suicide rate in the country.  Not exactly something to list under "best place to live" categories. Working in an ER here, I can say I believe it's true.  It is a rarity it seems to work a shift where one to multiple patients are not there for either a suicide attempt or suicidal thoughts.  The attempts range from a few scratches on the wrist by a paperclip to a call from paramedics on our base station line alerting of one all too successful. One call I took was for a 15 year old boy. Another was for a 75 yr old man. Both surely unable to fathom the emotional wreckage they would leave behind them.

 I've lost count of the number of nose to stomach tubes I've threaded into unconscious (or conscious but uncooperative) young women to administer thick black charcoal with the hopes of absorbing some of the toxic chemicals from their medication of choice before it hits their blood stream.  I've watched people start thrashing around their stretcher from the "crawling out of your skin" side effects of a med they ODed on that they certainly didn't count on. The average person is no pharmacist, and often doesn't realize that what they are taking in the amount they are taking won't make them dead so much as seriously miserable.

This cumulative effect over the last 6 years of talking to patients with suicidal thoughts and aggressively trying to save others whose thoughts took form has caused to me to think a lot about suicide, and what causes people to attempt it (or say they want to).  There are three reasons I have noticed.

1. The obvious one. Despair.  An inability to see any way out of the pain or struggle of life.  They've been besieged by tragedy or unrelenting physical illness or pain and they just want out. This reason breaks my heart.

2. A call for help.  These are the people who don't really want to die, but are looking, consciously or subconsciously, for a way to make people notice they are not coping well with life.  This too makes me sad.

3. Manipulation. This is the one you don't hear about, probably because it sounds so harsh.  But it is so true.  These are the people that use suicide attempts to win the upper hand relationally.  Because the tortured soul on a ventilator or languishing on the stretcher in an ER is surely not the one to blame. Whoever did not care enough about her or realize she was so fragile is the one to blame.  And the guilt this generates will keep them in their place for some time to come.  These are the people who harm themselves intending for the real hurt to fall on others.  Deceiving and self deceived. Leaving suicide notes that make you cringe because they are so obviously manipulative.  These make me angry. And sometimes they succeed on accident.

Suicide is no escape. If the soul is eternal, there comes a time when we have to look back on the domino effect of our choices.  Feel the enormous pain and destruction that taking our own lives leaves. It's no romantic "lay me in the river at dawn" scenario.

For those who have considered suicide, for whatever reason, please remember that the pain inflicted on others by harming yourself will be no salve to your own wounds.  Working through our hurts and disappointments and pain is harder sometimes than the escape, but healing is possible. And there is Someone whose wounds are powerful enough to heal all of our own.  Don't extinguish a flame you didn't lite in the first place.