Soaring Over Stress, Episode Seven ~ The Silence of Suicide

This episode of "Soaring Over Stress" titled "The Silence of Suicide" discusses the stigma and loneliness associated with depression and suicide, with a focus on men. It shares statistics about suicide, including the fact that men have higher suicide rates and tend to use more lethal methods. The host also mentions a book by Clancy Martin called "How Not to Kill Yourself" and shares excerpts from her own book, discussing her personal experiences with suicidal thoughts and attempts. The episode emphasizes the need to speak about suicide in an honorable and sympathetic manner. Hello, hello. Welcome back to another episode of Soaring Over Stress. I'm your host, Aimee Ray, and we are on to episode seven already. Today's episode is titled The Silence of Suicide. Today we're going to discuss the silence of suicide. How many people don't recognize there's a way out, the stigma of asking for help and or needing it, and the loneliness and isolation associated with depression and suicide, focusing on men in particular. We're going to also have our first guest, one of my good friends, Mike, on with me today to get a male perspective on the topic as well. I'm going to start off with an article published by Heads Up Guys, which states a few facts and figures about suicide. Almost 800,000 people die due to suicide every year, nearly twice the number who died by homicide. For every death by suicide, there are approximately 20 suicide attempts made. More than 90% of people who die by suicide struggle with mental health and or addiction. Researchers estimate that up to 60% of people who have died by suicide have major depression. It goes on to say the global disparity of suicide rates between men and women is a well documented phenomenon, with men consistently exhibiting higher rates. This disparity is attributed to a complex interplay of many factors. While men tend to use, well actually, I'm going to interrupt my fact reading to talk to Mike, because he and I were talking the other week, because I'm discussing this topic in the podcast and other places. You had said that you thought that men, what was it, attempt more? Well, I said that I hear men doing it more, getting more successful of it. I said that because you hear of women too, but I always hear of men doing it more. And I thought, every time I hear of men, hanging, shooting, and normally women, you hear pills or something else. Okay. Yeah. And when you told me that, I was like, no, is that true? Is that true? And then what'd you say, you went and looked it up? I went and looked it up, and women actually attempt more than guys, but guys are more successful. Just like you said. Yeah, yeah. And that's what this statistic says. It says, while men tend to use more lethal methods of suicide, i.e., hanging and firearms, like you just said, they are more likely to die during any attempt, meaning that it's not the method alone that explains the vast difference in suicide rates between men and women. Other factors, such as alcohol use, severity of underlying illness, loneliness, and shame must be considered as contributing factors to the elevated suicide rate among men. And then it goes on to say that men account for 75 to 80 percent of deaths by suicide. So that's a huge, that is a huge statistic. In the United States, the suicide rate among males is four times higher than among females, like you were saying. And male death represents 79 percent of suicides, amounting to roughly 105 men who die by suicide every day. Suicide is the leading cause of death for men under age 50. So, yeah, a lot of statistics there. There's even more that I, these are hard topics, you know, to go through. But, okay. So, those are some statistics. And then I recently picked up a book by Clancy Martin, aptly titled, How Not to Kill Yourself. This book, although I have not gotten through it, I've barely began, but, or barely begun, excuse me. So speaking on the book, Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon, says this, Clancy Martin gives voice to the large questions that suicide poses, why some people want to live while others do not, why some fluctuate between the poles, why he is grateful to have survived his attempt, but still hears the siren call of self-annihilation. He writes confidently, philosophically, dramatically, with great clarity about a life that has been both wondrous and agonizing. Another author, Dr. John S. Draper, former project director of National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Network, says this about the book, Martin reminds us that the most existential questions around suicide, what drives a person to want to die, and what has kept them alive, are not answered by the act itself, but by people like him, who have long suffered and are authentically seeking what it means to go on living, end quote. So some of the chapters in this book are titled The Suicidal Mind, Is There a Death Drive, I Can Always Just Kill Myself Tomorrow, I personally, I like that title. He also has one that says They Fucked You Up, Your Mom and Your Dad, Part One, and then later in the book, he has a Part Two for the same title, which I wholeheartedly concur. I actually have written my own book as well, it is still awaiting publishing. However, I was thinking about reading an excerpt from Clancy's book, is that his first name? It is, from Clancy Martin's book, How Not to Kill Yourself, as well as a portion of my own book. So I think I'm actually going to start with mine and then segue into his. So it's funny, I actually just turned off recording to talk to Mike because I was worried about putting this out there. I had always intended that this book would be under a pseudoname, and it still very well might be. And just wondering, you know, what should I do? And he and I were talking about it. And I said, you know what, fuck it. My family just wants to do what they do. And so I'm going to do what I do. And as the saying goes, if they wanted me to talk better about them, they should have behaved better. So from my book, Fault Lines, this is chapter five, titled Lahar Laments. And it's just a little piece I'm going to offer. It says, If lahars are mudslides caused by a mix of volcanic ash, debris and water, then thoughts of suicide and other illegitimate coping mechanisms must be the runoff of fault lines finally opening up and oozing out their truth. Suicide and its various thoughts and ideations have bubbled up like magma in my soul for nearly a decade now. At first, it seemed dark and ominous, yet glowing with a fury and rage too hot to touch. But as the years have gone by, it has felt less threatening, like a child stirring dirty water in a mud hole, and then trying to drink it. It has been for me, a terrifying comfort, and a place of release and rest, all at the same time. Further on in the chapter, I mentioned this poem called Cutting on the Inside. She wants to cut. She wants a bridge. She wants to fly home. But bleeding isn't allowed. Jumping is forbidden. And home is decades away. Okay, so in Clancy Martin's book, he says the following. In the book, The Sorrows of Young Werther, I guess it's Goeth, I don't know, I'm sorry. He wrote, he wrote on the subject of suicide, we can only discuss something honorably insofar as we sympathize with it. I want to discuss suicide in an honorable way. In our contemporary culture, we have a fundamentally dishonorable relationship with suicide, and thus how we talk about it. This isn't surprising. We've had a dishonorable relationship with suicide for centuries, at least since St. Augustine came out against it in the fifth century, motivated in part by early Christian groups who believed that one could get into heaven more quickly by killing themselves, while one was still sinless. An enormous variety of social and legal condemnations of suicide have dominated Western culture. Suicide was only very recently decriminalized in the United States. Did you know that? I didn't either. And it's still a crime in many countries. Moreover, any death by suicide reported in the news will skirt the fact of how the person died for reasons of privacy and public safety, which adds to our collective feeling that there's something shameful about this kind of death. When we learn that someone died by suicide, we feel quite differently than when we learn that someone died of old age, accident, or disease. It's typical to experience a whole range of complicated moral emotions and to start assigning blame to the suicide herself, but also to friends and family, maybe to social conditions or to poor mental health treatment or to drug and alcohol addiction or a host of other causes. A dear friend of mine committed suicide recently, alone in a hotel room, and many of our mutual friends were eager to blame his death on an accidental overdose of heroin, which apparently would have been a preferable cause of death to his deliberately taking his own life. The truth is, Goss got it exactly right. We don't speak of suicide honorably, because at some level we don't really sympathize with the person who kills herself. As a contemporary philosopher Shelley Kagan, among many others, has pointed out, even today, suicide is looked upon with a mixture of disdain, fear, and disapproval. Perhaps because we all experience suffering in some way and are free to take our own lives, yet choose to go on living, we judge others who've given up on life. But I want to try here to speak honorably, respectfully, and sympathetically of people who have killed themselves or tried to kill themselves, including myself. That means coming to understand the choices I made when I attempted to kill myself, which means thinking through some very uncomfortable ideas, such as despair, terror, self-loathing, and death, and also being willing to ask myself some very unpleasant questions. To really sympathize with a person who has or has tried to kill herself isn't easy. We may be grieving or angry or frustrated or worried about our own responsibility for her decision, and the person who has made the attempt and survived may also be having these feelings with respect to both herself and to her loved ones. What if we find it particularly difficult to sympathize with ourselves, which of course we do? What if we can see ourselves only as dishonorable, which is part of why we tried to kill ourselves in the first place? And what about that person, as John Mulhaney jokes, who tried to murder me? Can you really sympathize with him? Can I speak of him honorably? I tend not to sympathize with my own past decisions to kill myself, particularly not the times I tried to do so after my children were born. So I will just say, like, for myself, that was like the most agonizing part for me was my children. If I were to allow myself to think about my children, that was also what shocked me. So it's an interesting dichotomy. Okay, so throughout my recording, I keep stopping because Mike and I keep having discussions, and then I go back to recording, and he's just sitting here so patiently with me. But we were just talking about how, you know, I had mentioned this statistic earlier in the podcast about how men under 50, if the leading cause of death is by suicide. And like you were saying, that most people, men at that age have kids and like, must be pretty bad for them to like leave it to somebody else, not knowing that they have to, you know, not that they can parent them and teach them, you know. So yeah, that's another stressful thing, I guess. But I know I've personally lost at least two people that were very close to me, three people altogether, two male, one female, all of them had kids, I think. So it's just a rough thing. And then I remember when my one friend, we're just going to say his name's Henry, had passed away, and my co-workers knew him. Okay, so another aspect that I wanted to talk about was when we think that people are okay, or we assume that they're okay, you know, as was the case, I don't know how other people felt. I know that my friend Henry was seriously struggling. And so when he did pass away, I was discussing it with some of my co-workers. And my co-worker said, Oh, you know, Henry wouldn't do that. He's a happy guy. You know, he's smiling all the time. And they're like, Well, he's not like that. And it really did bother me. And I just said, Okay, well, what about Robin Williams? And furthermore, what about myself? And they just both kind of looked at me like, Wow, okay, like, there's something here. And then we think about other famous people that have died, like Anthony Michael Bourdain, Chris Cornell, and countless others who have died to suicide, whether it's because they're famous, or because they're actors, comedians, or generally appear to be happy people. We make this assumption that they don't struggle with it. I think I saw one of the statistics, I can't remember if I read it in the beginning of this podcast, or I had read it somewhere else. But for a year, they struggle with their mental health before they attempt. So I don't know something like that. But and all that time goes by and nobody notices it. Yeah. Which is, you know, yeah, no, thank you for bringing that up. A lot of time, hey, how you doing? How you doing? You know, and they just, and nobody expects for them to really tell you how you're doing or how you're feeling. Yeah, exactly. I actually have a friend who I said, Look, I'm going to be putting up the podcast soon. It's going to be geared toward men about suicide. And I said, I was just wondering, have you ever struggled? And he said to me, I live that life all the time, the brave face I must put on to ensure everyone else around me is happy, and putting myself last to everyone. It's hard as a male because we aren't allowed to express our emotions in a healthy manner, due to us never being taught about processing stuff. And my response to him was, damn, and wow, my heart bleeds for you. And for so many men in your situation. Later, I said, please know that you can reach out to me. And his response was, thanks, I won't. It's literally what he said. And I think that that's, that's a male response. That's a lot of times people I won't, you know, I wish I could. I want to know how, not necessarily me, of course, you're me. But you know, I'm one person, I would love to know how, how the topic can be opened up more how men could feel more safe to say, Hey, look, I'm struggling with other men. Right. And I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. You know, a lot of the times they don't look for help, because they don't, they can't express it. And then they sometimes, you know, if you go for help, and you're weak, right, it's the stigma. Yeah. You know, I'm going to therapy. Yeah, you don't ask for. Right. Exactly. I wish I could change the end of this conversation to something. I don't know. As I always say in my podcast, or often say, you know, there is 988, there is the texting 741-741. And maybe that's something I know it's not enough. I have had a few good experiences with the texting one, but I did have a really crappy one. And I can just imagine somebody who hasn't already done this, right, a bunch of times saying, you know what, screw it, I'm just gonna, you know, it's just one of those hard things. I'm not really sure if I addressed any particular need or help, I wish I could have been more helpful. But hopefully that opens up a little something for somebody out there, reaches someone I want to thank Mike for being on with me. So thank you for being here with me. Anytime. Yeah. And as always, this is Amy Rae signing off saying, I see you, you matter, and your story counts.