suicide Archive

When a Friend Threatens to Commit Suicide (Trigger Warnings)

Trigger Warning: Suicide, Self Harm, Relationship Abuse

It is three-thirty in the morning here and over the past twenty-four hours I have learnt a harsh lesson. It is a lesson that has left me feeling tired and drained, vulnerable and hurting, awful and selfish. Around twenty-four hours ago, a close friend (an online friend if you feel the need to know) threatened to commit suicide. She posted in a group saying that she could just not handle life any longer, that it was too much and that she was going to kill herself.

My Experience with Detox and Outpatient Rehab

My alcoholism reached a head in spring of 2013, brought to desperation by the death of my wife and my subsequent despair. By this point I was drinking from three pm onward everyday, first wine and then vodka, whiskey or rum. Nothing would bring her back, but I could annihilate myself. It was starting to dawn on me, though, that this was making me nothing but miserable. I wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything. I wasn’t socializing or running errands. I could barely cook. Being on disability, I wasn’t working. My full-time job was getting to the bottom of the bottle.

Death and the aftermath

My wife died four months ago. We had fought the night before, ending with her saying she was taking a bunch of pills. I thought she was joking. I woke up next to a corpse. I woke up with a black eye I didn’t remember getting and spent five minutes trying to clean the vomit from around her mouth until I realized she was dead. Time stands still, memories fail. I called 911 and the person on the line tried to get me to move her from the bed to the floor. I tried, moving a women my same height to the floor, dancing with rigor mortis. A rush of urine. It was then, holding that corpse, that it first hit me.

Hospital Epiphanies

I was taken to the hospital via ambulance and certified so that I wouldnt escape. And I spent the night in a holding cell in the Emergency Room. I saw the psychiatrist in the morning and they changed my meds and made me an out-patient appointment so that I could continue to see this psychiatrist and get care as I didnt at the time have a psychiatrist that was following me at all.

Brother Mine

I’m afraid you have become furniture, brother mine.

Nothing but an engraved box among a hollow wooden desk.

You’re not longer those books your read, the letters that lined

The inside of your throat and tongue. You’re no longer

The songs you played with shaking fingers and bouncing

Legs at three AM when the world finally dozed to sleep.

Goodbye, Katie

I want to give my heartfelt condolences to one of our writers on this website, Ava Gaul. Three days ago she lost her wife Katie, to suicide. As some of our writers have pointed out before, a person’s suicide not only affects those close to them, but entire communities. Despite not knowing Katie at all, […]

My Recent Suicide Attempt

Trigger Warning: Graphic account of a suicide attempt

I recently attempted suicide. At least I think I did, does it count if you don’t pull the trigger, so to speak, rather you try to get someone else to do it for you? I think it does, so I’m going to count this as an attempt rather than a para-suicidal gesture. At least in a rather sick way, I suppose, it makes me rather happy to count this as an attempt as it means I have tempted the fates and I am still alive and kicking.

Fear of Addiction and the Fall Into Alcoholism

My first experience drinking beer (well, aside from the time my mother’s brother gave me a drink when I was like five telling me it was soda – I spit it back out on him) was at a neighbor’s party when I was 20 or so. Up until that point, I’d never had a beer, and didn’t even like the smell of it. Over the next year and a half of knowing him, I found an affinity for beer, in relatively limited quantities, anyway.

My Experience With Anorexia (Yael)

Trigger Warning: Mention of suicidal ideation

I don’t recall exactly when my battle with anorexia started, but I seem to remember other people noticing it when I was about fourteen. Maybe the fact that I had always been unhealthy due to multiple medical conditions that caused me to have to travel to Vancouver, British Columbia, almost monthly for often painful or at least uncomfortable tests to try and give a treatable diagnosis; a process that seemed to always be in vain.

My Experience With Depression (Yael)

I would like to welcome the newest member of our writing team, Yael Cohen. In her first post with us, she tells her story of battling with depression. Thanks for sharing with us, Yael!

Trigger Warnings: Suicidal ideation, rape, sexual assault

I havent always been this way, when I was younger I like to think I was a pretty normal, what we would now refer to as a gender fluid child. I was born with an intersex spectrum disorder. My depression started when I was about eight, as at the time I was being raped by a family “friend.” This would lead later to a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (at age 9) and Major Depressive Illness (at age 16) after a stay in the psychiatric ward for suicidal ideation. To top it off I spent much of my formative years in hospitals as I was born with several problems physically. Just to add to my depressed mood.