Suicide

This is a depressing subject, I won’t deny. But, as explained in a previous post, this is the time of year at which I invariably start considering it. This is mainly due to SAD, I think, but it can also be put down to a number of other, smaller things that all seem to happen at once towards the end of the year. I won’t go into those. What I want to talk about instead is the wider reaction to something like suicide – the way that, as a subject, it gets thought about, treated by others, etc. – and, more particularly, I want to think about the perverse ideas that people have about it.

What I have discovered in more recent years – particularly last year when I was very seriously considering killing myself – is that there are a lot of people in the world who are fascinated by suicide and, more so, by the people who either attempt it or manage to achieve it. Perhaps these people are predominantly teenagers with a lot of angst or people with problems of their own, or perhaps they are just sickos, but they exist in the world and can be found very easily online – usually by people who are desperately seeking sympathy. There are even, you might have heard, suicide clubs, who meet each other online and then arrange to meet and conduct group suicides – presumably so they won’t have to be alone and they can all make sure they go through with it; so it’s kind of a sick, twisted support group you might say! :-/

I have never done this, obviously, but I am aware of the existence of such things and have taken a vague interest in that fact. I actually remember taking note of these things at various points in my life – for future reference – so I can’t categorically say that, had things gone very badly for me, I might not have tried it. All things are options for me when I’m depressed, any means will do in an abstract sense and I have, as a result, collected quite a lot of information on suicide over the years just out of natural curiosity.

So, this is what I’m interested in now. I’m trying to understand why everyone takes such a morbid interest in other people’s pain? Maybe because they have a lot of pain of their own and they want to know they’re not alone? Yes, that’s possible. But, by and large, no, I don’t think so. I think that for a lot of people, when they get really interested in other people’s misery, it is just because they have a perverse and slightly sadistic need to know that there are people in the world worse off than them. I think, in a half-conscious, suppressed sort of way, those people like to watch other people suffer.

Now, I can admit it, I have had certain glimmers of uncharitable thoughts myself; I’ve thought about other people who I know are having a hard time and taken a twisted pleasure in knowing that their seemingly perfect lives are not quite so perfect and that I, in comparison with them, might actually have quite a good deal. This is not a prolonged thing in me. I don’t mean to do it. And I don’t wish any real harm to anyone. But I can be spontaneously and momentarily vindictive with really quite startling ease.

But the online crew, I’ve discovered, have taken this to another level. We’ve all heard of Twitter trolls; many of them are callous when they write things either to or about other people, and some of them can be purely evil in what they say. For most people with the strength of mind to brush this off, it’s fine – because who the hell are these people anyway? But if you don’t have that strength, and if you’re desperately looking for someone to like you or say something nice or comforting to you, these cruel responses can really hurt.

Seemingly, the trolls think that this is funny – taunting desperate, lonely, or fragile people with their really rather poisonous remarks. I haven’t been trolled in this way, but I have seen other people get this treatment and I think that it is utterly disgusting.

When I considered suicide last year I was in a very bad place – clearly. But one of the things I did to try to deal with that was to start a Twitter account specifically to vent my feelings of anguish/depression/whatever. It’s been removed now so I can tell you the Twitter name I used – @Awomanofnoimportance. Because that was what I thought I was. At the time I was anorexic, I was failing my PhD, I was completely isolated from the world and it was deepest darkest winter. I felt like I’d already disappeared and that all that was left for me to do was to get rid of the empty shell of my body – the final detritus of myself.

“A Woman of No Importance”, I should say, does not refer to the Oscar Wilde play. It is the name of a short play/monologue by Alan Bennett. I have it as a sound recording with Patricia Routledge playing the main character, Margaret Schofield, and I was listening to it repeatedly last year, because it held some kind of profound resonance for me. For those who don’t know, it’s about a woman without any close friends or family who gets diagnosed with some kind of terminal illness – she has some kind of tumour or something in her stomach, the details of which are never properly defined because the doctors don’t figure it out in time – and, during the course of the monologue, she describes her life and the people around her while she goes through the process of being (mis)diagnosed.

So, while she’s talking she describes things that, at every turn, reveal her own delusion about how important she thinks she is in other people’s lives and, with every sentence, there is some kind of ironic tinge to show that she is actually not important at all. No one comes to visit her in the hospital, or if they do it’s only because they have to see someone else there and they’ve stopped in, briefly, on the way (occurrences which then lead her to insist that she’s been “singled out” for some sort of special favour, when in fact she hasn’t); the people in her office – who’ve all but forgotten her – send her a standardized greetings card to say Get Well Soon, and she takes the printed, mass-produced message inside as a sign that they’ve thought about her and genuinely care about whether she’s ok – as if she thinks they all banded together to write the message.

She’s alone, is basically what I’m trying to say, but she keeps going because she just refuses to see that she’s alone; she goes into denial and takes the crappy, little bit of attention that she receives as if it’s real and genuine and enough to fill up her life. So she believes she’s important, and the centre of everything, when she actually has no importance. She’s not even important enough for the doctors to strive to find out what’s wrong with her and when she eventually dies the only thing with her is a housefly, which, she insists, has also singled her out.

Anyway, this long description should give you some idea of how caught up I get when I hear it. But, leaving that aside for a moment, I’ve felt an affinity with the woman in this monologue for some time, and I’ve known plenty of people who I perceive to be like her. I can understand the impulse – it’s what people do when they have nothing in their lives and they know that other people don’t care; they embellish and imagine things about other people who pay attention to them, as if the people in the shops or the postman who delivers the mail every day are somehow their best friends because these nodding acquaintances are all they have to hold on to. Most people, I think, would want to kill themselves if they didn’t believe they were valued, and anyone who’s never known what it is to be genuinely valued might convince themselves, over time, to accept social niceties as a substitute. My mother has got by doing this for years, and nothing I say can ever convince her that this is the wrong way to go about things. I couldn’t do it, certainly. It is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen and, I finally realised this last year, I couldn’t bear the obvious hypocrisy of carrying on when it was obvious that the rest of the world didn’t give a damn if I was there or not. I just get angry when I think about that.

So I put myself on Twitter as a woman of no importance because I was so angry at the rest of the world for not caring that I was in pain, and because I wanted to tell people what bastards they were for letting me suffer that way and for not paying attention to the fact that I was here and had something to say.

But this was what really interested me. Are you ready for this? The whole time I was posting these things on Twitter – really quite vile and ugly things, full of expletives and offensive content – not only did no one respond to ask if I was ok, but I saw, as I continued to post, that I was getting more and more followers, who kept appearing as I continued to post.

Before you say it, they were not just the kind of advertising people who will follow anyone on Twitter regardless of what they post; they were, from what I could see, actual people.

This really bothered me; it made me even angrier. And it still makes me angry now. Because why on earth would someone sit at home, or wherever it is they sit when they’re online, and watch the progress of someone who’s saying, repeatedly, that they want to die and that they’ve been driven to this by a cruel and horrible world full of people who don’t care? Why would someone follow that with such avidity, and, more importantly, why wouldn’t they say anything in response to it?

Answer: Because they enjoy other people’s pain. What I didn’t realise last year was that there are a lot of other people who just take a sick pleasure in pathetic displays of pain and suffering. There is an impulse in most people to kick other people when they’re down and to smile cruelly when they see people who can’t manage their lives.

Someone says they want to kill themselves and a lot of people will sit there and say, “Well, do it then. Go on, I dare you.” And there’ll be a part of them that actually means it and wants to keep watching so that they can see if that poor person really will find the guts to do it. I imagine that they sit forward in their chairs, their eyes light up, they get really, genuinely excited by the prospect that someone might actually destroy themselves; they feel more powerful and more in control of their own lives when they see someone else give up.

It’s disgusting and terrible that people think this way; that they can score a point off someone in despair. But people do it.

There are, of course, other people in the world who have no wish to do this and who do want to help. But they are often unreachable at the crucial moment. Plus, it’s a tricky thing to know how to help someone in that situation and, ultimately, it will come down to whether the person themselves can find anything to hang on to.

But I think that people do try to hang on. No one wants, really, to kill themselves; we have too many survival instincts built into us for that. The body and the mind will always conspire to find some way to stop people before all hope is lost and they do it anyway. A lot of people would happily be talked out of it. But it disturbs me that, at that crucial moment, when someone needs bolstering that way and they reach out for help, they might just get abused or trolled instead.

It disturbs me even more that the world is growing in population and that mental illness and depression are continually on the rise, and that no one, or almost no one, is helping. What’s happening to the world that we have even less compassion for other people, and even less sympathy/understanding/tolerance for people, so that we don’t even care if they destroy themselves because “Hey, that’s one less to worry about right?”

The internet has certainly opened this up. I don’t know what it is, but sometimes I just imagine people sitting at their computers, watching people despair online – perhaps some of them are reading this blog – and laughing at those people, calling them pathetic and sad because they need to connect with someone who will tell them that they’re worth something. It might be wrong to blame everything on the internet, but it’s definitely detached people from the reality of human emotions. We don’t think about the actual people who put themselves out there and how desperate/lonely/miserable/or even suicidal they might be. And we don’t think about what we say to them, albeit through our computers, and how this might be received because there is just this overwhelming mentality – easy to subscribe to – that what you write online won’t reach people, because all the other people in cyber space aren’t really real.

But, I’m sorry, it is real. What you say and do online does affect people, it does hurt if you say something evil. It does matter if you follow someone’s Twitter account and then watch them tweet about how they’re planning on ending their life. It’s not ok to do that.

So don’t laugh. That’s all I’m saying. Don’t jeer at those people. And don’t hit the “Like” button when they tell you all about their pain or try to spur them on when they’re having a really bad time and just want to end it all. Because it’s not funny. It’s really NOT funny. Anyone who thinks it’s just a game that they can play online and then go on with their lives should just be totally ashamed of themselves.