To Take My Life

(Let me preface this by saying that this blog has been brought about in the wake of the death of Linkin Park front man, Chester Bennington, who has sadly passed away from suicide. I am one of those terrible people who jumps on a bandwagon and speaks about a well-known person who has died even though I wasn't really interested in them before hand. This happened with Alan Rickman and David Bowie though I didn't go out of my way to write a blog about them and their circumstances under which they passed. When they first died an abundance of people were outed by those who knew them and knew that they were never really a fan in the first place. I feel like I am in this category (as well as this blog post perhaps) though with the amount of information on the Internet how I feel probably won't mean much to the few strangers who might read this. However, something has struck a chord with me after looking into Chester's death and has had me thinking.)

Linkin Park had a small role in my life growing up as it would have for many people who were at impressionable ages when the band first made it big and hit the radio waves all over the world. I wasn't a fan but I also didn't mind them. I liked a few of their big songs like Numb and In The End, and I can still remember a few lyrics of the choruses in these songs after years of not hearing them. My brother liked them more and got their Cd's as did some of his friends. Given the themes and ideas that the songs covered, I remember it worrying my mother as I'm sure it did with many other parents. What I didn't understand back then was why.

Being so young I didn't hear the heavy and emotional complexities in the songs and why it may have made people so uncomfortable. The subjects in many of the songs that Linkin Park made were not widely talked about, taboo subjects if you will. Things like self-loathing, hating those who care and being angry with the world. These sorts of things are what we are aware of as they are, at times, associated with teenage angst. Maybe because they were sang about in songs by adults is what made people trepidatious about letting their children listen to them. The fear may have been in parents realising that their kids may also feel the same way about the world and are unable to relate. From someones point of view where they feel they can relate to these sorts of songs, there would have been comfort in knowing people whom they admired felt the same way too and that it was okay to be angry and they had a right to feel how they were feeling. With a death from suicide, particularly someone who has been openly honest about his thinking and attitude towards not just the world but also himself in his songs, brings forth the issues that have been raised within his music for so long. Only now are we listening.

I know many different artists of all kinds who are usually extremely sensitive and emotional people who make their creative outlet be the things that allow them to let it all out in a constructive way. Songs, paintings, poems, stories etc. They are the people that battle with themselves as they find it difficult to figure out where they belong in the world and cope with the ugly and sometimes traumatic experiences that life will throw at them. Having spoken to people over the years I have come to a hypothesis that these talented but sensitive people of the world turn to things like drinking and drugs as a way of coping as they don't feel there is any other way of helping themselves. They are both extremely kind and extremely broken. It makes it easier to understand why people in the limelight struggle with these substances as Chester did. What sits in the shadows of drinking and drug use is what we still struggle to speak about - mental health.

For someone to commit suicide, it is an illogical and totally emotional response to what is going on in their head. After many chats with so many different people I have gotten to know over the years, I feel that people who commit suicide are not at all selfish and do feel love for their family and friends. But they are tired. They are exhausted and drained and are desperately looking for some peace.

You cannot know how someone is feeling or how they feel about themselves, not truly. There is always something that we have sitting in our heads that we keep to ourselves and never show to the world. There is an idea that we have three faces: one which we put out to the world, one which we only show our closest loved ones and the one that only we know of when we are alone. It is this final face in which people with mental health problems find the hardest to deal with as only we know it and it can be a dangerous force if it were to become our enemy.

If only words were able to really explain and describe the pain of mental health problems but at their best, they are obsolete and too small to even try and make sense of all the internal wars people are fighting. At the point of suicide, it all has to do with how people feel about themselves and their percieved affect on those around them.

A personal hero of mine is Stephen Fry. A man with unlimited intelligence, humour and grace but has struggled most of his life with bipolar and has attempted suicide on a few different occasions. Speaking openly about his attempts in interviews and in documentaries, he has made it clear that there is no logical reason for suicide because if there were someone could be reasoned out of it. In a television programme, comedian Jon Richardson looked into whether or not he had OCD and the many ways it manifested itself in different people. He met a woman whose son's OCD was so severe that after he spent hours and hours cleaning the house he could not move at all for fear of spreading germs and making everything dirty. He would stay in one spot for the entire day. Even after trying as many different approaches to help him get it under control, in the end he took his life unable to carry on fighting his compulsions and fear of germs. It may seem completely over the top to others that someone willingly died because he couldn't get over his cleaning habits, but there was no one else but himself in his head. Not even his mother truly knew what he was thinking.

Professor Kay Redfield Jamison is at the forefront of psychology and has spent her career researching mental health problems, specifically manic-depressive disorder. She is someone who understands the consequences of such a dangerous disorder as she herself suffers from it severely. She is now retired but was a consulting doctor in UCLA and treated many patients privately too. Surely someone who knows more about this than anyone else about the disorder and has it herself could surely get it under control? Why would someone so intelligent and so aware of the dangers of being unmedicated refuse to take her pills? When it comes to the mind, nothing is straight forward and nothing is in our control.

Kay describes both her manic and depressed episodes as they happen together: "There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty...Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.”( - An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness).

Athletes are among those who are expected to be mentally tough to be able to deal with the extreme ups and downs of their sports. To open up about something like depression and be told to toughen up is not only unhelpful, its damaging. Famous gymnast Shawn Johnson was only 16 when she competed in the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and she was well aware of the expectations from her country. For months leading up to the Games she was expected to come back with four gold medals, especially the All-Around (gymnasts compete on all events and the highest score wins, it is the most prestigeous medal a gymnast can ever win). Unfortunately she ended up coming second. She won two more silvers after that and finally won a gold on an individual event but to her it didn't matter. Being handed her All-Around silver medal, the presenter told her "I'm sorry" which reinforced to Shawn that, if everyone knew her as a gymnast and she failed, she failed as a person too. There wouldn't have been a way for someone to reason her out of this perspective of herself.

She went on to train for the London Olympics to make her coach, national team, family and sponsors happy though mentally she fell apart. She spent over 40 hours a week training, ate poorly, didn't sleep and tried to lose weight to get back to her 16 year old size. She cried constantly and her hair started falling out. Fortunately for Shawn, she found an outlet of peace when she found God and retired from the sport. Unfortunately, in a sport where perfection is nigh-on impossible, selfharm such as starvation is not uncommon.

Suicide prevention and mental health awareness is now more avaiable in western culture than it has ever been encouraging people to talk about what's going on in the hopes that this honesty could save their lives. Any kind of social action starts people talking, however talking doesn't help all that much if nothing is done about it afterwards. Trouble is, where do we start?

We still know so little about the brain and everyone is so uniquely different that one solution for one person will not work for the majority. Someone will find the help they need in medication, someone else may find it in their religion, some people find it in their art. The simple fact is that we are, as a society, at an intersection in terms of how to help those with mental health problems and suicidal tendancies as we have so little information so far that a step in any direction could have disastrous consequences. It is unfortunate that only with abnormalities in the brain can we understand a little of what each part does. At this moment in time no-one has an answer and there are those out there who are suffering, some in silence.

“Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete ”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

Perhaps Chester can help shed some light on these thoughts:

I don't like my mind right now
Stacking up problems that are so unnecessary
Wish that I could slow things down
 I wanna let go but there's comfort in the panic
And I drive myself crazy
Thinking everything's about me
Yeah, I drive myself crazy
'Cause I can’t escape the gravity

You say that I'm paranoid
But I'm pretty sure the world is out to get me
It's not like I make the choice
To let my mind stay so fucking messy
I know I'm not the center of the universe
But you keep spinning 'round me just the same
I know I'm not the center of the universe
But you keep spinning 'round me just the same