Suicide:
When Depression Takes Over and Life Becomes Too Painful

Recognizing the close relationship between the irritability and anger that is "acted out" and what is "acted in" can be seen in the origin of the word suicide. The word is taken from Latin and means killing of the self. However, the German equivalent Selbstmord, which translates as self-murder speaks directly to the violence that occurs within. Although most people experience the milder forms of "acting in" IMS, it is useful to explore the outer fringes where death is a very real possibility. Seeing IMS in its extremes can better help us understand what most people experience. Suicide is still a fearful and taboo subject, one most people would rather ignore. Yet unless we confront the reality of suicide too many males will continue to die, too many will experience unremitting suffering, and too many families will be destroyed.

Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and former director of the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic. She has written more than a hundred scientific papers about mood disorders, psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, and suicide. It's safe to say, she is one of the best in the field and knows what she is talking about.

But, unlike most other professionals who describe the problems of others, Dr. Jamison acknowledges her own battles with life-threatening mood disorders. "Within a month of signing my appointment papers to become an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, I was on my way to madness." This is how she begins her book, An Unquiet Mind: Memoir of Moods and Madness. "It was 1974," she says, "and I was twenty-eight years old. Within three months I was manic beyond recognition and just beginning a long, costly personal war against a medication that I would, in a few years' time, be strongly encouraging others to take. My illness, and my struggles against the drug that ultimately saved my life and restored my sanity, had been years in the making."[i]

Jamison, by her own admission, came very close to death many times in her life. "I was seventeen when, in the midst of my first depression, I became knowledgeable about suicide in something other than an existential, adolescent way. For much of each day during several months of my senior year in high school, I thought about when, whether, where, and how to kill myself. I learned to present to others a face at variance with my mind; ferreted out the location of two or three nearby tall buildings with unprotected stairwells; discovered the fastest flows of morning traffic; and learned how to load my father's gun."[ii]

Ten years later she found the desire to die overwhelming. "After a damaging and psychotic mania, followed by a particularly prolonged and violent siege of depression, I took a massive overdose of lithium [the most common medication used to treat manic depressive illness]. I unambivalently wanted to die and nearly did. Death from suicide had become a possibility, if not a probability in my life."[iii]

From then on she was on a quest. "As a tiger learns about the minds and moves of his cats, and a pilot about the dynamics of the wind and air, I learned about the illness I had and its possible end point. I learned as best I could, and as much as I could, about the moods of death."[iv] What she has learned can be a help to us all.

• The underlying conditions that predispose an individual to kill himself include heredity, severe mental illness, and an impulsive or violent temperament.[v]
• There are a number of events or circumstances in life that interact with these predisposing vulnerabilities: Romantic failures or upheavals; economic and job setbacks; confrontations with the law; situations that cause or are perceived as causing, great shame, and injudicious use of alcohol or drugs. [vi]
• Suicide in our young has at least tripled over the past forty-five years.[vii]
• One in ten college students seriously considered suicide and most had gone so far as to draw up a plan.[viii]
• One in five high school students had seriously considered suicide and most had drawn up a suicide plan.[ix]

Does this sound familiar? Drop me a line and let me know what you have experienced.

Does this sound familiar? Drop me a line and let me know what you have experienced.

This article first appeared on Gordon Clay's MenStuff Web site, http://www.menstuff.org/

Copyright © 1998-2005 Jed Diamond and Bert H. Hoff | WebMaster Bert H. Hoff, creator of MenWeb and Men's Voices quarterly.