***The following post mentions suicide. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. You can also call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
What Stigma?
What was the stigma surrounding my suicide attempt my freshman year?
- People generally had a negative view of me. Most challenged my depressive and suicidal thoughts. I was seen as trying to take the easy way out of life. Since I was depressed, I should have been able to snap out of it. Since I was sad, I should have been able to do things to change my situation. The stigma was that I had the ability to change things, and even though that might have been true, the forgotten part of that was that I was attempting to change things by putting an end to it all.
- My social isolation only increased, and I had to push through getting the help that I needed. If I didn’t have the will to truly want to live, I would have died, but I fought harder to stay alive. I sought the help of professionals, and when I did not get the help I believed I needed from them, I continued to look for help until I found it. I did all of those things relatively alone and without the support I truly desired and needed at the time. The people I needed around me the most – health professionals on campus (nurses who had automatically frowned upon me and chastised me) – turned me away.
- I was perceived as crazy and mentally off. However, I was neither crazy nor mentally off. I was actually struggling with depression and anxiety. I was stuck in a stage of freeze mode but desperately wanting to take flight. I was drowning in anger, and the anger was on the verge of erupting. It was about to leave carnage in its wake, and no one was prepared for it. Even I was taken aback at how swollen anger had become inside of me. The anger felt like a mixture of rage, hate, and hot burning coals of fire, and I was desperately tired. All I wanted to do was sleep, but I could not.
- I was frowned upon and cast out of social circles that I did not even want to belong to, but it was painful, nevertheless. It was a struggle not to think about the thoughts of others who wrongly believed the worst of me and feared being anywhere near me as if I had some type of plague. The stigma seemed to be that I was already dead … already gone with remnants of a shadow left behind that needed to be taunted even more. Why could no one understand that I was hurting? Why did no one seem to care? I knew I was not the only one struggling. I was just the only one whose struggles were out in the open.
- Campus-mates that called themselves Christians ministered what they believed was the love of Jesus. To them, I was hell-bound, and this was disheartening to me. If I couldn’t get support from Christians, then all I could think was that there was definitely something wrong with me, but no, there was something wrong with the system. If the WWJD fandom was around, would I have still been ostracized? I had to wonder.
- I was the stigma.
Stay tuned for the next post …
My Voice Unchained 