Not all Suicides Are Rooted in Hopelessness (Trigger warning: Suicide, abuse mentions)

Some suicides happen because death seems more tolerable than life.
Some suicides happen because of hopelessness.

There’s a third suicide category that people rarely talk about, though: Some suicides happen because you don’t think you deserve the space you take up in the world. These are the self-haters, the self-destroyers, and the self-blamers of the world, and their sense of self has been contaminated.

Maybe they were abused. Maybe they have a diagnosis that doesn’t fit cookie-cutter depression. Whatever the cause, they…

Oh, hell. Let’s stop pretending they have this problem. The correct pronoun is “we”. We spend half our lives trying to believe we’re worthy, and the other half wondering if we’re ever going to get this life thing right. We believe we’re too flawed for the world; too inconvenient.

When self-hatred coexists with depression, suicide risk skyrockets. We’re one of the riskiest suicide categories in the manual. I can give you 30 studies, 20 hypotheses, and three potential cures, but I will never be able to explain the way it feels. I can give you the title to the research paper I’m taking my statistics from, though: That title is

The Last Thing You Feel is Disgust.

For most of you, this won’t make sense. It’s a foreign country. You only understand it if you’ve been here before. If you do get it, though, welcome to my tribe. I get you.

I suffer from unipolar depression. I’m highly responsive to antidepressants and lifestyle factors. Give me a pill and a dog to walk, and I’ll be smiling shortly. For many years, I assumed that my suicidal ideation was tied solely to my mood disorder, and it wasn’t.

I can be the happiest camper in the caravan park, but if you trigger my sense of worthlessness, I will instantly stop asking “Why die?” and start asking “Which tools?” If you’re wondering at the gloriousness of that last sentence, it comes from Anne Sexton, whose sense of worthlessness became the catalyst for her bipolar suicide.

This matters.

It matters because if your sense of worthlessness contributes to your suicidal ideation, no amount of depression treatment is going to be enough. You’ve got to target every element of your suicidal ideation, and that means removing the catalyst: Self-hatred.

All three siblings in my family are mortified by the fact of our own existence. This is because all three of us had the same mother. Now that her ashes are filed away in a wall, we’re slowly clearing away her mess. With the source gone, we're slowly learning who we are when she's not controlling us. I’ve been in therapy for my self-esteem issues for seven years, so I can give you some hope.

The longer I engage in that process, the more I learn that self-esteem isn’t built out of compliments and positive traits. If it were, a day on Fetlife would cure me, and it hasn’t. I can give you a list of things I’m good at. I can even give you a list of my positive personality traits, so no number of compliments can save me.

My sense of worthlessness isn’t rooted in a lack of confidence in my talents and gifts. It’s rooted in the irrationality my mother peddled when I was a child. You can’t disprove irrationality. That’s the problem, so all you can do is measure the depth and breadth of the problem. Look at it realistically. Find the toxins. Recognise them as such, even if you can’t exhume them.

I am Schrodinger’s hatred. There’s no telling if I’ll make it out alive, but I’m stronger than my mother. I’m stronger than any of the abuse I’ve faced, and I believe I’ll do just fine.