Passive Suicide: My story

This is hardest article I have ever written, being open and honest about something like suicide from a personal perspective is tough, but Passive Suicide is something that we have to have a better understanding of. Statistics show us the figures for people who have actively taken their own life but we can only guess at the number of people who are passively suicidal and will eventually succeed in quietly ending their own life without anyone realising it’s what they intended all along.

If speaking out myself helps anyone to seek help or recognise their own behaviour then the difficulty I’ve had in writing this will be worth it.

MY STORY

Pre heart attack my health was OK’ish. I felt extraordinarily tired and visited my GP several times, I suspected it was something to do with my heart but exhaustive tests proved otherwise (!) and I put it down to getting older?

Then I had the very thing I suspected I might have, a heart attack! Having been told there was nothing wrong I relaxed a little, but still had a nagging feeling that something wasn’t right, and, sure enough, there it was. I’m lucky to be alive, so, did I recover and then feel the desire to spend my life ‘high fiving’ everyone in celebration of it ‘not being my time’ and rejoicing in every second of borrowed time I’d gained? Well…no.

So why not? That’s a hard one to answer but I’ll give it a go! After the heart attack I still had some issues with my heart that weren’t resolved, (I still do and need surgery to correct the electrical impulse that causes excessive ectopic beats), this caused me to question whether I was going to keel over any minute and die anyway! Constantly worrying that your time will soon be up doesn’t make for the most positive mindset and none of the doctors I saw were giving concrete reassurance that I was absolutely fine.

Another massive health setback in April last year left me feeling drained and ill for months after, and the disease that caused it is still part of my life and stops me dead in my tracks when it flares up. And, last week I was diagnosed as being pre-diabetic! The icing on the cake, so to speak. Add to that the arthritis, being overweight, less than perfect vision and general daily fatigue and life appears less and less fun as time goes on.

If you add into all the health challenges, the reality that I have chronic depression it really is no wonder that I’m struggling with life at the moment! My mood is up and down so I get by, but it’s always there, in the background and the simplest things can feel like climbing Everest.

Now, my hard wired mindset is that I am a mother and it’s my job to look after my children, even though they’re all technically adults now. My worst nightmare is that I will become so infirm as I grow older that their lives will have to revolve around taking care of me to the detriment of their hopes and dreams. I want them all to be able to live independent lives and I want me to be able to look after myself so that I’m never a burden on them. Big changes are needed and after a long hard think I knew I couldn’t do it on my own, I needed help.

And therein lay the problem, the only people who can help me are my children and they are the last people I want to ask for help! Asking for help is probably the hardest thing for anyone to do anyway, having to ask the very people you’re trying to protect has been one of the most challenging things I’ve ever had to do.

But ask I must, and I spoke to Lorie a week ago to ask her for her help for a short while, enough time for me to start to get my health back on track. I cried, I felt the worst guilt, I felt weak and I felt worthless. And yet, when she spoke to everyone else they were more than happy to step in for a while and couldn’t understand why I had such a problem with asking.

So, why am I telling this to the world? Because it was only a couple of months ago that I finally decided I had (tenuously) found the will to live again. Passive suicide is a very real thing and by not taking care of myself I was committing ‘passive suicide’ and I eventually became aware of it. Suicide statistics don’t take into account the number of people who die slowly and know they are killing themselves but welcome the end coming. It’s a far less dramatic way of going than active suicide but no less heartbreaking and alarming.

Would I call my self suicidal? No. Have I wanted to die? Yes. It was only very recently when I went to bed every night thinking I might not wake up and being ok with that and thinking that an accident in my car might end the pain. People don’t talk about passive suicide any more than they talk about feeling actively suicidal and it has to change, if my honestly can change one person’s mind and encourage them to ask for help, it’s worth putting myself out there.

Anything can happen in life that can take you down a dark road to a place where you want the pain to end forever, tackling that pain and trying to make a change is so hard and sometimes we just can’t do it alone. Be honest with yourself, where is your mentality right now? Are you knowingly or unknowingly committing passive suicide? Are you engaging in behaviours or habits that you know will bring the end sooner than it should happen?

I hadn’t recognised that I was passively suicidal until very recently because it isn’t talked about enough, when people talk about suicide they only think about active suicide. Statistics only show us the number of people who have actively taken their own lives, the number of people passively but very deliberately risking their health in the hope the end will come sooner will probably never been known but I guarantee the figures will be huge.

Let’s talk about this, let’s open a dialogue and allow people to be honest about wanting to die and the emotions that run alongside that. The more open we are, the more people will begin to understand and with that will come more help.

Film ‘Kingdom of Us’ on Netflix:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc8_spETMBY&t=11s

Book ‘Unravelled’ on Amazon:- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unravelled-inspirational-story-journey-darkness-ebook/dp/B00L1ENC0O/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1549448678&sr=8-1

TED Talk on Youtube:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xts1F-PoUNA&t=11s