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Knowledge is Necessity

Unfortunately, many of us know this topic too well.

"I unambivalently wanted to die and nearly did."

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Suicide Prevention - Part I

Suicide Prevention - Part II

Support System

Staying Alive

Daughter of Suicide

 Night Falls Fast

It was a pact made in good faith - two longtime friends, fellow individuals with bipolar, both resolving over dinner to be there for the other in time of need.

One of them twirls the scotch in her glass. Even as she makes the promise, she knows it is one that cannot be kept. She knows from her own experience that the pits of despair militate against a person seeking help, that one can barely crawl out of bed during the fury of a killer depression, much less get to the phone much less make other arrangements.

Many years later she receives a call from the man's wife. In the words of the author: "Jack had put a gun to his head ... Jack had killed himself."

The writer is Kay Redfield Jamison, who needs no introduction. Her latest book is Night Falls Fast - Understanding Suicide (Knopf).  Like Dr Jamison, our personal experience has made us reluctant authorities. We're all veterans of our brains going down on us. We know what it is like when our broken minds, desperately seeking the quickest way out, come within a degree or two of finality and its false promise of blessed relief.

According to Jamison: "The reality of dying from suicide became a dangerous undertow in my dealings with life. When I was twenty-eight ... I took a massive overdose of lithium. I unambivalently wanted to die and nearly did."

No one who has been through what we have been through can ever cast judgement on the unlucky ones, and here we find Dr Jamison at her most eloquent, not as an expert bombarding us with the kinds of facts that make this book an authoritative text, but as a survivor restoring honor to those of us who did not make it.

One full chapter is devoted to Drew, a brilliant and charismatic cadet at the Air Force Academy who had been accepted for flight school. Then, months before graduation, he was hospitalized following a manic-depressive breakdown. He was allowed to graduate, but did not receive his officer's
commission. After several years of struggling with his condition, he bought a .38 caliber revolver. When the gun misfired, he pulled the trigger again.

Then there is Meriwether Lewis, leader of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Lewis was a frontier soldier and protégé of Thomas Jefferson, a hero in an age of real heroes who lead his men over 8,000 miles of untracked North American wilderness in a spectacular journey of discovery. The success of his mission made him the equivalent of a rock star back east. His subsequent posting as Governor of the Louisiana Territory didn't quite work out, but soon he be back amongst friends. Seventy miles from Nashville, however, two pistol shots rang out. According to one account, a servant found him "busily engaged in cutting himself from head to foot."

In their misguided efforts to "clear" the Lewis name, several historians have sought to cast his death as an unsolved murder. Jamison's response is that suicide is not a "blot" to his name. It is a tragedy, one all too capable of taking down the best of us, even heroes like Meriwether Lewis, even people with their lives ahead of them like Drew, even those close to us like Jack.

Of course, we here have understood that all along. But thanks to Dr Jamison, maybe your friends and family can understand it, as well.

Excerpt

"Suicide is a death like no other, and those who are left behind to struggle with it must confront a pain like no other. They are left with the shock and the unending "what ifs." They are left with anger and guilt and, now and again, a terrible sense of relief. They are left to a bank of questions
from others, both asked and unasked, about Why; they are left to the silence of others, who are horrified, embarrassed, or unable to cobble together a note of condolence, an embrace, or a comment; and they are left with the assumption by others - and themselves - that more could have been done.

"Family members and friends are, most painfully, left to ask of themselves, What will I do without him? How can I live without her?"

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Kay Jamison: "The reality of dying from suicide became a dangerous undertow ..."