Older readers may be familiar with the movie and, even better, the TV series’ M*A*S*H and, in particular, its theme tune, Suicide Is Painless. The show was based on one of those crazy Asian wars America gets involved in from time to time, this one being the Korean War. I didn’t even realise the song had words for many years, given the TV theme was an instrumental, and when I discovered the song did have words, I thought, “Well, that’s odd. Suicide is not necessarily painless.”
I don’t want to go into even the vaguest of details, because you never who might be reading, but I knew people who killed themselves. Most, though not all, were young men, seemingly at the beginning of their lives and the news always came as a shock, until, that is, the benefit of hindsight revealed signs we had overlooked. As ever, hindsight is completely useless, except perhaps as a lesson to be learned for the future.
The suicides themselves, depending on the methodology used, may indeed have been painless, but my God, those who were left behind have suffered unbearable pain for life, mixed with the what if of survivor guilt. “Why didn’t I see what was going on? What could I have done differently? I could have saved them. It’s my fault.”
People sometimes say that suicide is cowardly and selfish. Cowardly because it’s more brave to face up to serious issues and selfish because they don’t consider the effects of their death on those left behind. I don’t agree. It’s far more complicated than that. Speaking as someone who knows mental illness in general and depression in particular, I say emphatically that suicide is not cowardly. Even in my darkest moments when I felt life was hopeless and pointless, I never got beyond thinking about ending it all. I did consider the best ways of killing myself but I could not come up with one that was, for want of a better word, painless. And there was always the thought that life, no matter how awful it was, was still better than the alternative.
So, I could understand the mind, if not get into one, of someone who had completely run out of reasons to live, when hope for the future had been completely extinguished, when death was a more preferential option than living. And looking back at those friends and acquaintances, I see myself as the lucky one.
People often look at me as if I’m mad when I say that my own Black Dog is almost a friend. I have known him for almost all my life and, generally speaking, I know how he works and how he affects my mind. I can’t find another way of saying that his pernicious presence is something I cling to for fear of something much worse. And of course, there were far worse Black Dogs than mine.
I wish I knew then what I know now about those who took their own lives. I wish, even more, that society did far more to cut the horrific rate of suicide in this increasingly grey and not particularly pleasant land. But the truth is society seems to care even less. In 2019, there were 5,691 suicides registered in the UK of which 4,303 were men and 1,388 women, the highest figure in decades.
I have enough trouble managing my own mental health, never mind trying to manage that of others, but I do find myself looking for signs and I always urge people to talk about their feelings and always seek the advice of professionals. I know it’s a very fine line between thinking about suicide and actually committing it. Luckily for me, I never crossed that line, but I know, knew, those who did. Suicide isn’t, at least to my mind, the easy option. It’s the hardest of them all and I feel sad, and not a bit ashamed, at how more people are committing suicide these days, not less. What does that say about society today?
