**Trigger Warning: This post discusses suicide and suicidal ideation**
There’s not been a suicide of a public figure talked about this widely, ever. I think it is for a number of reasons.
- “He seemed so happy and didn’t show any signs” – the juxtaposition has shocked so many
- He’s someone who brought in folks from all walks of life – as a dancer, DJ, actor, host, father of three, infectious smile, someone who rose the ranks. There was at least something in him that anyone could relate to.
What most people grapple with in this situation is: why? How’s it possible?
Before I learned about suicide and suicidal ideations first hand, I’d ask the same questions. “It doesn’t make sense”. And that’s because so much of what we’ve been TOLD/TAUGHT about suicide is so narrowly focused. We hear the terms “choice and decision”. It’s asked “Why would he TAKE his life?”.
These questions arise because we have such a narrow view of how suicide happens. Then when we learn of these tragedies the only explanation we seem to fall on are cliches like: “he must have been wearing a mask”.
Here’s the reality: we lose people who LOOK and FEEL like they’re in perfect physical health – to things like strokes and heart attacks because plaque builds silently in our circulatory systems.
Well – we lose people who LOOK and SEEM like they’re in perfect mental health conditions – because stress and trauma build silently in our bodies. Suicide is like a heart attack of our nervous system. It can and often does come out of nowhere.
When I was in FL – new job in sports, South Beach, more money than I had ever made, single, i FELT happy. My smiles were real. I wasn’t wearing the proverbial “mask”. And yet what felt like overnight, the rug got pulled from underneath me.
In that period of hell that followed, I experienced my first ever suicidal ideation. I didn’t ask for it. It wasn’t related to a specific event that just happened. But it was a self harm ERROR message that felt like a magnetic pull I couldn’t stop on my own. No choice, no decision. Irrationality and my brain felt taken over. I looked at a bottle of pills and instead of seeing them as a medicine that helped me each day, they seemed like a weapon – a weapon that “something” in my brain was telling me to use – to swallow all of them. I felt alien. Like my brain was broken beyond repair. Like even though I wanted the urges to stop, they didn’t.
I was fortunate to be around family to be able to ask for help as the world was crumbling beneath me. Too many people get surprised by these magnetic pull error messages and get run over by them, because we don’t talk about them openly. Don’t give people a heads up as to what they might feel like.
Life stressors and traumas accumulate in us ALL. Even the happiest amongst us. It doesn’t have to be something “major”. IT can be the accumulation of small things over time. And like plaque they build silently.
I don’t know why this tragedy happened to tWitch. I don’t know if it happened following the pattern above. And yes, even in an irrational mindset, some suicides do involve more choice than the explanation of how many of them happen, above. But what I do know is – we are ALL susceptible.
That the “heart attack” version of suicide can happen to anyone. If we don’t talk about how we are all susceptible…if we don’t explain how the error messages feel…how can we expect folks to be prepared, have lower anxiety and therefore weaker the urges, and know how to fight them off and get to safety. We can’t. So we have to educate – to get in FRONT of this. We have to hold hands and teach and support.
