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Thinking about ending your life could be evidence for a mental health condition, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re broken. It could mean you’re human. As someone who works in mental health, I have experienced a continuum of where people fall on a map. There is a range of severity, duration, and several qualitative measures to determine where people are. There is a passive ideation, like, “God, this world is hard, just take me in my sleep,” to “Fuck, I think today I will walk out into traffic.” These are two different places. There are places in between and on the other side. It can be a daily struggle. It’s a thing some people use to cope, a thing some people use to manipulate others, and it’s thing that blocks people from thriving. It’s a thing.
Contrary to popular belief, it is not just a psychological experience. It’s a quirk of society. Specifically, Durkheim, a famous sociologist, wrote a treatise on how the rates of suicide vary from culture to culture, and from time to time. If suicides were just a quirk of faulty brain chemistry, then this fact would not be true. It’s statistically verifiable, but it’s not the thing that is sorted in a community mental health clinic. That’s not a fault- when it comes to the individual experiencing this, it is necessary to get out of a macroscopic frame and work with the person. We still need to address social-cultural dynamics that influence suicide.
In addition to experiencing suicidal ideation as a professional, I have also experienced it in my personal life. Very few know this. Maybe more…
