Depression Talk

In the eyes of many aspiring artists, Nicholas Hughes had a pedigree unmatched. The son of British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, he was one year old when his infamous tortured poet mother commited suicide by sticking her head in a gas oven.

46 years later, Nicholas Highes’ body was discovered in his Alaskan home. He’d hung himself. His surviving sister, Freida, who also suffers from depression, claims that Nicholas was battling depression at the time and apparently was the one to discover the body when she arrived for a visit to her brother. He never married and did not have children. He was a professor of “fisheries and ocean sciences”, with a real love for the outdoors and took up pottery as a hobby.

This Is What Depression Does To You

Although he kept very quiet and tried to stay away from the public eye and his parents’ fans, by all accounts Nicholas Hughes became a successful and highly respected fellow. But no matter how brilliant or logical you are, depression does have a way of making you unable to see your situation clearly.

So, if you know someone who has had depression in the past and yet seems all right, still check up on them from time to time. In depression, setbacks are inevitable. There isn’t just one overnight cure and then you’re free from it for the rest of your life.

Suicide Warning Signs

Indications that someone is thinking about sucide include:

• Giving away prized possessions
• Becoming more and more isolated
• Talking about death or dying
• Sudden weight loss or weight gain
• Not finding any joy in any activity, even those things the person usually loves

Last week on Depression Talk, we looked at an unknown Canadian man who tried to commit suicide by jumping into Niagra Falls — only he somehow managed to survive. For some unknown reason, my subconscious is fixated on this character. How do I know this? because I keep having nightmares about horses commiting suicide by drowning. It’s normal for me to have nightmares about suffering animals, but not about drowning animals. These nightmares started after March 12, when the world became aware of the Niagra sucide jumper survivor.

Why Horses?

I love all animals and a lot of bugs, too so I’m not entirely sure why my subsconcious has equated the suicide jumper with a horse. Perhaps because the stories I grew up with of wild horses refusing to eat or jumping over cliffs or shoving a muzzle into a bucket of water when in captivity. (I think the latter was featured in a cowboy poem called “The Mustang Bay”).

Perhaps my subconscious is using horses to make me pay attention. Either that, or it’s getting lazy and is just merging news stories and images like some sort of demented Photoshop.

That and maybe because I’ve survived several suicide attempts — although I’ve never jumped over any waterfall and I never had any attempt filmed and broadcast on international news.

Why Should I Care

If my subconscious is worried about this jumper, I wonder why it’s picked this fella. I hear about people dying all of the time and I’m like, “That’s terrible. Pass the popcorn.” Perhaps I’m getting soft in my old age. I’m starting to care about strangers again.

An unknown Canadian man estimated to be in his 30’s survived the 180 foot plunge over the Canadian side of Niagra Falls. He jumped about two in the afternoon with a heck of a lotta witnesses about, who were able to phone for help.

But the man didn’t want help. When he bobbed to the surface, he swam about 300 yards in the surface. Although he tried to loose his life in the jump, all he lost were his clothes. He avoided and fought all rescue attempts and was only rescued when he finally passed out in the water. Even then, a local helicopter operator had to hoover over the water and use the force of the whirling blades to push the struggling man to shore. He was rushed to hopsital to be treated for hypothermia and a head injury.

He jumped on 11 March and in that time I’ve been hoping to find some details on this guy. I have not found much of anything except for this NY Daily News post. Niagra Falls officials plan on not charging the man with anything, unlike the last guy to try to kill himself jumping over the falls and lived.

I guess he was not a happy bunny when he woke up. He’s probably furious that he was rescued. There’s nothing like recovering from a botched suicide attempt to watch what’s left of your pride and self-esteem fly out the window. Dude, I know what you’re going through (although I never went over Niagra.)

But, dude, your fortune is now made. Just get one of Octomom’s publicists to sell your story to the highest bidder and you’ll be set for life. (God — you’re not the father, are you?) But dude — it does get better from here. Trust me on this.

Last time on DepressionTalk, we looked at treament resistant depression. That was so you’d get tha background information on this latest study on treatment resistant depression in teens which came out on the online version of The American Journal of Psychiatry, AJP In Advance. It’s got the toe-tapping title of “Predictors of Spontaneous and Systematically Assessed Suicidal Adverse Events in the Treatment of SSRI-Resistant Depression in Adolescents (TORDIA) Study”

The point of the study was to try and discover why some teens with treatment resistant depression are more likely to attempt suicide than others. The top predictors are (drumroll, please):

• Family problems
• Drug or alcohol abuse
• Previous suicidal attempts or threats of an attempt

(Cymbol crash). Not really that earth shattering, are they? The more the dperessive’s life sucks, the more they will think about leaving that life.

Study Specs

Alright, I’m back from banging my head against the desk to tell you how these brainiacs came up with the findings. They looked at 334 adolescents who did not respond to at least three medications. 48 of them thought about or attempted to kill themselves during the study. The average time from dropping the last ineffective medication to thinking about leaving it all behind was three weeks.

Any Practical Advice?

The study strongly suggests that in treating depressed teens likely to commit suicide, “family conflict” and “emotion regulation” methods be used. I think that means talk therapy or another form of therapy where you have to go to someone’s office. It also says that unless a kid can stop self-medicating with drugs and/or alcohol, expect more suicide attempts.

Sometimes, these studies make me scratch my head. We know that high cholesterol can kill you, whether you have depression or not. Now, new research published in the Journal of Psychiatric Reasearchhas come out stating that in men diagnosed with drepression, low cholesterol can kill you, too.

According to this, the way the combination of low cholesterol and depression kills men is by making them commit suicide or taking a drug overdose or engaging in more risky behaviors that may lead to a premature death.

Damned if you pig out and damned if you don’t, huh?

What Is Low Cholesterol?

The article defined low cholesterol in men as “165 milligrams of cholesterol per deciliter or less”. The normal number is 200 milligrams of cholesterol per decileter.

When it comes to cholesterol, there is such a thing as getting the level too low. Low cholesterol is thought to perhaps play a role in making a person more predisposed to cancer. In pregnant women, it can lead to misscarriage or low birth weight.

For most people in North America or the UK, the dangers of getting low cholesterol are a moot point because of the high calorie, high-cholesterol diet. Because of the high price of food, people are choosing to get fatty calorie-laden food to help them get through the day. But, somehow, some folks still have low cholesterol.

Study Specs

The article was researched and written by the Geisinger Health System in Danville, PA. It looked at about 4500 veterans from Vietnam and followed up on what happened to them since 1985, with 2000 as a cut off date to begin coallating data. Veterans with both depression and low cholesterol were found to be seven times more likely to die a premature death than other veterans.

Of course, being a veteran may have had something to do with the high suicide rate, too, but for some reason, that point was glossed over.

Depressives tend to have a preoccupation with death, so you may as well read about it so much that you’re sick of the whole topic. Also, the more you know about death, funeral arrangements and how hospitals handle death, the less fearful it is. Death is the Big Unknown, but it’s a heck of a lot scarier for the living left behind who have to deal with the dead.

Fearing What You Don’t Know

One way to come to terms with death — whether from a prolonged illness or a sudden death like sucide — is to read Living with Death and Dying by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who was the world’s leading thanatologist (doctor who studies death). If that names sounds familiar, that’s because you’ve probably heard of the Kubler-Ross model of the stages of grief. She’s the one who figured it out. Actually, there’s an umlaut over the “u” in her name, but I can’t figure out how to get umlauts to work on WordPress. Sorry.

The Book Itself

Although Kubler-Ross gets the author’s credits, there are actually two other people who contribute chapters to the book. One is on how art therapy can help those about to die come to terms with their situations. Another is a testimony of a mother of a girl who died of lukemia, but then that section gets bogged down in transcripts of tape-recorded conversations with therpaists. (Why is every “um” recorded?)

This is a book where you can skim some passages, because there are so many little stories and bits of advice that it can be hard to pay attention to all of it at one time. So, you can go back when you need to.

This book is also good to help you communicate with your doctor or attending nurses about all the dicey issues surrounding death.

The main flaw is that there is far too much God in it, but that may a comfort to some people.

There are many things I think about while lying awake at night listening to the dog snore and the wind rattle the house. This is one of them.

Layers of the Onion

When I was homeless in England, suicides in the homeless community were a common event. Usually, the preferred method of suicide was drug overdose, but there were also an alcoholic who went swimming in January and a woman who walked out directly in front of a bus. I tried a couple of times while I was in England but botched the attempts.

Perhaps because I was American or sober or for whatever reason, I became the confessor for many of the homeless in the Bath-Glastonbury area. In order to survive in that life, you have to act tough and cocky and say things like, “There are a lot of advantages to being homeless.”

But, under one or two layers, there’s a lot of suffering, confusion and fear. Although they were all highly individual characters, there was always one thing in common — they weren’t wanted as kids. No matter is they were given up for adoption, or were an accidental pregnancy or were told they were wanted and then neglected and abused, they were not wanted as kids or as adults.

And usually would come the same statements. “I wish I had never been born. Why didn’t my folks get an abortion when they had the chance? It sure would’ve saved everyone a lot of bother.”

Never Born

Nature has ways of balancing out overpopulation or threats of overpopulation. Perhaps depression is one of them, which develops when a child is born who wasn’t wanted. They then wind up having a miserable life and keep trying to off themselves until they eventually succeed.

Except for those who manage to cope with their depression through empathy with others. Perhaps then they manage to teach others how to cope and that helps non-depressed folks better adapt to post-traumatic stress disorder or being abused and then the species becomes stronger — and learns birth control.

Anyway, I still wonder why I survived being homeless and many others didn’t.

Depression is a deadly disease. Most people with depression will act suicidal at one time or another — although not to the extreme that this poor sod does. He probably thought that killing himself was his only alternative. One thing that depression and the down phase of bipolar disorder does is that it severely narrows your decision-making process so that you can’t see any of the choices around you. And if you are affected by other symptoms of depression like sleep deprivation, chronic aches and pains and all-encompassing fatigue, then your thinking processes are even more narrowed.

Depression is like putting horse blinkers on so that you can only see one direction and not everything else around you.

Many depressives make wrong life choices in diet, exercise, sleep and chemicals that don’t kill you as quickly as a plunge ten feet from the edge of Niagra Falls. They wind up killing themselves in a far slower fashion than this fellow did.

I did do some Internet research tryng to discover who this fellow was, if he left a note behind or if his body was ever found, but I haven’t been able to find anything. Niagra Falls is so powerful that a body can never be found, such as with the case of a stunt gone wrong when, in June 5, 1990 a man named Jesse Sharp paddled over the edge in a kayak. His kayak was found, but he wasn’t. It’s thought he wasn’t trying to commit suicide, because he had dinner reservations for later that night.

In other words, if you feel depressed, get help. And don’t go to Niagra Falls.

A study done by the University of Bath (I used to live in Bath! Huzzah, Bath, but I wish this was for a different reason!) reveals what we probably already knew — men who had been sexually abused as boys were ten times more likely to commit suicide than men who hadn’t been sexually abused as boys, even if they were clincially diagnosed with depression. The study was done not in Bath, not in the UK, but in Australia, where men are not expected to talk about very deep things like childhood traumas. The study is published in The British Journal of Social Work.

What About Women?

The study focused on men, doing one-on-one interviews with them and did not interview women who had been molested as girls. Authors Dr. Patrick O’Leary and Professor Nick Gould explained that men were more likely to act on a suicidal impulse (and succeed) than women. They estimate that for every “successful” suicide done by a man, there are 25 men who try to commit suicide and yet manage to live. In the UK, about 2,000 men commit suicide each year.

So, does that mean that women are more resilliant to trauma? Well, the study doesn’t go that far, but it does suggest that being able to to share a burden can sure ease the load on a depressed victim of childhood sexual abuse. Women are expected and encouraged to be emotional and share their true feelings than men are, especially in the “stiff-upper-and-lower-lip” cultures such as the UK, parts of America and Australia.

Men are supposed to have it all together in these cultures, so to cope with depression and post traumatic stress disorder, they turn to self-medication through alcohol, addictions to legal or illegal drugs, criminal behavior and obsessive behaviors. These are the patterns learned, but they are not very helpful in preventing not only a crap life, but an eventual suicide attempt.

Suggestions

So, what is the practical upshot of all of this? The study suggests “Greater awareness in the healthcare and criminal justice systems will help identify those who are at risk and give them treatment before it is too late.”

But it is up to a man who has been abused to seek help.

Yes, it seems to be suicide week here on Depression Talk but if you’ve skipped over the other posts about suicide thinking that they’d be too depressing, please try not to skip this. It’s a little public service announcement video put together by Denver Film and Digital. It shows people from NFL stars to high school students get suicidal thoughts.

Hey — I have yet to meet one person who honestly never had a suicidal thought (not even for one second). We all have these thoughts. When you have any type of depression or chronic illness like migraines, you tend to dwell on these thoughts rather than try to get any help with either your mental, emotional or physical pain.

Warning: Snark Ahead

If it’s a little too touchy-feely for you, then just take a gander at the really sensitive and encouraging comments just below the video at YouTube itself. Wow. My favorite is from “herorev” who wrote:

“It doesn’t take courage to recklessly go along with the crowd and denounce suicide.”

I guess we know who’s going to be up for a Nobel Prize in Medicine next year, don’t we? I’m hoping that insightful comment on the human psyche was meant to be sarcastic. I’m as big a fan of sacrasm as you’ll ever find, but I tend to prefer an audience who isn’t going to die on me anytime soon, because I still need them to dig my sarcasm. Dude, dudette or whatever you are, “herorev” — first rule of brainwashing — don’t immediately get your followers to drink the Kool Aid during the first revival meeting.

I’ve screwed up more suicide attempts than I care to admit, so I’m sadly more than qualified to write this article. If you’re reading this, chances are you have also gone through a failed suicide attempt or know a loved one who has just gone through a failed suicide attempt. Any communication — whether at home, hospital or on the phone, is going to be awkward for both sides. There really isn’t any right way of talking to someone after a failed suicide attempt, but I can give you some hints that helped me in my past misadventures.

Don’t Bring Up the “S” Word Unless The Patient Does

The person who has attempted to commit suicide and is still alive will feel like a failure. They will be overly self-conscious, embarassed, freaked out and worried. Automatically blurting out, “How could you have tried to do such a thing?!?” will not make the situation any better. Trust me.

Let the patient talk in his or her own time. If they want to talk about it — fine. If not — that’s fine, too.

Talk Like You Normally Would

One of the reasons some people commit suicide is because they feel as if they are a burden on thier friends and family. They believe the world will be better off without them. When the suicide attempt goes awry and they realize they have to face their loved ones, they worry if they’ve forever lost the friendship or good relationship they may have had with them.

Let them subliminally know that your feelings for them still hasn’t changed. Talk to them about things you normally talk about. Although I was resentful at first when this happened after one of my failed sucide attempts, later on I really came to appreciate it.

Ask If You Need To Bring Them Anything

Whether they are in the hospital or at home, it’s alwqays good to ask if you can bring anything to the person recovering from a failed sucide attempt. They will most likely be in shock, which can lead to sudden weakness or incoordination. Just taking the trash out for them or bringing them a cup of tea not only gives you something to talk about, but shows that life goes on.

Hope this helps.

Mom got a frantic phone call this afternoon. Her friend of about twenty years was calling from the hospital, after a failed suicide attempt. Her friend had been increasingly isolating herself from others — even buying a house far away from everyone she knew — and Mom did tell her that she was concerned for her well being. Her friend has severe depression.

Mom’s friend asked my Mom to contact her relatives in Ohio to come visit her while she was in the hopsital. Mom did so, telling complete strangers that their family member near Philadelphia had once again tried to commit suicide by trying to jump off a house roof and had to be taken to the hospital in handcuffs.

(No, I don’t quite understand that, either, but I’m not sure I really want to know.)

Not Your Fault

Mom says she feels as if she should be doing more to help her friend in the hopsital, but really, there just isn’t anything she can do. When someone you cares for tries to commit suicide, you naturally feel some degree of guilt. Party of it is survivor’s guilt and part of it is just the confusion and upheaval that such news of a failed sucide attempt brings.

Also, you feel bad because the situation is totally out of your control. When someone you care for tries to commit suicide, it’s not your fault. It is your fault if you completely ignore them when they ask you for help during their recovery.

Signs of Suicide

Although Mom did talk to her friend about her isolation, the suicide attempt still seemed like a bolt from the blue. Mom’s friend did not act in a way that let her feelings of suicide show — except for choosing more and more to stay by herself, surrounded by people who didn’t know her at all.

What could Mom do — force her friend to get help when her friend didn’t want it, just because she moved far away and stayed home every night instead of going to the movies? So, if you think you should have done more to help your loved one who tries to commit suicide, take a deep breath.

You did all you could.

I’ve tried to commit suicide more times then I can remember. My last attempt was in April, 2003. It’s been over five years without the urge to die. That’s the longest gap I’ve had since childhood. I’ve tried to kill myself in different ways but all of them wound up the same — me on my hands and knees, throwing up.

So, if you are contemplating killing yourself ask yourself — how much do you like throwing up? There’s also that whole death thing, too, but let’s just stick with tangible elements here. If you’re going to try and commit suicide, especailly if you are a woman, chances are all you will do is wind up throwing up for hours on end.

Overdose Attempt

Sometime in 2001 (I can’t remember what month), I found four boxes of painkiller in the trash. They were massive. They looked like horse pills — combinations of opiods and paracetamol (acetominophen in the US). Now, I can’t even read the word “paracetamol” without my stomach rolling over. I naively assumed that by taking as many as I could, I’d fall asleep and die. It all made sense at the time, trust me.

No such luck. I wound up puking for 36 hours straight. And the guy who’s trash I’d gone through had found out and was really angry with me and threatened to call the police. Not that I cared at that point. I remember the only thing that distracted me from the pain was watching Air Force One with Harrison Ford, which for some reason was on TV. I know that movie gets panned (”Get off my plane!”), but I’m forever grateful that it was made.

The Lesson Here

When you are deeply depressed and life seems that it can’t get any worse, well, you’re wrong. Life certainly can get worse. You could spend 36 hours throwing up and thinking about how you are so stupid that you can’t even kill yourself.

And then, somehow, you will laugh. Take that laughter and hang on to it and then go get help. Things do get better. They don’t get better right away, but eventually they do.

Everyone has voices in their head from time to time.  Even our own thoughts often has a voice that differs from our speaking voice.  (”No, Rena — that’s just you.”) Many of the times, the thoughts in our heads don’t surprise us, but sometimes they do. You often can hear these voices from seemingly nowhere when you have any type of depression, whether it’s post partum depression or bipolar disprder.

Imaginary Friends

Voices in your head can turn into imaginary friends, as long as what they’re saying to you is helpful. When you have a depressive illness, it’s hard to see your own self-worth. You are postitive that you are the worst person who has ever been born. We run ourselves down with thoughts and bizzarre conclusions, like, “I can’t work on my blog every day. That must be because I’m so stupid.”

I picked that one off of the top of my head because it’s Friday and this is the first Depression Talk post of the week that I’ve been able to do. (Whoops). What can I say? I’ve been sick, my Mom’s been sick — all average stuff that happens to bloogers. But when you have depression, you never quite see yourself in an average light. You are either the best person in the world or the worst.

During those times, if you listen closely enough, there is a little alien voice that says, “You’re just having a bad day. It’s no big deal. You’ve gotten through bad patches before and that proves you are going to do it again.”

That’s a friend. Cherish this friend.

The Enemies

Then, there are those voices that tell you that the world would be a lot better off without you in it to mess everything up for everybody else. Or, perhaps you hear a voice telling you that you are invincible and can fly, so jump of the bridge and get those arms flapping.

Any voice that tells you to harm yourself, harm others (especailly animals and other innocents) or tries to convince you that you are the Devil is a voice you need to immediately call someone about. This is your illness talking — not you, not God and not anyone else. You need to talk to someone in order to get this voice to shut up.

Hope this helps.

Do we need any more proof that we are in a recession?  After 15 years, the teen sucide rate has risen in America instead of dropped, according to a new study published in the September 3 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.  It took a while to crunch the numbers, so the study cuts off in 2005, meaning that the teen suicide rate rose during 2004 and 2005. It is still unknown how high the rate is for 2006 and 2007.

Study Specifics

The study was performed by Jeff Bridge of the Nationwide Children’s Hospital of Columbus, Ohio. He looked at teen suicide rates from 1996 - 2003, which were steradily dropping. He found a sudden 18% increase for 2004 - 5. Bridge has a more liberal definition of “teen”, meaning kids from the ages of 10 - 19.

Why the Increase?

In October of 2003, there was alot of quibbling in Congress over black box warning labels to be put on antidepressants. This happened as a result of many teens with clinical depression being put on Paxil and then, instead of getting better, they offed themselves. Please note that any antidepressant can make you feel suddenly suicidal, no matter what your age. If you are taking a new antidepressant and feel worse than ever before, please call your doctor or therapist.

There is a theory that pressure on doctors as a result of Paxil suicides are making doctors too leery about perscribing them to teenagers. Should all of the warnings be taken off antidepressants?

No

The president of the National Research Center for Women & Families, Diana Zuckerman, claims that there are many reasons why teens commit suicide. I think we all can see that the economy sucks. There’s injustice everywhere, catastrophic climate change and many news sources saying that the next generation will be worse off than previous American generations. Add to that the hormonal tidal wave teens go through, schools, peer pressure and no wonder they think of committing suicide.

Teens are more likely to think of suicide because they haven’t learned the coping skills that adults have, even adults with clinical depression. There usually isn’t just one cause that sets a teen planning to commit suicide — it’s usually a cyclone of factors.