“Suicidal ideation.” I think I heard that phrase first from doctors at the Community Hospital in Santa Rosa. I think about suicide. That’s what you’re doing when you ideate — you’re thinking. As one who can be mesmerized by a word I find myself toying with “ideate.” It’s such an unnecessary word, right? Who decided they needed it? The phrase, “suicidal ideation,” becomes detached from its meaning, and I laugh about ideating. Ideate about breakfast, ideate about the weather. I am ideating about thinking.
My thoughts can get intense. Surprise. Suicidal thoughts among them. Telling people that makes them worry about you. Naturally. You don’t want to make people feel bad. You don’t want them to panic and call in the authorities. So you don’t say anything about it. It’s kind of embarrassing, isn't it? Suicide brings up strong emotions — many people become enraged at suicides, contemptuous even. You wouldn’t want to tell a person like that that you’ve been having suicidal thoughts. They’d get mad at you, sneer at you.
I was intrigued by Clancy Martin’s memoir/self-help book How Not to Kill Yourself when I flipped it open and found Martin talking frankly about suicidal ideation and how it seems an unbanishable presence, whether he’s depressed or no. I haven’t come across that before. People thinking about suicide — they only do it in extremis. When they’re fucked up in the head. They don’t idly think about suicide while throwing a frisbee for the dog. Do they?
Although Martin suffers from chronic depression, he says suicidal ideation pops up on good days, too. Most of How Not to Kill Yourself is about that crisis point where thoughts shift to action. That makes sense. It’s where intervention is necessary, where the conflicted self needs to do something — hopefully to hold off death rather than jump into its arms. But I’d be curious to read accounts from people who experience suicidal ideation like a hangnail — an affliction that’s seemingly minor, in that a suicide attempt has not resulted, but where such thoughts niggle, tease, madden.
In this passage Clancy Martin talks about the ambiguities of suicidal urges:
Is it possible I don’t really want to die? Of course. You can want both things. On many days I did want both things: to die, so I didn’t have to live this life anymore, so that I could stop struggling, stop suffering, stop failing, stop disappointing — in an instant, all my problems, gone; and to live, because to die meant — who knew what it meant?
To die means the cessation of all pleasures as well as all pain. When the pain is overwhelming, joy ideation seems ridiculous, trivial. Joy? Fun? That’s nothing that will ever happen again. Besides, it’s so fleeting. It doesn’t have the grip that pain does. Does it? For someone?
A friend recently said, “I think we are both mildly depressed.” I wanted to object, but why? Because it’s embarrassing? Because that suggests we need to be fixed? Lifted out of depression, made happy? Am I okay? I don’t know. I am maintaining — feeding myself, doing the dishes and laundry, scheduling get-togethers with friends. I am getting things done — tried on a drawerful of Kent’s tshirts, took a bag of clothes to the homeless shelter. There are a lot of things to do. I can panic over things undone. Not that panic helps anything. I remind myself. I relearn lessons, I pull out consciously composed scripts that have been helpful in the past. One-day-at-a-time atomizes to one-task-at-a-time, one-thing-at-a-time. The dishes, a bill, writing a list, asking myself what right now I could do that would bring pleasure.
source:
How Not to Kill Yourself: a portrait of the suicidal mind
by Clancy Martin
2023. Pantheon Books, New York
