It is a common cry these days, something I see regularly on Facebook, ‘It’s all hopeless’, but what does that mean?
I had my day nearly 30 years ago, the day I decided to die. I had thought to write about it in some detail but even now that is impossible. There is no way to describe the pain it caused, nor waking up and having to face it and live with it. I am sure there were other options that might have been available, but I lacked the ability to see them. Losing hope is a truncated place in which reason and sense become warped and completely inaccessible other than within the confines of despair. Looking back, it is fruitless to say, what if? Even hindsight does not present any answers when the moment came in which the desire to abandon my life took over.
I have no sense of the amount of time I spent in hospital, time was one of the last things that came back to me. I do remember being asked by a psychiatrist, if I was released, would I do it again and my immediate response of, ‘Yes’. He was absolutely right to commit me to a psychiatric hospital, the three months I spent there were the safest I have ever felt in my life, once I got over the loss of my liberty.
I don’t think there is any way to rationalise or resolve the pain that my family went through, their grief could not have been worse had I succeeded in killing myself. It was raw, naked and brutal, exceeding all their mental and physical reserves, and it was horrifying. Whatever else happened, I knew I would never, under any circumstances, do that again. Should I face that level of personal distress and torment again, there is one thing I know and would know in the midst of the worst, I would ask for help, even if that meant just getting to my GP surgery and saying the words, ‘I need help right now’.
The act of asking for help is loaded, it means having reached a point beyond my physical and mental resources. It is a blind leap into the unknown, not least in not knowing if I would even be heard. It is thus taking a huge risk, the last ditch place, but at least taken before abandoning life altogether.
There are bogies attached to asking for help, the fear of loss of dignity and self respect, and yet to ask for help is to accord myself dignity and respect and that there might be some way unknown to me that will restore my ability to manage my own life once again.
Having been through the experience of risking the loss of everything, life itself, the extremity of the pain and grief and profound sorrow, it is easy to see the abomination that the DWP have unleashed. It is easy to see that they are procuring hopelessness and despair and the many deaths that they are responsible for through policies of punitive and malicious cruelty. Were I ever driven again to such an extreme of despair, the very last place I would ever consider going to ask for help is the DWP.
Whatever the loss of rhyme and reason in such a place, enough remains that I would not go out looking for a mad dog to attack me. That is how I measure the government and the DWP, not only are they found wanting, their policies are knowingly and deliberately predicated and formulated on wilful punishment and cruelty. They have chosen, by many degrees of separation, to abandon social care, to dismantle our welfare state and the healthcare system we have willingly paid for and used with gratitude for the dedication and care we have, in the vast majority of cases, received. The small percentage of cases in which our NHS has failed does not justify dismantling it, privatising it and literally stealing it from us.
When disaster strikes and we go beyond our own ability to maintain our own health, we dial 999 and we ask for help, or manage to get ourselves to A&E, and we place our lives in the hands of our peers, albeit a highly trained and specialised team of our peers who extend themselves on our behalf. An A&E department is a place of hope. That is how it works, or at least it did before the Tories got their hands on it.
In other areas of our lives, help is not so readily seen or easily available. Reaching a place of mental collapse and despair is no less serious than any physical condition. Might I go so far as to suggest that in a civilised nation we might offer readily available help for both physical and mental suffering in which shame has no place? Certainly, when I had an emergency operation in 2015, which saved my life, I never, even for a moment, felt any shame for my helplessness. The thought never occurred to me and the level of care was incredible, for which I am eternally grateful.
At the time of my suicide attempt I had no idea where to go or what to do other than exactly what I did. Not enough has changed since, the number of suicides is increasing. That is not down to personal failure, that is a systemic failure and, specifically, it is a failure of government which, not only refuses to acknowledge any failing but drives despair and suicide, knowingly and with malicious intent. Every life lost is an indictment against them. There is no excuse. This is a government that rewards the banks and corporations and the free markets, by which they mean free from social and political restraints, and abandons care for the people, who pay for those rewards and freedoms.
If there are any circumstances in a civilised world or nation in which that is acceptable, I do not know what they are. As a nation, we are far from civilised yet and, in fact, are going in the opposite direction.
KOG. 08 March 2017
