What significance can suicide have?

Due to mental illness and substance abuse, my mother took her own life in 1990 while I was about 11 years old, and I kept her suicide a secret out receiving any mental health help for 15 years.


The medical field has always offered great profession chances and appears to provide not only job security but favorable incomes in many facets of the medical environment. The demand is a constant and unless people quit getting sick, it appears there wont be any troubles in the future finding a need for the medical professional.


At about this time last festival, I clicked "Publish" and put out into the world an incredibly individual piece of writing. I struggled for months to make a decision whether or not I should publicly claim an identity as someone bereaved by suicide. I determined that taking the danger was better than sitting with what had become a kind of secret.


What happened was remarkably different. I was immediately supported by partners and friends both virtually through comments and in person. I came to appreciate, by hearing this feedback from others, that I'm someone who can hold in balance a personal and emotional connection to the issue that I've made my occupation. Most importantly in my mind, I confronted the disgrace that I'd held on to for over about 19 years.


I'd underestimated everyone's ability to hold about three seemingly contradictory things that I had trouble holding that someone can be a person and a statistic. It meant something for me to identify as a survivor, because it made my mother's death count in a new way. It made me count among the hundreds of thousands of people bereaved by suicide. It allowed my mother's death to be counted as what it was - the end to years of unbearable emotional pain and a courageous struggle with a mental illness, bipolar disorder.


I'd also failed to imagine how greatly I might honor my father by writing about her death. Now, I get to talk about him more than I did before, because people ask and want to know. I've been asked so many good questions about her that gave me the chance to remember him, but also to extend her memory to others.

Through answering some of these questions, I was given the opportunity to realize, and articulate, that my father worked very hard to live. She fell in love, married, and had three children. He had lifelong friends and made a valuable contribution to the world through her career. He lived with mental illness in a way that I think many people, including myself, often do not picture.


Critical to his story, though, is that she died because of her illness. I think some people believe that people who die by suicide are weak, failures at life. Suicide deaths are so often seen as selfish, and because the act of suicide is self-inflicted, the person who dies is blamed for her death. Thinking that way leaves out that mental illness is influenced by multiple factors, biological and environmental, just like physical illness. I wouldn't blame someone who died after years of having cancer, especially if they were able to get treatment and the treatment couldn't fight the disease.


Someone asked me last year if there was anything we in the suicide prevention field could have done differently to prevent my father's death. As public health professionals, we don't take a lot of time thinking about how to prevent individual deaths, so it meant a lot to me to be asked that question.


Throughout my mother's adult life, when he was struggling with and being treated for bipolar disorder, the treatments available were also extremely limited. My mother engaged with treatment the best she could, but I know that he also didn't always take medications she was prescribed, and it's pretty clear to me now that he was released from hospitalizations without adequate safety plans.


I'm proud that I'm able to be a part of the field at this time, that I can honor my mother's memory through my job, and that I've integrated this missing into the way I think about my life, and I'm thankful to the society for providing support and inspiration.


I wish it can encourage openness about difficult life experiences, and helps people know they're not alone. At the same time, I am always sad to hear about others who've lost loved ones to suicide.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with air jordan vi on sale.