The First Fortnight Festival happens between January 4th-18th, featuring various events that challenge mental health prejudice through arts and cultural action. They say that January can be a month of melancholy and depression after the compulsive jollity of the Christmas season, so it’s a good time to focus on the subject.
Fifteen years ago, my own mental health went into a wobble. I ended up in the bedroom with the curtains closed. I was unable to venture to the kitchen without feeling overpowered by anxiety and inexplicable waves of depression.
I wrote about it at the time. But maybe it’s more important to say that I am still here and have recovered a sense of joy again, just being alive. And I wouldn’t have got through that terrible time were it not for my family and their love and encouragement. But despite even family support in those dark days, I often feared I would never recover. Depression had come down on me like a terrible cloud and I was convinced it would never again dissipate.
But it did. And now I am compelled to let people know. Because it is the fear that there might be no cure that drives some people into a darker and deeper zone of despair.
Depression came down on me like a terrible cloud. I thought it would never lift, but it did
An old friend asked if I was ‘still at the writing’. ‘When I can get the ink,’ I said
‘One Christmas Day my brother set me on fire’: seven writers spill their most bizarre Yuletide yarns
A poet, a singer and an infant called at my door on election day and ended up staying
Self-annihilation is seen as the zero moment that may bring them peace. Suicide is a fatal solution for something that might only have been a temporary problem. The idea that there is no way out of depression may be a factor in why so many people come to the conclusion that the only remedy is an act of destructive violence against their own bodies.
Sometimes I want to shout from the rooftops that this is not so. Mental health issues are not permanent. There are ways to escape the cloud by reaching out and sharing your troubles with those who love you.
Grief is always harsh and cruel for people left behind after a death. But there is nothing more terrible than losing a child or partner to suicide. The cries of agony that rise from those who are left behind, from the front pew in every church or at the graveside, would turn any heart to stone.
And everyone asks the same questions. Why did we not notice? Why did we not realise the extent of their mental anguish?
Every so often I find myself waiting outside some church in the rain for another hearse to arrive
Even when everyone in the family knows the problem, and Pieta and other agencies have done their best, a person will still sometimes persist in secret to achieve their goal.
“Why did they not realise how much we loved them,” the mourners wonder. “We would have done anything to help them if we could. We would have held them through the darkest night.”
Those are the questions that people are left with. And nobody ever gets an answer because suicide is so final. Which again is the thing the victim never notices; that their mental anguish might not have been permanent. But death is.
And no matter how intense any person’s anxiety, no matter how intense their depression or self-loathing, nobody lives in isolation. Suicide wounds everybody. The family left behind bears testimony to that fact.
Death by suicide in Ireland is a kind of soft war. In 2021 there were about 500 casualties, most of them men. And many of those hardly more than children. Every so often I find myself waiting outside some church in the rain for another hearse to arrive. Then I join the line of people who queue along the aisle and shake the mourning hands, the widow or mother, the wife or husband. Everyone numbed by the coffin beside them. The heartbroken families sit in ill-fitting black coats that they borrowed or suits that they purchased for the day to honour their loved one.
And all they can do is wail with pain and rage, thinking of their lovely child or beloved partner who lies silent beside them.
All the lovely children who were once so completely loved and cherished by their families — gone forever. Such a dark day could never have been imagined by their mothers when they were born. And yet they slip away into the dark, alone and in pain.
All of them were loved. All of them are missed, and all of them leave a terrible silence in their wake.
- The Samaritans can be contacted on freephone: 116 123 or email: jo@samaritans.ie
- Pieta’s freephone crisis helpline is 1800 247247 or text HELP to 51444