“She ODs all the Time and She Lies”

That was one of the Facebook responses to a woman who posted a suicide statement on the Social Networking site.

Simone Back left a message on FB which said; “Took all my pills be dead soon so bye bye every one.”

“She died”, the article said “…and nobody helped.”

What a sticky topic this is turning out to be. The article also said, “One user replied calling her a liar who ‘overdoses all the time’ while another said it was ‘her choice’. Miss Back, 42, is thought to have been dying of an overdose as the messages were posted on Christmas Day.”

I am overcome by so many emotions that I had to actually detach myself long enough to take a good hard look at the situation to see what is really happening.

Where I feel a bit caught is that the health of our friends and fellow citizens is everyone’s responsibility and the notion that a woman who is 42 years old is responsible for her own choices. What I feel is missing in the conversation is the part where we are not dealing with a stable adult. When the one person responded saying, “She ODs all the time and she lies” it might seem reasonably easy to dismiss the last statement Simone made. The problem I have with the response is that she stated something that was brutally obvious and was actually the answer to all of this, not the excuse for no response.

My response is, “She ODs all the time and lies? Ok then, she is sick and needs help!” If someone out there thinks ODing ‘all the time’ is on the same level as stealing cars or sleeping around, they seriously need to take another look at what they are saying. ODing all the time is time for intervention, not dismissal! Lying is another sign of sickness.

Healthy-minded adults absolutely are responsible for making poor choices like in cases where they are selfish, but I still believe every poor choice comes from somewhere no matter who makes it. If we choose to go sleep around on our spouse, we are making a choice based on some mental instability which needs addressing. If we have to lie about something to cover something up, we must be doing something harmful to ourselves. For this reason, I believe EVERYONE needs help and EVERYONE has the potential of being Simone Back.

All that being said, I firmly believe that friends and families can only do what they can do and shouldn’t beat themselves up from guilt. This is when we ‘do what we can do’ not ignore and type cruel, heartless responses. For instance, the Mother heard about it when it was too late and she’s disabled in a wheelchair. She is limited on where she can go and how she can travel, but she could get on the phone. She probably is well aware that her daughter was sick and lied, but she tried anyways…it was just too late. I don’t however agree this is FB’s responsibility although I applaud them for putting some things into play. Everyone’s pages are semi-private communities. The user base is over 600 million people. It’s getting to be like society. It’s like blaming the Government for something that happened in your living room. I would hope everyone could do their part.

Every single one of us has the capability to do what we can, but I also believe knowing when to keep our mouth shut is a skill too. If you jump on a forum and tell others to dismiss a suicide note, you are adding fuel to it. You aren’t helping. Ever remember the saying, ‘If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all?’ That does apply in some cases.

Now, on the flipside; one of the reasons I am such a defender of the English language is because I believe in Word Power. When we learn about conflict resolution, healthy debate and how to communicate well, we have a power to help that can equate to being fully armed.

What if this woman said, ‘Ok guys, we need a new angle with Simone because she has had several attempts before this where she didn’t actually kill herself and she is known to lie. Her life is worthwhile and if anyone can come up with a game plan based on Simone’s complicated personality type, I would love to hear it.”

People in war train all the time to get to know the enemy better before entering the combat zone. Why don’t we arm ourselves with the same weapons in peaceful resolution? If we can start with the facts instead of reacting with our annoyance, we might be able to realize the enemy wasn’t Simone and her ‘lies’, the enemy is the sickness going on in her head. If your friend was being attacked, you would try to get the attacker off of them. If your friend is being attacked by Depression, suicidal tendencies, mental illness or other instabilities, wouldn’t you want to save them from it if you could?

I hate the phrase ‘crying for help’ when used to describe something that Simone was doing. If someone is crying for help and we are in a position to help, we should help. Maybe they need help getting rid of their sickness. Maybe like cancerous cells, it’s taking over their judgment and their lies and manipulations are their body’s last resort. We don’t have to bend to their every whim, but we can recognize they are being taken over. You know how I know Simone was being taken over? …because she is dead today. If death is not enough to tell you the person was fighting illness, I don’t know what could convince you.

If we truly feel like we have done everything we truly can, we should not carry the weight of someone’s illness or suicide. But if we tell others to dismiss their illness, we are probably going to be left with a burden bigger than what we ever asked for. The responder might have been accurate saying she ODs all the time and lies but a person who offers that isn’t trying to help, they are either looking for sympathy from others or have been manipulated and therefore feel warranted in their reaction. It’s simply not a helpful response and could have been worded in such a way to educate others and help Simone get the help she needed.

If you ever wonder how to deal with things like this, the internet has all sorts of ways you can help. You can even ask other friends how to properly respond. If someone tells you dismiss it, ask someone else until you find someone who both respects Word Power and is interested in finding a solution. Again, we are adults! We can’t save everyone, but we can try based on being well-informed and well-equipped.

Much love on ya!
Karen :)

“Your ability to communicate is an important tool in your pursuit of your goals, whether it is with your family, your co-workers or your clients and customers.” ~Les Brown

You Couldn't Tell He was Suicidal

The following Video contains some of the blog below plus my add-ons.

I received an email from one of our friends on here who asked me if I would consider discussing the topic of suicide.

I won’t try and cover topics that I know nothing about from experiencing something personally. I also want to say that the topic of suicide is something that should be dealt with by a professional. If you know someone who has suicidal tendencies, may I highly suggest getting them some proper help? It shouldn’t be taken lightly. I won’t ignore the topic either especially when requested because you never know why you are being asked.

I have been there. My Doctor helped me through it. Your family Doctor has a huge amount of resources at his fingertips and they are more than happy to help.

It’s rather dangerous for me to go into the topic too much because you never know what nerve out there you are hitting. So instead of me trying to come off like some professional, let me talk directly to people who are the family and friends of people dealing with suicidal tendencies. This is not for those who have lost people to suicide. My heart goes out to you!

Some of my friends and family knew…others didn’t. Some took it seriously, some didn’t. I can tell you this much; there is no such thing as too much love. I have heard people say, ‘They gotta toughen up!’ There is no such thing as listening to long. I have heard people say, ‘They just want attention’. In my situation, I didn’t think I was being weak and I didn’t actually want anyone’s attention. My brain wasn’t even going there. I wanted out and I wanted to be left alone. It had absolutely nothing to do with lacking courage. For those who call suicide a cowardly act, may I suggest educating yourself. I personally didn’t feel weak or cowardly, I felt extraordinarily SAD.

A sad person can still get themselves to work every day. A sad person can put on a happy face for the crowds. I thought it was interesting to hear Owen Wilson had an attempt in 2005. If you look at his IMDB profile, his career was going incredibly well. The films he was making at the time were churning out stellar and may I add hysterically funny performances. When I watch those films, I don’t see anything in his performance that would suggest he was not doing well. He looked great, had a good bounce in his step. In fact, there is a scene in Wedding Crashers where Vince Vaughn walks in on him while he is reading a book called, ‘Don’t Jump, Life is Worth Living!’

Suffice to say, we have no clue who is suicidal. Chalking it up to cowardice is lacking education.

I have also heard people say it’s a sin or a crime. Well, a sin is supposed to be something where you do the opposite of what you know is right. I can tell you first hand, I wasn’t even thinking about if it was right or wrong either. As far as making it a crime; are you going to jail someone who has succeeded? Come on! Use your head! Ok, you are going to jail someone who has attempted it and call it a crime? They didn’t know they were doing anything wrong. Putting someone under suicidal watch is one thing, but sins and crimes have definitions that have nothing to do with it. You have to be alert enough to know you are doing something wrong. My brain was so far the other way in its own galaxy.

Unimaginable sadness was my problem, but for many people there are other reasons and that is why I say to visit your family doctor. I was very glad I did because my visits saved me. I didn’t even want to go in. He met me on the street and told me he wanted to see me.

I remember telling him I didn’t want to go on an SSRI. He asked why…I said I didn’t want to be on drugs. He said, ‘They are better than the alternative.’ I took the first dose in his office. He explained serotonin to me and how Depression was like water going down the drain. You see it going, you can stop it for a time and then at the end, it swooshes down very quickly and you can’t catch the end of it. He told me that I was at a point where I was not physically capable of stopping the drain with my hands and he put in the stopper. Then he told me to take a deep breath and said, “Do not think about tomorrow. You get to experience today. Let’s just do right now. We’ll get through this together, you are not alone.”

It was advice that I still implement even though I am not depressed anymore. I had a series of steps and hurdles to get right out of it. I had roots to get to. I like taking life in steps though, not just because it’s overwhelming, but because it’s beautiful.

Many of us feel extreme emotions without being suicidal; it’s the gray area of life. Frustration, anger, sadness, loneliness are prevalent in many people’s homes and lives. I am learning to use these as a vehicle for my art or to help someone.

The fact that there are people out there who are feeling any of these and are good at hiding it leads me to believe we should treat everyone with kindness.

Much love on ya!

Karen :)

“Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” ~Plato

When Devastation Strikes

Devastation is a really hard word that I don’t think should be applied to too many personal things BUT IT IS! If you research the history of the word, it was usually used when talking about weather disasters or in war. Some of the synonyms are destruction, desolation and wreckage.

I have personally used the word when referring to my own break-ups, deaths around me or upheavals in my world. But in hindsight, while I was feeling especially devastated as though an elephant sat directly in the middle of my chest, it was nothing compared to a village being flattened or some of these national disasters we’ve seen.

Preservation is the opposite of devastation although I don’t feel like the word is useful in present day. Of course prevention is better than trying to fix something after the fact, but our reality has become we all have to fix something that is pure devastation in our world now. Prevention was like some fleeting thought passed across a board room table in yesteryears. Please don’t mistake this as me not being a believer in prevention, I am …but the immediate needs of people are to fix things, to correct the devastation and just get to step one of survival.

But try telling any of that to someone who swears they are devastated. See, today I listened to a girl who said she felt so devastated by a break-up that she wanted to take her own life. I wish I could say this was an isolated incident because it would be nice to chalk that up as nonsense, but the reality is that she was sitting in the middle of her wreckage and felt as though she’d been crushed by a fleet of elephants. Ah see, devastation is in fact relative! To tell her that what she was feeling was not devastation would be diminishing her feelings and really not at all helpful, so suffice to say I left my history lesson off the table. :) I do however, hate to hear anyone crippled by their emotion because it soaks up valuable time where they can be out there being creative or building a cool life!

The one common thing that a person who is emotionally devastated will feel which is in alignment with the historical definition of devastation is the sense of loss, the overwhelming lack of direction, the crippling sense of numbness and quite often the talk of taking one’s own life. For these reasons and many others, I find people likening their break-ups to disasters because all the symptoms creep in.

So in all cases of devastation, how does a person even begin to take step number one to come up from the ashes? That is a novel of an answer, in fact it could be a whole library of afterthought along with it. In my own instances, all I could do is something called a reality check.

In every case where I have felt devastated whether real or imagined (very real to me in any case) was to ask myself "what just happened?" Before getting a grip on how to fix it, I sorta had to know what was broken. My mind is the Queen of Imagination. This works well for me sometimes and other times it’s an alternate reality I have made up.

Break-ups have always seemed like the death of me because I always invest more than my heart could take on. So, in the case of break-ups, I had to ask myself if that other person was really MY WHOLE WORLD like the love songs suggest, or if they were perhaps just a person along my path at that time, at that place in my life. Then I could really ask myself, is this devastation or really just a crappy hurdle?

In looking back it was a hurdle, nothing more. At the time, I was crushed.

My reality check when I lost my mother was the worst hurdle in my life because I considered her to be my whole world. But here is where I may come off insensitive but I don’t mean to be. My Mother’s death hurt like nothing I could ever have imagined, but the lesson I learned was that she left a piece of her with me to move on and do things…to involve myself in the bigger picture and seek out my purpose here. I am certainly very sad about it and felt instantly devastated, but I had to zoom out and find my reality check. The reality was I had a FANTASTIC Mom like no other and I was blessed. The reality was that I was going to move on. The reality was this was something I was going to turn into art. My reality check is how I began to heal.

When devastation strikes, we all feel like we cannot go on. But suicide will devastate someone else and the reality of life is none of us are free from feeling devastation and I find great comfort in knowing it’s not just me.

If you feel the need to take your own life over something you have found devastating to you, I encourage you to seek out like-minded people and there are MANY of us who maybe don’t know exactly what you are feeling, but together we are all coming together to find our reality check in it all.

This life can throw many curveballs at us and can suck so badly in so many ways, but I have crawled out of what has felt like devastation and I am finding a beautiful world out there with cool spirits and green fields. It’s not all bad like the news suggests and it’s not as devastating as our love songs try to infer.

It may feel bad right now, but we are given a day at a time with sleep in between. I personally never thought I’d be here to make new friends because I have attempted it. Nobody could convince me at the time that I was going to make it through. But here I am feeling like a kid again. At times, I really can’t believe it!

Much love on you…we’re all in it together…and you are NOT alone!
Karen :)

"All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming." ~Helen Keller