Potential content warning (CW) - mention of suicide ideation/attempt (no specifics are described.)
Four years ago I came to this meadow to end my life and nearly succeeded. A lot changed that day and the hardest parts were still yet to come. There wasn’t much left to me or my life by the end of 2020, over a year after I’d first tried to seek help.
It’s not that I can stand here today, four years later and offer a nice neat narrative of overcoming a battle - I live with depression that is related to other aspects of my life and experience. Sometimes it’s barely noticeable and other times it’s all-consuming and entirely disabling.
My story is messy and continues to be. I am the unpleasant kind of “crazy” that healthcare despises. My life was saved and I am very privileged in many of the identities I hold, but I still cannot access the kind of supports that I would find helpful in addressing much of what underlies my depression.
Sadly, I’m also not remotely unique in this, have a good sense of navigating the system, and present as high functioning - many others face harder circumstances.
It is a very strange thing to work in an acute hospital setting with complex patients, be respected as a competent and capable healthcare professional, and know that a few floors down I would be treated entirely differently as a patient.
“Manipulative”, “gamy”, “overly intrusive”, “aggressive”, “limited”, “willful” - the list of things I have been described as in my healthcare records goes on. (What they miss is underlying trauma - some of it medical in origin.)
I’m passionate about crisis care reform, suicide prevention, and I also would never voluntarily seek help that could result in involuntary care. I hold fairly anti-psychiatry views and I depend on the support of a psychiatrist I’m very lucky to have. I’m glad for the people I love and who love me, the experiences I’ve had that I might not have, and the beauty of camas growing in the place I aimed to die.
I live with depression - sometimes I still feel profoundly hopeless AND life is beautiful.
-S.
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