“Supporting the Whole Student” Workshop, October 2018

I was invited by the Samuel Center for Social Connectedness to speak at a workshop called “Supporting the Whole Student” in Montreal that focused on how to handle the issue of mental health at post-secondary institutions. I spoke about my own experiences with depression that I struggled with while attending McGill University, but also about my current work as a suicide prevention advocate. You can read a transcript of the speech I gave below. cw: suicidality, self harm

“Going into university, I already knew that I suffered from depression.  It was something that I had struggled with for years at that point as an overwhelming and unrelenting sense of despair and a self-hatred that made it nearly impossible to exist. But I thought I was managing it. I was on medication, and I saw a therapist regularly enough. I had even experimented with discussing it openly with people at my high school. I knew some people didn’t get it, and judged me for it. They usually weren’t my friends anyway. But I always thought it was worth it because I would go home after school and someone who had overheard my conversation about depression that day had messaged me online, sharing their own pain, asking for advice, or just wanting to talk to someone who got it. People I didn’t necessarily know all that well, or that I hadn’t even been aware that they had heard my conversation, were reaching out to me through a medium that makes it easier to hide our shame.

When I got to McGill, things were fine for a while, but pretty soon I fell back into that all-too-familiar place. I was sleeping for most of the day, only getting up when I was too hungry to keep sleeping. I lost over 10 pounds because I spent so many weeks eating just one meal a day. I vividly remember a time when I had left a box of pop-tarts on my bedside table, just within reach. I didn’t get out of bed that day, or the next, because that box allowed me to suppress the hunger long enough to go back to sleep. I was sleeping in strawberry frosted crumbs, but I barely even noticed. I’d rather sleep than go on living. I reached a point when I knew I needed help, when I became aware I was in the midst of a tailspin. I contacted McGill mental health and they put me on a three-week-long waitlist to see somebody. Fortunately, I had a few friends that I had explained depression to who got it. There were many that didn’t, in fact one friend asked if I had ever just tried being happy. But the ones who were willing to learn and to help when and if they could are the reason I am still here today. My best friend today is among that group. She was willing to do what I asked her even if she didn’t quite understand at the time. She took all my sharp objects, she knocked on my door to get me out of bed, and she went with me to the gym for some stress release that didn’t involve self harm. I love her for that. Although, the fact that I had to teach people what depression was in order to get help amplified my feelings of isolation. I remember when she went with me to an outside clinic to bullshit a doctor’s note in order to avoid failing a class due to absences, and I went to the bathroom to put some disinfectant on my recently cut up legs. She was looking at the cuts with an expression of genuine curiosity. She noticed that I had seen her and quickly looked back down at her phone and apologized. She told me she was just curious because it was something that she had never encountered before. It was an almost unbelievable idea to me that someone could have never had a self-destructive thought or a desire to harm themselves, things that were so natural for me. It was like the moment when someone in their fifties told me that they had never had a suicidal thought in their life. To me, this was just as unfathomable as my desire to end my life was to them.

After being in the danger zone of suicidal ideation a few times and having had a more serious attempt, I ultimately had to seek help outside of McGill back home. I made the decision to take a semester off in early August of 2014 after my first year when I lost control and relapsed with the self harm. It was a moment where I felt like I was in freefall and I knew I couldn’t safely go back to Montreal.

After I completed a twelve week intensive outpatient program, I began my recovery. I returned to Montreal in January, feeling very disconnected from the life I had left behind the previous year. My best friend took me with her to parties so I could meet people and have a social life. Whenever it came up that I had just taken a semester off from school, the person I was talking to would excitedly ask me what internship I had done or where I had traveled to. I would hesitate for a second as I debated whether or not to tell the truth. As I forced myself to say “I was back home in a treatment program for severe depression,” I would feel a wave of shame wash over me. The kind that you feel as warmth in your cheeks and your chest at first that somehow spreads to your fingertips and to your toes.

It took three years for me to speak about that time in my life and not feel that shame. Over the course of those years, I experimented with different anti-depressants and different approaches to treatment. I joined a student support group at McGill that was recommended to me by a psychiatrist I saw at McGill Mental Health. I liked it because it reminded me of the group therapy I did back in Chicago. I was able to talk about my pain in a room of people who understood.

More importantly, I was working towards finding myself again after being lost for so many years. In my last semester at McGill, I reached a point where I realized that I was no longer ashamed that I had tried to kill myself. I am proud that I survived and I am damn proud of all the hard work I did to get to where I am today. So I got a tattoo of a symbol from the day of the attempt, almost exactly a year ago, to mark the moment that I stopped feeling ashamed because it was a turning point. At this time I was getting involved with a student led group called “Stronger than Stigma” who’s goal is to tear down stigma related to mental illness on campus and in the greater Montreal community. They encouraged me to use my voice to reach others, and showed me the power of sharing my story.

 I wrote a blog post about my suicide attempt, and I was so worried about sharing something that was so painful and that society tells us to never speak of. After I shared the post with my social media networks, I could not believe all of the people who reached out to me. It was like the awkward kid in my calculus class messaging me after school but ten times greater. Family members, friends and acquaintances reached out to me with their own stories or a desire to connect over this similarity we never knew we had. I was struck by the fact that so many of us keep silent because we feel so isolated by our pain, and yet by sharing a part of my life that was deeply painful, I was actually connecting with others. In fact, it is the silence and the refusal to speak of things that might cause people discomfort that keeps us isolated. And my mission became clear to me.

After graduation, I found myself living in a rural community with a total lack of any of the resources that saved my life that you take for granted when you live in a city. There is no mental health professional on staff at the hospital in town, and suicides amongst farmers in rural Wisconsin are on the rise. And the obituaries always say “died unexpectedly” rather than even hint at the topic of suicide. So I talk about the issue of suicide prevention any chance I get, and I write into the local papers on behalf of a local suicide prevention coalition in our county. The more people see it and hear it talked about, the more normal it becomes, and the more normal it will be to share thoughts of suicide at a time when it can still be prevented and lives can be saved. Suicide can only be prevented if an individual suffering asks for help, so how do we create a society where people feel like they can ask for help? I believe it start s with those of us who have suffered connecting with one another, and those who have not suffered striving to become better listeners, and to better understand suicide and mental illness in all its complexities in spite of their personal discomfort. And that’s why we’re here, to continue the conversation, and I look forward to learning from all of you.”

Virtually Inspired Recovery, November 2021

You can listen to a recording of this conversation here.