It took my elder brother Robert’s death for me to finally begin taking my mental health seriously.
Ever since my teens, I have lived under a cloud that seemed to follow me everywhere. It would arrive, darkening my world, then eventually disperse and I would feel positive about my future until it returned, and I’d have to wait for it to clear all over again. Sometimes this would take days, other times weeks. But it has meant that, for my entire adult life, I’ve walked a perilous line with depression and suicidal ideation. When I was younger, this was interpreted as natural teenage moodiness and a phase that would pass. And it did, revealing the otherwise buoyant nature of my personality and reassuring those around me that I was okay. Nothing to worry about. Until the phase, that cloud, returned. Over time this cycle of light and shade grew so familiar to me that, in my more flippant, darkly comic moments, I began to refer to taking my own life as a backup solution should my cloud fully descend and obscure me completely.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever actually do it,” I’d say, with a humourless laugh. “But it’s nice to know I have the option.”
My family has always been very open with one another. We talk a lot, joke constantly and no subject is ever considered to be off the table. But the one thing we never really talked about, was our mental health. When family members were in crisis, we didn’t speak of the cause of those crises so much as the hope of recovery. “It’ll be fine,” we’d say, “They’re getting better now.” This sort of talk seems so dangerous now, but at the time it defused the issues at the heart of our varying problems and made us feel better about them. They were too dreadful and complex for us to fully reckon with, so we smeared them with toxic positivity and hoped for the best. And when it came to my own mental health, I did the same, regularly thinking about my own death but trying to focus on those periods when my obsession with it passed. Sticking to the unofficial family credo, I’d think “I’ll be fine,” all the while quietly suspecting that I would not be. Then, in 2008, Robert took his own life, and everything changed. Death was no longer an abstract concept for me and my family, because it was in our homes and causing fires everywhere.
Robert’s death presented my family with a terrible, permanently altering example, and it taught us all something valuable. We now know the full impact of suicide, of a young death. It left a huge crater in the middle of our world, and we can never allow it to happen again, to any of us. History cannot be allowed to repeat itself. So now, when we need it, we get help. We talk to one another about how we feel. If things are difficult, we don’t sugar coat our responses for one another, we tell it straight. And if we’re really struggling, we get professional help. Counselling, therapy, informed guidance, these are all things we talk of in my family these days. Nothing is allowed to fester.
When, during the Christmas of 2019, I experienced my most profound suicidal impulse in years and found myself standing on the edge of a cliff, it was thoughts of Robert that stopped me from taking that unalterable step forward. In this sense, my brother saved my life. When faced with a terrible and final decision, it was his example that caused me to step back from the edge and seek out the help that we should all feel confident in asking and reaching out for.
