TW: #sucide #mentalhealth #depression
This is going to be the most difficult thread I've ever written. But I know I have to. For my own sanity, catharsis.
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This is going to be the most difficult thread I've ever written. But I know I have to. For my own sanity, catharsis.
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In 2019, I lost a friend. He died of suicide. He was a classmate, and a colleague. We worked alongside each other for 8 years. We had lunches together. He was a gem of a person. Extremely intelligent, a 10x engineer (if there is such a thing). Soft-spoken. Without malice.
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No, I am not eulogising him. I know that most people who have known him would agree with this assessment. And in any case, it shouldn't matter if he wasn't all that I'm saying he was. Those are just details I could not not mention.
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On that day, I got a call that he was serious after a "fall" from his balcony. By the time I reached the hospital, he was no more. A few friends had gathered and some of us accompanied him (or his body) to govt hosp for autopsy.
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As we waited outside the autopsy room, a policeman struck up a conversation with us. "Are you all relatives?" he asked. No, we're friends, we said (a relative, another ex-colleague, was there, but was on a phone, a few feet away). "When is the last you met him?" he asked.
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At that point, I had not been in touch with him (more later) so it was at least a year for me. None of us had seen him in the previous six months. "What sort of friends are you?" he asked. The question stung, but it was a fair question.
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We tried to explain that he had isolated himself, and did not want to meet anyone.
Recently, though, reading a tweet about suicide, I realized that this was a RED FLAG we all were unaware of. So few of us understand #mentalhealth.
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Recently, though, reading a tweet about suicide, I realized that this was a RED FLAG we all were unaware of. So few of us understand #mentalhealth.
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A few years back there had been instances that some of us knew about, and we *knew* that he needed help. We tried to get him help, but he'd never really seek therapy, and his extreme high-functioning self meant it was easy for us all to believe the demons were laid to rest.
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Then, while working together, he had a fallout with me. He stopped talking to me. I tried hard to understand what I had done wrong, talked to other friends to find it out indirectly. To no avail. I mean it didn't quite add up. I knew some details, but it didn't explain it.
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He soon moved to a different company, and we only met once briefly after that, in a social event. He talked with me, and let me know that whatever had happened back then was unfortunate and that he wasn't in a good place. And we should meet.
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But few months down the line, it never happened, and instead, I got to see his lifeless body. I've thought long and hard about how any of us could have helped him. We weren't bad friends. Each of us cared for him. But we were ignorant. We didn't understand #depression.
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I mean we *knew* about it. But we didn't *get* it. We didn't see the signs. We were all too happy to believe that he was *fine* now. If he could laugh like that, and talk like that. But my god, there were signs.
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His complete and total isolation for long stretches of time was one. He had had problems holding on to jobs (and for someone of his calibre, he could excel with 30% of his mental capacity used). He was not working for over a year. He had gone into a shell for months/years.
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I keep on thinking about how we could have averted it. The question by the policeman comes back to haunt me even today: what kind of friends give up on a friend, live him to his means, just because he wants to? I wanted to write this because I don't have answers.
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But I want to warn others like me, to be aware of the pitfalls of assuming that mental health issues will sort out by themselves. I want all of us to be aware of signs that could mean a person is suicidal. Or struggling with severe mental health issues.
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I read this tweet recently, and it brought back all of it. If we had known this, would we have tried harder? Tried more things? What?
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https://twitter.com/MrunmayiA/status/1272465004487303169?s=20
In the wake of the pandemic, with people being isolated physically, it becomes so much more important that we all have a basic understanding of #mentalhealth and related issues.
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We need to actively shed off our misconceptions -- from our ideas of strength/weakness, or our assumption that someone who "looks OK" is doing OK. We need to observe more, listen more, read more to be able to do either. This extended pandemic may lead to another pandemic +
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of mental health issues. And we're severely ill-prepared for it. We don't know how to spot problems. If we do, we don't know how to deal with them. But surely there are a few simple do's and don't that all of us need to learn?
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Amplify threads about mental health that you see, thanks to a vibrant community of mental health professionals on Twitter.
His death by suicide was a complete shock to anyone I've talked to. It's like none of us believed it was possible.
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His death by suicide was a complete shock to anyone I've talked to. It's like none of us believed it was possible.
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The primary response from everyone was disbelief/shock. And we're all relatively well-read, aware (or so I thought) people. The point is not to scare anyone, but to bring us all out of a complacency wrt #mentalhealth. We owe it to our loved ones. Take care you all.
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Finally, a request to any mental health professional/expert who reads this: please links to leave layman-friendly online materials on identifying some serious mental health issues, and what first-line actions we can take to help, and what we should avoid.
Thank you.
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Thank you.
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