What's It Like?

What’s it like to take a medicine that makes you suicidal? It’s not where you want to go but you go anyway because your brain has been hijacked by alien, malevolent chemical miscreants hell-bent on causing devastation. They have weaponized everyday objects such as knives, scissors, and screwdrivers. They have perverted ordinary, common-place experiences like waiting at a railroad crossing for a train to pass or passing a car on the highway into undeniably tempting and easily accessible means of total self-destruction.

This mental riot goes on for a few days even though you have stopped taking the medicine. You have taken some precautions. You’ve tried to distract yourself with errands, housework, and some socializing. But the devils, these demons, they just won’t quit. They keep resurfacing, pulling, pushing, punishing.

One night you can’t take it anymore. It’s time to take care of business. You don’t want to die. You just want the feeling of wanting to kill yourself to die. But killing yourself is the only way to achieve that result. You have to die.

You drive to a nearby pedestrian bridge that spans the river. It’s a little after one in the morning. You park and walk up the ramp until you’re about halfway across the bridge. You’re wearing a backpack with a dumbbell inside. You climb over the railing and find a small perch above the water eighty feet below. You take a handful of Xanax left over from an expired prescription and drink a beer, thinking that the drug and brew will just blitz you into oblivion, and they do, but not in the way you expect.

While you're waiting for the blackout to happen, you notice that it’s a beautiful mid-summer night, breezy, cloudless . . . . wow, it’s so pretty, almost a full moon, its cool white light glinting on the rippling water below. You are wondering when the pills and the pint are going to work their magic but you are already so stoned, so completely that you don’t realize that they already have. You can't move. You’re unable to take just that one, single step over the edge.

Some time must have passed. You remember looking back over your shoulder to see some first responders standing on the bridge. Someone must have seen you and called 911. They must have coaxed or pulled you back over. Then you’re in the psychiatric section of the emergency room, a place of broken, violent humanity where patients punch and kick nurses despite the heavy, twitchy police presence, a place suffused with artificial light from overhead fluorescent fixtures, a place pulsing from the ceaseless noise of all the vital machines tethered to every patient for pulse, oxygen, and blood pressure. The machines ping and bong, buzz and squeeze, all day, all night.

At some point EMTs bring in an unconscious man with some of his necrotic fingers in a small plastic container he had stowed in a pocket of his dirty cargo pants. When he wakes up, a doctor comes by, injects some local anesthetic into his hands, and trims from them some of the remaining rotting flesh and bone. A little later nurses give him a couple of sandwiches and let him go. Frequent flyer, one of them says, here about every ten days.

You spend fifty-six hours here. You probably don’t sleep. It’s hard to tell. You know you don’t eat much. A bag of potato chips. A piece of pizza. You stopped looking at the clock across from your bed a day or two ago. You stopped watching the t.v. on the other side of the room. You are waiting for a bed in the inpatient psych unit.

Finally, just when you think that you are about to crack, that This. Is. IT!, a nurse arrives with a wheelchair. She edges it closer to your bed. She helps you into it. She passes you off to a couple of orderlies who wheel you along some corridors, take you up in an elevator, and through a few doors, to the inpatient psych unit.

You spend almost two weeks here. You get to know some other patients. You get some perspective. As ruptured as you are, a few are worse off. A wild-eyed double-amputee who’s blistered his hands rolling himself around in his wheelchair. One morning you team up and motor around until the charge nurse calls you out. A young woman about half your age who wears only pajamas and a blanket around her shoulders and tip-toes along the seams of the linoleum floor, murmuring, Oh, ye-ah, as she pirouettes along the hallways. A fractious, furtive diabetic who ransacks the trash for leftovers and hoards them in his room.

Even though the food is not very good (you are in a hospital, after all), you eat a lot because you have lost weight and you did not have much to spare in that department anyway. You befriend the food service workers so you can score seconds on protein and ice cream and you love hearing the meal carts trundling from the elevator to the dining area. Breakfast at seven, lunch at noon, dinner at five.

Group therapy and music therapy happen every day. You think both are for the birds. But you go anyway because there is nothing else to do and because you become aware that the nurses and doctors and social workers are watching you, keeping notes on you, seeing if you are making an effort, making progress.

You hate the doctors at first because they are not you and they have no idea what they’re talking about. They want you to try things that you know won’t work. You are certain that you know what is right and what to do and you are determined to be in charge but then, after about six days, even more exhausted and despairing than you were in the E. R., you give up, open up, and go with it.

Therapy becomes, well, therapeutic. The doctors, they’re still arrogant, but you concede that they know a thing, or two. Maybe three. In the evenings, you look out of the small window in your room and start to think, I might just get out of here after all.

What was it like to take a medicine that made me suicidal? It’s not where I wanted to go. But I went anyway. And I fought hard to get back, as if my life depended on it, because it did, and I won, and it’s worth it.

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If you, or anyone you know, is experiencing suicidal thoughts, help is available:

https://988lifeline.org/utm_source=google&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=onebox