Responding to Death By Suicide

TW: suicide ideation

“Check on your strong friends.” Such an empty statement. Yet it  goes viral whenever somebody dies by suicide and their death makes the news. 

I don’t struggle with suicidal ideation as often as I used to, but I still get triggered every time somebody dies by suicide. And can I be honest? When I was in the thick of it, seeing the response that deaths by suicide had on people only made my own pending suicide seem that much more tantalizing. 

I suffer from Main Character Syndrome. I’ve stated as much before on instagram and I’ll restate now: I say suffer because I feel like the world does not recognize or treat me as the main character that I feel I am. And one of the benefits of dying by suicide, for the longest time that I could see, was to have the attention be on ME. Granted, I would be looking on from the afterlife, but in my mind I would be doing so, smug and content that I was finally getting all the love I had deserved while alive.

Pictures taken at the New York Botanical Gardens

In some ways, I think this is what led me to consider such a dramatic plan for exiting this world. (Details in my upcoming book that I won’t spoil.) In my plan, I would go out in a dramatic fashion. The way I saw it, the more tragic the demise, the more attention I would gain posthumously. 

When I see a viral tweet about someone losing the battle against their mental illness, I wonder what it would feel like if I went viral for that reason. Not only would I be receiving love and attention from people that actually knew me, but I would be getting it from all over. From people who didn’t know I existed before but who would surely remember me now, and I would be on their mind, creating more contentment for Afterlife Kiana about the massive effect she was having. 

Susanna Kaysen says that suicides are a “preemptive murder,” and I agree. They don’t happen in the spur of the moment in most cases. People wrestle against their feelings for years sometimes before they reach that point. Police used to not share details of murders because they didn’t want to inspire copycat crimes, and I think the same should be done for people who die by suicide. Because every time an article comes out detailing how somebody ended their life, I used to imagine myself doing it that way, imagining what that must have felt like. 

Captured by: Jonathan Chanin

A passage from my book that I will spoil:

“If I could commit suicide without going to hell and if it wasn’t a sin, I would totally do it,” wrote a twelve year old Kiana, who believed that with her whole heart. I don’t remember where I first heard that rotten doctrine. I remember crying my eyes out asking my church small group leader about it after my cousin Ross died by suicide when I was twelve. When my mom got the phone call she screamed and fell to the floor crying. I remember thinking that I had never seen her grieve that way before, especially not when my own dad had died. It was very uncomfortable to see. And yet, having a front row view of the way my cousin was mourned did little to discourage me from feeling the way I felt. I silently observed, practically sitting in my Aunt Judy’s lap as her ragged, uneven sobs tickled my ear, but I kept still. I wondered if my own death would gather as big of a crowd, and romanticized the idea of being the cause of such potent grief. I could only hope that I meant this much to people. It was an intoxicating query.

When I confessed to my mom for the first time that I was suicidal (around seventh grade), she reacted as if it was not a big deal, which confused me because I was hoping for a more dramatic reaction, akin to the one I had witnessed months ago. I filed that information away in my brain: nobody cares if you talk about feeling suicidal— you can’t talk about it, you gotta be about it.”

This passage pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole situation: people will go on and on about how the circumstances are so tragic and do nothing to help prevent the tragedy. People will like their friends' tweets and memes joking (or not joking) about wanting to die and never check in to make sure they aren’t in danger of harming themselves. 

Internet discourse in the wake of suicide can become harmful and can further trigger people. 

Some people seem to believe that suicide is a selfish choice for someone to make and while I tend to agree, I don’t see the point in stating this belief in the aftermath of a tragedy. Let me explain: selfishness is the inability to see past yourself, and when all you can see for miles around is your own pain, suicide seems like the logical solution to your problems. Calling people selfish for acting in what they believe to be their best interests is counterproductive and does nothing to alleviate the suffering of the people still living who struggle against their ideations. 

If you know someone who is fighting for their life and can’t think of how to help them I suggest reading another post I wrote called: Prevention > Awareness. And for the next time stories like this tragically hit the newsfeeds, here are a few ways to not sensationalize death by suicide:

Forgo posting about checking on your strong friends and just do the work. Who needs checking on? How can you be there for them?

Respect the privacy of those who are mourning. Do not look for details, and definitely do not share those details should you come to know them. Not only is that not your information to share, but you have no idea who you could be triggering with it.

Be there for yourself. Do everything you can to dismantle the glitz and glamor of this tragic ending within your own mind. Be patient, and give yourself grace. 

Allow others to be there for you. Reach out and share your feelings with somebody you trust. 

In a world rampant with hopelessness and despair and tragedy, we should be making sure that we are not adding to the negativity we tend to see on our feeds.

S/O to Anna Hall and Jonathan Chanin for editing.

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