Content warning: This piece discusses suicide in a way that some readers may find triggering.

The first time I lost someone to suicide, I was 11 years old. They were an extremely close family member and I was too young to process this healthily.

It launched a lifelong battle with my own mental health issues, laced with suicidal ideation. In the 15 years that followed, I attempted to take my own life enough times for the exact number to become blurred in the chaos of my adolescence. 

It’s only recently that I’ve felt I have the capacity to commit to overcoming this trauma. 

In addition to my own struggles, I’ve witnessed countless friends pull themselves back from the precipice, and mourned those who succumbed to the pain.

Currently, the music and bar scene in my hometown of Doncaster, which so many of us found a home in, is in a state of collective grief after another friend took their own life just last week. 

Alongside the shock, guilt and disbelief, imagining and empathising with the internal agony they would have felt in those last moments is the hardest thing to reconcile.

For me, a close proximity to suicide has cemented some perspectives that might be seen as controversial – primarily, that the catchphrase ‘it’s OK not to be OK’ is misleading and hollow.

This phrase has become closely linked to World Suicide Prevention Day and is used by organisations, campaigns, activists, influencers and celebrities to raise awareness and reduce the stigma of mental health issues.

And I think it is extremely patronising. It reduces the desire to no longer exist to a term that insinuates something is trivial, minor, dismissible: ‘not OK’.

Suicidal ideation feels like you’ve fallen down into a bottomless pit that you’re too exhausted to claw your way out of. It’s not ‘OK’ to be consumed with so much self-loathing you feel the joyless, hopeless world would be better without you in it. 

To have this torturous level of defeat reduced to ‘not being OK’ is a frightful understatement.

Ironically, for a slogan designed to make people feel less alone, seeing swarms of people regurgitate the same message year after year only continues to trigger greater isolation in me through feeling misunderstood.

Those of us with serious mental health issues have been told ‘it’s OK to not be OK’ for years. For how long are we expected to be content in our suffering?

We recognise that physical illnesses have the potential to be treatable, perhaps curable, but also possibly fatal. Similarly, suicide is a potential outcome caused by the worsening of an illness. 

To tell someone with heart failure ‘it’s OK that your heart is not working’, or a cancer patient ‘it’s OK your tumour has grown’ would be unthinkable.

So why have we accepted that telling people in mental health crises, who are at their most unwell, ‘it’s OK not to be OK’ is good advice? 

If anyone were to say it to me as an offer of support – depending on how turbulent my mental health was that day – I’d be inclined to laugh, or cry, in their face due to the sheer unhelpfulness it would offer in that moment

Similar slogans around this time of year include ‘check in on your friends’.

While the Samartians are correct in saying ‘reaching out to someone could help them know that someone cares, that they are valued, and help them access the support they need,’ I feel like this puts the burden of responsibility on people who, statistically, are likely to be suffering in one way or another themselves. 

It can also leave survivors who have lost people to suicide with the guilt of feeling that they should have or could have done more, on top of their grief. 

As someone who routinely suffered in silence, I recognise the value of normalising and de-stigmatising mental health conditions, and encouraging conversations that challenge the taboo around mental illness. 

‘It’s OK not to be OK’ has become a popular saying on social media, and this has the potential to help those with mental health struggles find comfort in an online community, particularly young people. It allows them to highlight how common it is to experience mental illness and that someone struggling should not be shamed or treated poorly. 

But social media can’t replace formal, professional support, and this catchphrase doesn’t call for the urgent actions needed to help people who feel suicidal.

Interestingly, I’m not sure anyone has ever said this phrase to me in person..

And if anyone were to say it to me as an offer of support, depending on how turbulent my mental health was that day, I’d be inclined to laugh, or cry, in their face due to the sheer unhelpfulness it would offer in that moment. 

It also ignores the current political and social climate mental health patients are expected to survive in, a system that certainly isn’t functioning in a way that ensures we will be ‘OK’. 

It’s not OK to be placed on a 12 month waiting list for just 16 counselling sessions needed to cover over 10 years of trauma – as was my experience with specialist trauma therapy. 

It’s not OK that, during a global pandemic, our Government is yet to release guidelines for mental health services. Services are now operating under their own discretion in terms of their capacity to meet social distancing guidelines, as opposed to there being a initiative ensuring all services are able to re-open nationwide. 

And it’s not OK that patients like me have been without formal counselling since March due to a lack of funding in my area and have been told that support is unlikely to resume until 2021.

And it’s certainly not OK that some medications designed to treat mental health conditions include ‘suicidal thoughts’ as side effects; that Black people are four times more likely to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act; that men are three times as likely than women to die by suicide. 

It’s not OK that in young people, 50% of mental health problems are established by age 14 or that one in four women taking the contraceptive pill experienced negative mental health side effects.

Rather than being bombarded with an empty slogan again this year, the only way I and, no doubt, countless others will feel truly validated, is if mental health support becomes as accessible as possible.

Mental health needs to be afforded the same weight as physical health when it comes to the allocation of public funds.

I would like to see universal, free mental healthcare operating at the same standard throughout the country, same-day therapy services and in-house counselling provided within all schools and workplaces. I want a zero-tolerance policy on medications with mental health side effects, and children must be taught how to deal with mental health issues.

We are currently in the midst of what the mental health charity Mind has labelled a ‘coronavirus mental health crisis’, and very few of us feel hopeful. 

It will only be ‘OK not to be OK’ when infrastructure is in place to ensure recovery is painless, efficient and easily available for anyone who is suffering. 

Source: Read Full Article