Suicide!

Good, I got your attention.

In light of today, world suicide prevention day (according to IASP), I just wanted to take some time to talk about a topic that is sometimes difficult to talk about. From my own experiences I know that suicide can be an extremely difficult topic to tackle and an even more difficult one to deal with. As most of you know I am a psychology major and for me mental health awareness is an issue that is close to my heart. As I was crawling along on the 91 during our lovely So-Cal rush hour I was thinking about my own story and my newfound views on the mental health industry, especially therapy.

I was never really a fan of therapy, and still wouldn’t call myself a “fan,” but I would say that I have come to appreciate it and what it is fighting for. The stigmas around mental illness, in all cultures and sub cultures, are truly shameful. As Americans we talk a lot about freedom of this and that but for the most part what we really mean is freedom within our normality’s. Freedom to be and act “normal.” In order to live in society you have to act like society.

This semester I started an internship at a state hospital and have learned a ton about mental health and myself. What I have seen so far ranges from major depression to schizophrenia and I am sure I still haven’t seen the worst of it, but I have learned a whole lot. “Crazy” people aren’t “crazy,” they’re sick! Not with a cold or cancer, but just as life alerting as either of those can be. Some people will never be able to get better (this has been very hard to witness) and some people can take some medicine and they’re good to go. However, that’s not really the problem.

The problem is in the way we treat this sickness. If our friend has a cold we tell them to drink fluids and get rest but when a friend says they’re depressed or anxious, often times, we don’t know what to say. It’s not our fault that we react like this though. To a certain extent it may be but we were never educated on the topic of mental illness. No one ever told us about depression, anxiety, or agoraphobia and suicide as a result of many mental illnesses was rarely, if at all, talked about. Sure it may have been in an assembly or two, maybe it was an announcement at school today, maybe you saw someone with a ribbon tied on their wrist or pinned to their shirt, but our education systems are not education. The people that know the most are the people going through it and that really shouldn’t be the case, because for they most part they won’t say a word. They will break eye contact and look at the ground in hopes that the gut-wrenching feeling will go away when their secret comes up. We don’t want anyone knowing that we’re “sick” and we get terrified if anyone even gets close to figuring it out.

Who are we to make others feel this way? We all are sufferers! We are all facing different demons and are all dealing with them differently, but worst of all most of us are facing it alone, or at least that’s how we feel/think. If you don’t take anything from this post at least take this: you’re not alone. I know it’s cliché and believe me when I say I hate what I’m about to say. It gets better and in time you’ll get through it. It wont be quick and it sure as hell wont be easy, and more likely then not you’ll never be at the same level as you were before you’re mental illness. That said, it doesn’t mean you can never get back to a place where you are happy, calm, and safe. I wish someone had told me this a few years back because I wouldn’t have wasted so much time trying to get back to where I was.

Lastly I just want to add that we, as a society, need to work on destroying this stigma surrounding mental illness. Illness is illness! Whether it is physical or mental illness. We shouldn’t ignore one while coddling the other. Just like physical illness mental illness takes time to heal, takes patience from others and ourselves, and most importantly requires nurturing from others and ourselves. Suicide is not a first response! It’s a desperate act, a last resort for some one that is feeling so emotionally overwhelmed that they can’t even think clearly. No one that is willingly about to take their own life is in their right mind, and there are signs to notice when someone is getting sick. Just like coughing and sneezing foreshadow a cold, isolation and lack of energy foreshadow depression. Suicide is 100% preventable! Educate yourself, know the signs, and talk to your friends and family. Together we will start to break the stigma surrounding mental illness.

Suicide helpline: 1(800)  273-8255

New Start, No Promises

            For the past few weeks I’ve been contemplating restarting this blog thing. These thoughts come most often during my breaks because I usually find myself bored out of my mind and I need some kind of outlet. I first started this blog to connect more with God. I found that the only way I was really good at that was by studying the bible, and I mean study like taking notes, highlighting, etc. I’m sure you can get some type of idea of how I was reading by my earlier posts on Romans. I assume you’ve also noticed that it’s been a while since I’ve last posted. Well, there’s a pretty good reason for it and a few not so good reasons. Warning: the rest of this post is going to be very self focused, so stop now if you don’t want to read me talking about me. You’ve been warned.
            Basically for the last year, maybe a little more than a year, I haven’t really been “feeling” Gods presence. I’m not really sure when the falling out started or even why for that matter, and I still don’t. What I do know though is that I didn’t give up. One of my very wise youth leaders once told me that even when he didn’t feel God or when he didn’t really want to be around God he still went to church and interacted with his Christian community, so that’s exactly what I did. I kept going to Sunday mornings, doing bible studies, and hanging out with my “church friends” which are just my normal friends (that’s what partially kept me at the church). Eventually I just became too fake at church so I started stepping down from my roles like leadership, book clubs, and bible studies. This is when I really started questioning my faith.  
            We started a college group in February of 2014 and that started many things. Some really cool friendships started to sprout and my involvement in the church was once again a reality. What didn’t start though was the rekindling of my relationship with God. This past year has been quite a roller coaster of faith, or rather the lack there of. However, more recently I’ve been trying to reflect on why I am a Christian, why I believe in God, and what I should be doing/how I should be acting if I truly identify as a Christian. This process has really been the equivalent of trying to do something you know very little about. Like maybe you know the basics of it but doing it on your own is way harder than you thought it’d be. Thankfully I never really had to be alone. This is both a blessing and a curse though, because when your friends have faith it is easy to feel like you have faith too but it’s not always your own. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in it all and you forget that this relationship is solely between you and God, that’s the one that matters, that’s the one that holds your faith.
            An old friend once told me that I needed to be careful as a psychology major because she had seen a lot of them walk away from their faith. At first I disagreed with her but then I started learning some things and I started having questions, then doubts. I don’t know if it was just self fulfilling prophecy and because I had heard it before I thought it was happening but at some point I started to believe that God, Christianity, the bible was all just a made up story, simply a figment of our vast intellect. It was hard to come to terms with even thinking these things.
            I know it’s not a horrible thing to question your faith, the church, or even God but I felt like I was seriously losing my faith, and my relationship with God was already kind of sandy (that was a bad joke, just in case you missed it). So this kind of brings us to where I am now. I’m working on rekindling that fire. I know it might not burn the same and it will probably take a while to get it started, but in the end I hope it will burn brighter than it did before, that’s the goal. I know I’m not going to stop questioning things, that’s not the point. I just want to be okay with questioning them, okay meaning that if I hit a roadblock my faith will be able to withstand it and not crumble. This seems like an abstract idea to me right now but I think I can get somewhere close to that goal.
            I feel like a lot of people my age (and not so much my age) have struggled with faith in the same way I am. Many of us have walked away from the church in an attempt to acquire freedom or independence. I don’t’ think it’s so much that we “gave up on our faith” as we just couldn’t really find a reason to stay. Does that make sense? Not even that we are getting something for our end of the bargain but that there’s no spiritual pull. Maybe it’s us, maybe it’s the messages and we just don’t resonate, or maybe it’s just a time of change. What comforts me though is knowing that I can question it all and it doesn’t matter how long I’m gone trying to “figure out life” He will always be there waiting for me to run back to Him. That doesn’t mean I should just go out and do what ever the hell I feel like though! To me it means trying to figure out why you want to call yourself a Christian.
 On that note, that’s what this blog is going to become: a place to try and figure out why. To ask those questions that rattle our faith and to use the answers we find to strengthen it. I’m not going to make a commitment to this thing, but I’m going to try to use it more (but who knows it could take me another six months to post) and most of these will be much shorter.
 Thanks for reading friends