Stigma Multiplied

In twenty four countries in the world
the stigma against poor mental health
is reinforced by laws that make suicide
-a symptom of poor mental health-illegal.

The punishments vary from country to country,
Empire to Commonwealth, the worst is
life imprisonment (The Bahamas), rarely enacted,
below that the average is a mix of fines
and custodial sentences. No offender gets less
than a misdemeanour mark on their criminal record.

This means the criminals being unemployable
where employers collectively refuse to employ
once suicidal ex criminals whose time is spent.

The stigma of surviving attempted suicide
gets added to the stigma of criminality,
so that the stigma of being unemployable
can complete the shameful trio. 

These events are survivable-
ask hard enough for nothing
and it will be enough to survive.

Face it; every competitive social system
has to a poorest who can live with the least,
and those with the least surely includes
surviving failing to commit suicide.    

 

Enquire Within? But Not Too Closely...

Every suicide seems terrible
to those who thought they knew
the person who killed themselves
well enough that they did not think
deep enough to ask the unaskable.

How such a lack of curiosity
can lead to so serious an end,
death by the person's own hand,
forces open the incurious mind,
and indicts the tamed and timid, 
in ways that no other act can. 

But the living should know
that part of their life will be
to mark the passing of the newly dead
with a certain respect,
even when they died by their own hand.

It is a part of life that they will pass on,
with variants, to others in their own turn
when their passing has to be marked.

The living have all the tools required,
the legal procedures, the comforting words,
and all the collective gestures
through which we can disguise
how they misunderstood the departed.

What seems worse than suicide to me
is how as we breed we extend the secrecy
via which our greatest truths are revealed. 
Mostly through our greatest acts of desperation. 

The Spirituality Of Personal Pain

I am not sure about the 'just' in this statement,
I am never sure about words like 'just' and 'only'.
But the idea that those who feel suicidal
feel that 'home' is elsewhere rings true enough,
particularly when in the body they are in 
they feel estranged from the housekeeper of it
for living through the circumstances they do.
As for angels, my closest friend often thinks
that he is not human and that my closeness to him
means that I am not human either.
Angels are our imagined 'spiritual' animals.

'Combat Suicide'

is a phrase I will never understand.
I have been close to suicide a few times,
and I contemplate it often, and with humour.
I like to think it is a friend who does not
need to see me, but might send a postcard.
Anyone who takes up arms against the sea
of their troubles, to oppose them, needs to see
that arms (and legs) are best for swimming with-
in the direction of the tide, but a little faster.
We have to know the flow we are in, to follow it,
and resist the reversing undertow underneath.
We can't do that through any metaphorical 'fighting
for our soul, against the will to live'. We did not make
our souls, any more that our bodies. They are a gift,
not ours to keep, much less to maintain in conflict.
Successful militarism, even against the lack of will
to live, means keeping close to your true self,
and keeping it's enemies even closer.