Suicide has been in the news a lot lately over the last couple of years. Accounts of teens deciding to end their lives for one reason or another, often due to bullying. I think about the topic of mental health often, especially as it relates to black people. I read somewhere that at least two thirds of the black people who need mental health treatment do not receive it. Although cost and availability are often an issue, I think a bigger one has to do with a stigma placed on mental illness in our community. Someone who is depressed is often told to "pray about it" or to be positive or optimistic. Sometimes they are even made to feel like they have no right to feel the way they do, because somewhere someone is in a worse situation. I think that last one is what I hate the most. Who are we to tell someone that their situation isn't "bad enough" to be depressed? Sure someone else's life may seem worse to us, but there are always things that we as outsiders can't see. That person who's life seems worse may have a stronger support system, or could be seeing someone for psychiatric help.
In the end, it's always easy to say that suicide is never the answer, but obviously, to a lot of people it is. So tonight on twitter when I saw that a young lady was tweeting as she attempted to commit suicide, I took it seriously. I prayed and hoped that someone she knew had gotten to her before it was too late. Her tweets played out like a public suicide note, citing an abortion that she regrets, and a guy who allegedly coerced her into it and later broke up with her. Several hours earlier she'd even mentioned anti-depressants, but that she felt like the side effects outweighed their benefits. I wondered to myself if she'd ever been to a mental health professional who could evaluate her and explain the pros and cons of these medicines to her, and hoped she was okay.
Then it started. For some reason I decided to search her twitter name, to see what kind of things were being tweeted in response to her tweets. People accused her of faking this suicide attempt. First off who are you to say that someone you don't even know is faking something? And even if she was trying to get some attention, it's obvious that the girl was in pain and needed someone to help her. If she was faking, maybe having someone reach out to her would have been what she needed to see that she needed to get some professional help. Other's made jokes, and tweeted her asking if she was dead yet.
Someone in a different state called the police, and it seems as though someone was able to get to her and get her to a hospital. I pray that this is true and the young lady is still alive. What really scares me, however, is the people who may also have searched her name, seen the ridicule she was receiving, and decided that they would not seek mental help for themselves, in an attempt to avoid the same. People often say "it's just twitter" and it is so obvious that it is SO much more than "just twitter" and I wish people would think about the consequences before being so insensitive. Everything is not a joke, especially mental illness. Just remember, someone close to you could be struggling with something similar before joking about someone committing suicide.
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