Chapter 7 of U Murder U (Suicide)

Dr Peter Lewis walked into the conference room and saw a man holding his wife’s arm and talking to her, he saw the look of fear on his wife’s face which she was trying desperately to conceal. With slight trepidation he walked up to them and turned his wife round to face him, “Anna, what is it?”

“Peter, oh my God, Peter, I just saw a vision of a little girl, she was standing over there and there was this bright light around her,” she whispered then collapsed against him. He held her close, he could feel her shaking.

A short time later

“Ladies and gentlemen, my wife is not feeling well and will not be able to continue with this conference. She is aware that a number of you have come a long way to be here today and has asked me to continue on her behalf and answer whatever questions you might still have. My name is Dr Peter Lewis and I co-founded TTS with Anna some years ago.” Completely ill at ease, Dr Peter Lewis rubbed his forehead nervously as he tried to make the transition from university lecturer mode to a conference speaker mode. “Suicidium is a latin word from which sui caedare is taken from, which means to kill oneself or the act of intentionally causing one’s own death. World organisations estimate that each year approximately one million people die from suicide. These organisations have said that in the last 45 years suicide rates have increased by 60% worldwide and it is among the three leading causes of death among 15-44 year old men and women. In the UK over 6000 people committed suicide in 2014 and the numbers increased in 2015. Studies have shown that mental health disorders such as depression as well as substance abuse are associated with a number of cases of suicide.” He looked at the faces wearing frowns and coughed as he realised that he had lost a number of people along the way as he quoted facts to them. “You know what, I’m going to take my lecturer hat off and stop reeling out facts and trying to define words. It might be a better idea if you ask me questions and I answer them.”

“Will Anna be okay?” Sandra asked.

“She’ll be fine, thank you.”

“She was in the middle of telling me that there must have been some signs I didn’t see before my fiancé killed himself. I told her that he asked me to call him on his mobile and not on his office number a couple of weeks before . . . he died.”

“There are usually always signs but some are so subtle that they can easily get missed among the hustle and bustle of life. It’s the people left behind who suffer when someone dies, the suffering is escalated when someone commits suicide because you always wonder if there was something you could have done to prevent it, something you could have said or something you shouldn’t have said that could have given them fifteen minutes to think things over and change their mind. Your fiancé made a choice that didn’t involve your input, it was something he chose to do. There may have been several signs, there may have been only one sign but don’t replay things, don’t look for what you missed because the guilt will destroy you and the unanswered questions will paralyze you.”

Slowly, still struggling with the unwanted answers, Sandra nodded, “Okay.”

“Why did you just mention fifteen minutes?” A man with a nervous twitch asked, his eyes glued to Dr Lewis.

“You’ve heard of fifteen minutes of fame, well some psychiatrists believe that it takes just fifteen minutes to ‘talk someone down from a suicide ledge’. They’ve compiled a series of questions which they’ve found really engages the person on the brink of suicide and is able to pull them back.”

“And this works?”

“A number of studies have been published online. Log on to the TTS website, have a look at them. See what you think.”

The man wrote something down. “Thank you, I will.”

“Dr Lewis, is it true that people who commit suicide make several attempts?”

“Studies have shown that some people have attempted suicide as many as twenty times before they eventually kill themselves. On the other hand, some people die at their first attempt.”

“Why do people say that only crazy people attempt suicide?”

“I don’t know why people say that and I’m not going to say that some people who commit suicide are not crazy. A lot of studies have shown that some people are in so much pain they probably have a chemical imbalance in their brain. What I’ve learnt over the years is that a number of suicidal people do not want to die; they’re in so much pain and just want their pain to stop by any means necessary.”

“What do you mean?”

“A teenage boy being bullied who feels that there is nowhere to turn. He feels his father will look at him as a wimp for not standing up to the bullies and his mother won’t understand, she’ll just march down to the school and embarrass him in front of everyone and give the bullies more ammunition to use against him. A middle aged woman drops her children at school, cleans her house, pays all the outstanding bills then takes a rope and hangs herself. A beautiful teenage girl breaks up with her boyfriend and is so distraught she poisons herself. A thirty-something year old woman breaks up with her partner and sets herself on fire, burning 80% of her body – she lived for a week in excruciating pain before she died. A teenage girl gets involved with a man via the internet, a man she thought was a teenage boy, a man who calculatingly grooms her, when she finds out that the private ‘revealing’ pictures she has sent to him have been displayed online she becomes so ashamed, some other events occur in her life and she kills herself. Those are all true stories, all those things really happened and they are still happening in one form or another now. The list of names of people who have committed suicide is getting longer and longer, we can no longer sit back and let it continue to grow. We have to stop this from continuing to happen!”

“Is it true that you should never ask people who are suicidal if they’re thinking about suicide, or if they have thought about a method because talking about it will give them the green light to go ahead with it?”

“No, that’s a myth which needs to be exposed as a myth. In actual fact, asking a person if they’re thinking about suicide does not give them the green light to go ahead with it. It is important to talk about suicide with people who are suicidal because you will learn more about their mindset and intentions, and allow them to see things from another perspective,” Dr Lewis replied.

“Is it true that people who are suicidal do not seek help?”

“Many people who are suicidal do reach out for help and many don’t. Sometimes it takes an expert to really see beneath the projected layers and when that expert is not available things get missed. People are busy and might not see things until it’s too late. That’s why we set up TTS, it’s a safe-haven for those who reach out for help. We make that help available through our staff and various organisations.”

“Everyone has good days and not-so-good days. So what are true symptoms of depression and how do you help someone who is depressed to the extent of suicide?”

“I listened to a CD lecture once and the doctor talked about something called the dot-test. This is where you take a clean sheet of paper and mark it with a dot and then ask the person to look at it. He said that usually the depressed person will only see the dot and focus on the dot but everyone else will see a clean sheet of paper with a dot on it. Depressed people focus on negatives and everyone else focuses on positives. Taking this literally and using things in everyday life, talk to the person and see from their response how they’re feeling, if they’re tending to feel down, negative, over-emotional, sad, disappointed for reasons that they can’t explain or if they can explain them but the reasons don’t seem normal then they could be depressed and the way to help them is by getting them to talk to someone before that depression goes undetected, untreated and leads to suicide.”

“What if you can’t relate to someone who’s depressed?”

“You don’t have to relate to them, all you have to do is try to help them. You may not understand what they’re going through just try to understand that they’re going through something. Don’t be judgemental because that only causes them to shut down and camouflage and tell you what you want to hear. Listen to them, talk to them and if you can’t do that call TTS. There are people manning the phones at TTS 24 hours a day, every day of the week, who can talk to them, people in thousands of locations who can physically get to people quickly and talk them out of committing suicide and help them through whatever it is they’re going through. TTS works with patients as well as families and friends of the patients.”

“What about when someone has an illness and they want to go out on their own terms instead of being sick and a nuisance to their loved ones?”

“I ummm . . . .,” Dr Lewis hesitated.

“What about when they think that suicide is the only solution and a way that will see they die in good health, while they still have their wits about them?”

Again he hesitated then decided to continue. “Something happened in my family a few years ago and I’m not going to make any excuses, I’m just going to tell you what happened. I had a cousin who was a footballer and he was doing really well, got signed to a premiership club at a young age and everyone in the family was so proud of him. He went for a routine check-up for insurance purposes and they found a number of tumours. It was really unexpected because he was so healthy, he never got sick and he was always at the gym. Long story short, I was in America when I got a phone call from my mum to say he had killed himself. My whole family was distraught. During the autopsy they found the tumours but when they ran some tests they found that they were all benign. My cousin was just twenty years old, he had his whole life ahead of him. He killed himself because he wanted to go out on his terms. He thought he was going to die but the tumours were operable and wouldn’t have killed him if they weren’t removed,” he paused as he struggled with his emotions. “He wanted to go out on his terms but his terms didn’t come with all the facts. I don’t know what hurt his parents the most, his lack of faith in God or his lack of faith in them. Faith that they loved him and would do anything for him, take care of him and love him regardless of what he had or didn’t have. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, and we don’t know what new drugs are out there that can help. In this life we need to have faith. I don’t see dead people and I don’t hear dead people but I’ve been woken up on many nights to hear Anna talking in her sleep and nine out of ten of those times, she’s trying to console a person who is trapped in a room watching their life play on a screen, the life that they could have had if they hadn’t killed themselves, and those are on good days. Sometimes the people she talks to are watching the people they left behind suffering and other times they can actually feel the pain they’ve caused. From what I’ve heard, when these people die, their pain doesn’t stop. Unresolved pain doesn’t go away when they die, like matter, it just gets transferred!”

Anna tossed and turned as she slept on a settee in a side room of the book shop. She could see fish swimming on a wall and the little girl she had seen earlier reaching out to her, asking her for something with silent words. Her heart pounded in fear as she tried to move forward. Her feet were rooted to the spot and the girl seemed to be moving further and further away. It was as if she were floating backwards. Anna saw the girl’s lips moving but she couldn’t hear what she was saying. Her heart was pounding so loudly she thought it would explode. “No,” she called out, “wait, don’t go, who are you, what do you want from me?” Then she heard words that made her heart freeze.

“Help me, please help me! Help me to help them!”