Sue Bailey

“You have so much to live for.”

It’s one of the things that gets said to you. And it’s true. It just misses the point entirely.

There are many reasons I would like to stay alive. There are books and films and songs I’ve never heard yet that will move me and fill me with joy and delight and – there’s probably a German word for it, that feeling of being moved to sorrow so great that it makes you feel intensely and wonderfully alive in the moment. There are people I adore and it breaks my heart I’ll never see them again. I won’t see my nephews and nieces grow up. I’ll never drink another glass of wine or eat another piece of toast. I’ve been to the British Museum for the last time.

All of these things fill me with so much grief that I can’t even begin to express it.

But they’re not the point.

It’s not that there are reasons to live. It’s that the reasons not to live are so much greater. My whole life has been a balancing of that equation, and now the maths just don’t work out any more.

It is not a cry for help because I know that help never comes.

Stage direction: *wibbly lines*

I’m 13, or there abouts. First or second year of secondary school, so somewhere between 12 and 14. I’ve stolen a handful, maybe 30, paracetamol from the big bottle, because I’m lonely and ugly and fat. (Eight stone, I write in my diary in disgust.) And one lunchtime, I just do it. I walk over to the table with the jugs of water and pour a glass, pour the tablets into my mouth, pour water after them, they’re gone.

I have an idea what will happen next. I’ll pass out. I’ll be hospitalised. I might even die and then they’ll be sorry. But mostly, it’ll mean that someone will show me how to not be so miserable.

This is not what happens.

Firstly, we leave the lunch room, and half an hour later, I pass out on the grass. I am lying on my front and it’s only for a few minutes, and when I wake up, Simon H., who really is fat, is dry-humping my bum. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind.

Then it is double maths and I pass out on the desk. We’re doing pythagoras’ theorem. Ms. M., the maths teacher who later cries when I tell her I’m not doing A’level, yells at me for not paying attention.

After that, I’m not really sure. I got home, somehow, and seeing as there was no fuss, it must have been on foot. I don’t remember one step of it. I pass out on my bed, my mother yells at me, from somewhere down a long tunnel, for not coming for dinner. Later, I wake up.

No one mentions that I fell asleep in maths. No one mentions that I fell asleep at 4.30 in the afternoon. No one, obviously, cares.

Weeks later… In the car. My father is talking to me. For which read, criticising my clothes, hair, makeup, music, choice of friends, everything that the fathers of 13 year old girls criticise. I say: “that day, when I came home and fell straight asleep?” He obviously doesn’t remember. “That was because I’d swallowed a whole bunch of paracetamol.”

He looks at me. “You know, if you’d died, you’d've gone to hell.” It’s a statement of fact, not even a question.

We drive home in silence. It’s never mentioned again.

photo credit: juhansonin

On Tuesday, The Guardian had a feature on the book that changed my life. I’ve been considering this question every since it arose in Mig’s comments so long ago that I can’t even find the post, and the conclusion I’ve come to is this:

to change a life is a big ask from a book.

Let me make this clear – I love books. If I had to choose between [sex + alcohol + music] or books, I would pick books. If I had to choose between the internet or books, that would be tougher – because it’s all about the reading, innit.

If you want to talk about pivotal moments in my reading, I don’t need whole books: two sentences cover it. Aged 7 or 8, reading that “most evolutionists reckon the natural world to have emerged in the same order as that listed in Genesis”, and realising I didn’t have to disbelieve in science to carry on believing in God. (I expressed my delight to my mother, who responded that the theory of evolution was just a theory, while the Bible was fact.)

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When doctors told Marie Seward that her period mood swings and depression were extreme she felt both relieved and angry.

You should go read that article on the BBC before you read my half-assed observations below. Mrs Seward says a lot of things that make a lot of sense, but the one sentence that really gave me goosebumps is this one:

“You think it is normal,” she said.

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Someone, somewhere –

I’m convinced it was in Prozac Nation but I’ve read it three times trying to find the section I think I remember, and I can’t. But I’m sure it was Elizabeth Wurtzel, quoting her therapist.

- says that depression uses anything it can find to fuel itself. That something which once made you happy, that took you away from depression, will, in the end, inevitably become part of that depression.

It’s true.

Someone else, somewhere –

It was written by Terry Pratchett, I’ve forgotten in which book and if I go look, I’ll get lost in L-Space.

- says that the only thing faster than the speed of light is darkness, because however fast light goes, the darkness is there waiting for it when it arrives.

That’s true too.

And you can run, and run, and run, spend your life running, *from* or *to*, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you’re running from, and what you’re running to, even if there is something to run to, because what will be there at the end of it, is the same.

So if you’ve missed the story, here it is: Abraham Biggs, a 19 year old man from Florida broadcast his death by overdose via webcam. He had previously stated his intention to commit suicide on a bodybuilding forum, and then had posted a link to his webcam stream over justin.tv.

Piecing together exactly what happened when is difficult. It’s not clear from the press reporting whether people were watching this video stream for hours, or for about 30-40 minutes. Some of the forum’s users, apparently including a moderator of the site, did not take his threats seriously because he had talked about suicide before on several occasions. Others called the police. Still others – apparently – called Abraham Biggs himself, and told him to “do it”. Some commentators almost seemed to hold the internet itself responsible:

Montana Miller, an assistant professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, said the circumstances of Biggs’ suicide were not shocking, given the way teenagers chronicle every facet of their lives on sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

“If it’s not recorded or documented, then it doesn’t even seem worthwhile,” she said. “For today’s generation it might seem, ‘What’s the point of doing it if everyone isn’t going to see it?’ “

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Last night’s Horizon, titled How mad are you? seems to have stirred up some feeling. If you didn’t see it, think Big Brother only with crazy people… hmm, maybe not.

The premise is this: ten people, five with diagnoses of various mental illnesses, and five allegedly normal, have been ensconced in Hever Castle, along with a panel of three mental health experts. The experts have to tell, by observing the inmates doing a variety of tasks, who has which of their list of mental disorders. Will they label perfectly sane people as mentally ill? Will people with mental illnesses convince the experts that there’s nothing wrong with them? I think we can probably guess that the answer to both of those questions is “yes”.

Many of the complaints I’ve seen about the programme – and most of them were before it was aired – have been along the lines of “how the label is going to damaged this person’s life”: being called bipolar or depressed or socially anxious on national television is, it’s said, far far worse than being thought only eccentric, individual or just plain odd. And what if a normal person gets labelled mad? Back in the closet with you, mentallists!

In the event, the strongest argument against this was the participants themselves. Two were ‘outed’ on last night’s first show: the experts spotted Dan with OCD, who said he ordinarily made no effort to conceal it, washing his hands fifty times a day and refusing to touch other people, and – if not exactly proud of his condition – then he was absolutely not willing to be ashamed of it. Good for him.

Their diagnosis for Yasmin, on the other hand, was wrong. They diagnosed her as not mentally ill, but she is (we haven’t found out yet what her real diagnosis is), and she was delighted to have fooled the experts. She might have a mental illness, but she’s every bit as normal as the rest of us.

Did it trivialise mental health issues? Though the slightly game-show format isn’t the best, I still don’t think so. When the typical mad person in the media is a released-from-hospital-too-soon schizophrenic who’s committed murder or worse, it was very nice to see some people who were a less flamboyant kind of crazy: ordinary, functional people who just happen to have this diagnosis. And it was very, very nice to see that a diagnosis of a mental disorder isn’t some kind of death sentence, but something that might, in fact, have its uses in understanding just what’s going on in that head of yours.

I’m sticking the rest of this post – the “where I’m coming from” part – behind the cut, so that those who want to avoid perhaps TMI about the inside of my head can do so. The second part of Horizon: How mad are you? is on next Tuesday on BBC2, and the first bit can be watched online, at least by those in the UK.

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