Suicide

This article claims that LGBT individuals in the Brighton area of Britain are more prone to suicidal thoughts and attempts at suicide than straights. It wouldn’t be difficult to draw some conclusions about LGBT individuals in other areas, because the issues that drive these people towards suicide in Brighton are certainly present in all areas of the world.

 For example: “A report found the double stigma of being isolated from the LGBT community because of mental health issues, and from the mental health service because of their LGBT identity, led many to suicidal distress.”

The article also mentions failures of the mental health system, a system that is frequently set up by and for heterosexuals. The mental health system in America, for example,  is already deeply flawed. There are simply not enough professionals to handle all the sufferers. This leads to a tendency to over prescribe medication in an effort to treat the person quickly and get them out of the office to make room for the next patient, and frequently sentences the ill person to a much longer run of drugs that don’t work for them or exacerbate their symptoms, because the appointment they need to attend in order to get their medication changed isn’t for another four months.

Mentally ill people are often treated as though they are particularly truculent children who simply need a firm hand and frequnet admonishments to hold their heads up high and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This may in fact be what some people need, but I will go out on a limb and suggest that this isn’t what truly mentally ill people need to hear. So many therapists don’t seem to understand the very people and disorders they claim to help and treat, so when LGBT issues are added to the mix, it creates a potentially destructive situation.

One of the women in the article linked above was asked, while in the hospital recovering from a suicide attempt, if what had happened to her wasn’t her fault for dressing up in women’s attire.

As you can see, this sort of comment is perhaps the very last thing a suicidal depressive needs to hear. I was inspired to write this article because people’s attitudes about suicide being cowardly really stick in my craw. Had the woman above killed herself, you can be assured that each person who made light of her distress, who asked if being assaulted was her fault for being gender variant, who prescribed the wrong medicaton, etc would be saying something along the lines of “why would she do something so selfish?”

Suicide is ultimately a failure in one’s ability to appreciate the potential for better things inherent in the future. It does not break free of its poisonous embryonic slime in a vacuum. It s aided and abetted by friends, family, nurses, doctors, and the very mental health professionals who are suppossed to support you. Then as soon as suicide claims another victim, all these people go about laying the blame squarely at the toe-tagged feet of the person who could no longer bear the looks, the comments, the hate, and most of all, the pain that invades every cell and pore.