Psychiatrists query me: “Do you ever think of killing yourself?” I answer “yes,” causing them to go into “alert mode.” My depression and constant physical pain would tend in that direction, but I do not intend to die by suicide. I do not want to do to my children and grandchildren what was done to me. I do not want to leave them bereft and assuming guilt, asking: What could I have done to prevent that suicide?
I know now that we can do little or nothing: that suicide is a decision made, often at the spur of the moment, to end unbearable physical or emotional pain. And it is almost impossible to know when such an act will occur.
Why did my mother, my aunt, my grandmother, my uncle and my brother take their own lives, and why have I not done so? I can answer for each of them: bipolar disorder, terminal cancer, deep depression, bipolar disorder and clinical depression.
For myself: talk therapy and antidepressants, a wonderful wife and children, creative work — all have helped to keep me alive. But that could be said of some of my family members who did kill themselves. As I said, it is now, and will continue to be, a mystery.
I hope I can keep my promise not to follow suit.
Christopher Lukas
Sparkill, N.Y.
The writer is the author of “Blue Genes: A Memoir of Loss and Survival.”
To the Editor:
Suicide is something that will always be with us, no matter how much we attempt to prevent it, because there will always be individuals, driven by a variety of circumstances and illnesses, mental and physical, who find living intolerable.
In my experience as a psychiatrist it isn’t always a matter of severe bipolar depression or threatening life situations but rather a sense of the lack of meaning in continuing to exist. This can result in the type of suicide that I would call a telescoping of the end of life that results from a feeling of why wait for death and spend decades suffering or feeling hopeless and disconnected from anything meaningful now or in the future.