For those of you who have suffered from depression for most of your life, do you think you will one day just end it all?

I have thoughts of self-harm often, but never seriously consider suicide. Even pain is better than nothing. Nothing is just so… nothing. And it’s going to come eventually anyway, so might as well hold out for the pinpricks of light between the cracks of the cave I’m in, you know? Because eventually I won’t have a choice, and all the light will be gone. And so will the darkness.

The self-harm thoughts come on the numb days. The times I need to feel pain just so I can remember what feeling feels like. And in extreme stress situations, so I can remind myself that there’s at least one thing I’m in complete control over – my pain threshold.

I have bipolar disorder and have experienced the ultimate blackness preceding a near-attempt at suicide. I was saved by the phone ringing.

I have been stable for a very long time, and thankfully, it’s hard to remember the daily struggle to get out of bed and do even simple self-care like showering and eating. I remember the black pit, though. I remember the hopelessness. I remember wanting it to end.

I found medicine that works for me. I found relief in exercise and daily meditation. I limit my news intake since I’m sensitive to bad news from anywhere around the world. I have a few close friends who are cheerful people.

The best thing that helped me was WRAP I cannot recommend it strongly enough. Simply put, WRAP is a way to stay well. I wrote down my strengths. I listed my triggers and came up with a plan to deal with them, and I wrote down what it feels like when I’m starting to slip into a crisis. With WRAP, I keep myself well.

I wish you continued stability, and I genuinely hope you find a way to live well and long.

I have a cycle. It runs about every six months. I get down, I get up. I recognized it many years ago and it helps me get through. But it is not an exact time frame only semi-regular so the hardest part is recognizing the depressive phase when it starts. Once I recognize I am sliding down I am able to recognize that shortly I will be out of this depressive stage; I just need to hold on to something.

It’s been a shadow demon for me since my teens. At times life was like trying to sprint in water while drowning. Honestly, I have found that it’s been a signal for change. If I keep life in flux it never could get a real grip. I also over exercise. Anxiety is a large component and running my guts out feels better than just stewing in it. The runners high after helps me sleep. It’s the mornings that are hell for me when my shit is all out of whack. When it’s bad I try to remember that the good days will come back.

For two years in college, my first thought every morning was “I wish I was dead.” I had a lot of ideation and tried therapy through my 20s but none of it was effective. Usually as I sifted through my tree of suicidal thoughts, there was always one small reason not to go. (Although I never came close attempting suicide. I just wanted to stop existing.)

In my 30s, I met a therapist who practiced CBT. It was effective enough to get me out of the dumps and functioning a little better. Managing life was still very difficult, but I knew I had some tools to keep me from slipping too deeply. He also made one of the first steps a thyroid checkup, and so for a time I was managing that better.

In my late 30s, I found myself refusing to take my thyroid medicine. At the same time, I was asking the universe, if you will, very sincerely for some spontaneous healing. I didn’t want my life to be based on taking a pill (I have zero thyroid function.)—in fact I never did and spent my adult life resenting this necessity.

After 2–3 months of not taking it, I started to look and feel like shit. My hands and feet started retaining fluid, and I sometimes struggled to speak because my glands were swollen around my throat.

I had breakfast with my sister and B-I-L one day and afterwards, my B-I-L remarked to my sister (a nurse) how bad I looked. Maybe later that day, she showed up at my door and more or less dragged me in to urgent care. I confessed that I had stopped taking my medicine and broke down in that moment. We did some tests, got a prescription, and I ended up going home. I suppose you could say this was my suicide attempt, but it wasn’t exactly that given my intentions above.

Curiously, though, it dawned on me that that was as far as I was going to go. After 20 years of wishing I didn’t exist, I realized that I wasn’t going to go all the way, and so I felt I could put that question to bed once and for all. There was some liberation in that. Secondly, I somehow came to a realization that I’m not my body. Before it was my identity, but now it was a thing I had. Third, I realized I wasn’t driving the bus in my life and that something else was. I skated to the edge of the rink, so to speak, and something came and pushed me back into the middle and said “not yet.”

In the two years that followed, my life improved immeasurably and is still on a very good course. One thing I came to recognize is that I had mistaken the nihilistic thoughts as my own. They weren’t. You could say they belonged to my mind, or my monkey mind, or a dark energy, or a demon, but they weren’t mine. They were fed to me, and I gave them strength with my attention and belief. They still come sometimes, but now I just ignore them, and I see them as divorced from my inner self, which comes before the mind and is inherently at peace. You might say that I didn’t want to die, but my ego self did, and that’s what was sucking all my energy until I awoke to an understanding that I wasn’t my ego self.

That whole game is a very natural one. Before you come to an awakening, the mind or ego self will throw everything it has left at you until it is exhausted and it keeps going so long as you give it your attention. When those thoughts come, you can ask “whose voice is this?” and discern whether it is your own or one that you are observing as separate from you.

That you are doomed, flawed, damaged, hopeless, or rejected by life is a myth that is believed. Your inherent nature is peace, joy, love, understanding, and compassion, and all of that is always present but merely obscured by the dark cloud of thought that fixates your attention. You don’t have a miserable life. You are life itself, life choosing life, and life taking care of itself. How else can it be that you are not dead already?

Probably not.
For me the crushing depressive spells seem to revolve around the central themes of choice vs no choice, control vs. no control. I can’t, of course, speak to the issue of unremitting physical pain, or personal loss so profound (like that of the death of a child) that there is no coming back from it.
As hokey as it sounds, what has saved me time and again is a line from popular fiction: Paul Atreides, at the end of Dune says “Whoever has the power to destroy a thing, controls that thing.” (May be slightly paraphrased)
It indicates that there is a choice; to destroy or not.

Control and choice. It has come to just that for me more than once.

@canidmajor I often think of a dune quote also: “Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens”

@rojo That seems to be what happens to me. Knowing that the pendulum will shift and the cycle will end helps me get through. I suffer through about 3–8 months out of the year.

I’ve had depression ever since Freshman year and yeah, I do have suicidal thoughts a lot. It’s usually a low-key wanna die thing, where it’s always on the back of my mind, but it doesn’t take much for it to become more prevalent. I don’t really see myself having much of a future because of it. So yeah, I do think about just ending it all, pretty much all the time.

I suffered from pretty severe depression, off and on, since about the age of 14. There were times, around that age, where I begged something, anything in the universe, to kill me if it could hear me (like some kind of fucked up prayer) because I was too much of a coward to do it myself. After that, I frequently thought about it, but knew I would never do it for a couple of reasons. One was that I was still too much of a baby, but as I got older I also realized that I simply couldn’t do that to the people who love me. Then my best friend committed suicide, which, weirdly, made me even more suicidal for a while (hence my Fluther departure), until it completely flipped and reinforced, even more, the idea that I could never put my loved ones through that. Even if I wasn’t around to suffer the guilt of making them experience it… it was too much. I used to have fleeting thoughts like “they’ll get over it, eventually”, “it’ll be better for everyone”, but no… I could not have been more wrong. I had to learn it in a way that I wish I never had, by losing someone I loved to it.

I also got really sick for a while after that, maybe partially because of my loss (it was a mystery, even for doctors), but it was really bad and there were times I felt closer to death than I ever want to experience again. I was very conscious of the physical ways my presence was fading away. And maybe, if I’d been out of my mind, I wouldn’t have been able to have the turnaround that I did, but the fear of dying, that very physical feeling of slipping away? That’s what really did it for me. It helped me recover from the loss of my best friend, and from my own depression. I haven’t experienced a serious bout of horrifying darkness since.

@tinyfaery Hang in there, do seek treatment. Personally I have had horrible experiences with anti-depressants. The FDA is right to put the black box warnings on them. They may work for you though and if it gets really bad they can literally save your life. CBT was marginal for me but works for many. Psychoanalysis does seem to help and I still see a psychologist periodically. That’s all I do. I had some genetic testing done and found some things. I take a folate supplement, keep stress low when I can and make sure my Vitamin D levels are good. Seems to make a big difference. Cutting alcohol consumption to sub-moderate levels helps too. Depression is not the same for everyone and all kinds of things can cause it. You just need to find what works for you. DON’T DO IT ALONE. You will need a support network.

I’m 54, and suicide has become so ingrained in me that I have idle thoughts about the depth of the water, the speed of the car, the quantity of medication etc. daily, hourly or more.

My mom was a suicide threat when I was a teen.
Never happened.
I’m still here, too.

I can’t promise I’ll be here, but the odds are on it.

I have had very low lows and I’ve been stable. I think about being dead sometimes.

It hasn’t been happening for some time but yesterday I can’t help but think one day I’m just going to die. It seems inevitable and very near in the future. It lasted for a short moment, minutes, maybe, then I’m back in my life again.

How do I think you felt normal? Will and therapy and friends that I can spend time with.

Yeah I’ve felt that way. I’ve dealt with anxiety and depression for at least the past 15 years straight and there have been numerous times where I’ve been convinced that my suicide would be inevitable. However, I’ve managed to channel that into an outlet. For me, it’s art. I still have the taunting and gnawing and seething thoughts from time to time but I always shake through them like staring with a steely gaze through a blizzard. Find what you love and let it eat you before your own negative thoughts do instead.

I am stunned at everyone’s honesty and ability to speak so openly about themselves. I so admire all of you. Truly. I cannot. No one reason in particular. (Damn, probably another thing to chalk up.) No one knows all about me and my proverbial baggage. I’m not saying that with pride either. Just the way it is. And all the Rxxxxx’s just make me feel worse. Very tired.

tinyfaery-
hang in. I know similar feelings. It sucks. A person I know came to town, we went for coffee. I said something- like, “yeah, too bad I have to stick around for that.” and she said: “Oh- you can’t come to heaven if you kill yourself! God will put you in purgatory, and you’ll never see your family, because you’ll be there forever!!!”
Seriously? :|
No wonder I keep my yap shut!

Thanks for all the open and honest answers. @ibstubro has said it best for me. That’s how I feel. I too have a check list. The idea comes out of nowhere and goes just as quickly. Mental illness is present it both sides of my family. 2 suicides that I know of. The older I get and the more I feel the uselessness of it all the closer I might be to doing it one day.

@kevbo I was going to try to die by not taking my thyroid meds, too, but my nurse friend told me it’d never work because people would notice I was dying…especially once I slipped into a coma! So much for that plan. ~

I’m nearly 50 years old now, and have struggled with depression for my entire life (along with crippling anxiety). The first time I wished I was dead, I was five years old. Until I was about 25, I thought about killing myself routinely. If anything upset me over much, the thought would be front and center in my mind for days and weeks at a time. I was absolutely sure I would do it one day…until the day I almost did. I was locked in the bathroom, with several pill bottles in my hand, crying my head off and screaming with mental pain. It was the most “I want to die” feeling I’d ever felt, but in the end, I couldn’t do it. That’s when I became sure I never would. That was a huge weight off my shoulders. The suicidal thoughts were still there, but I could dismiss them as just thoughts, you know?

I’ve been properly medicated since my late thirties, and have made several big changes to make my life a much happier one. Even with several chronic (and painful) medical conditions to deal with, I’ve been remarkably stable. But I still fall in the damn pit at least once a year (winter is a fucking bitch). Recognizing that it will pass keeps me hanging on until it does.

I hope something keeps you hanging on, too, girlie. <3

@augustlan, thanks for sharing that. How interesting. It’s another example of how weird the body can be that it can hold up to so much abuse. (Something I always wondered about with drug addicts and the like.)

I’m really surprised at all these answers. I thought I was the only one who thought this way. I went for counselling once and was asked if I felt suicidal. I was shocked by the question as no one had ever asked me that. I answered honestly yes but that I would never do anything about it as I have my family to think about. That’s what keeps me going in the hard times- the thought of how devastated they would be

I know that despite the medication and awareness of the problem, for ME it will never go away. Depression literally flows through me even though it is not obvious to those who do not know me well. Getting older will make it worse and the thoughts will only become more intense. Deep down, although I am chicken-hearted, I hope I get the chance at some point to slip away.

Yes. I have plans, though not imminent. It is more of a “if this, then this’ sort of option for myself. Right now I have one reason to stick around and a rather important one at that but when that job is done, I have to be realistic about my situation. My situation is relieving me of any life with dignity. I refuse to be isolated, alone, old and infirm and begging.

I’m glad that we all have things in our lives that keep us tied to the earth. It’s amazing how many people live like this. It’s good to know we are not alone.

Let’s all try to remain big chickens. Death will come to us all, eventually.

It is unfortunate that we have things in our lives that keep us tied to the earth when in fact there is NO point in being here. The end will come, but just as we had no control over our entrance neither will we have any over our exit.

^^ True that.

I’m so glad that you asked and that all answered. The echo isn’t so lonnnggggg and lonely. Just a few bubbles away, so to speak.
Thanks.

@ZEPHYRA respectfully disagree. While we cannot, perhaps, choose the time of our entrance, (and there is some speculation about that) we can most definitely choose the time of our exit if we want to.—unless it is all pre-ordained in which case, no we can’t but if it is all choreographed what is the point?—-