Synaptic Silence

Editorial for the Oregonian, published but date unknown

The testimony before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday by Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore, concerning the suicide of his son, Garrett, was truly courageous. Suicide of a loved one is a subject that is extremely difficult for most people to discuss in private among trusted friends, much less in a public forum where the inevitable criticisms of what the senator and his family might have done to prevent Garrett’s death will inevitably arise.

Smith’s public airing of his and his family’s grief, his poignant description of their search to find meaning in this most personal of tragedies, and his pledge to help other families prevent further needless deaths are selfless actions that represent the highest and best use of his public office.

His story was particularly poignant for me. I work as a mental health investigator for Washington County. It is a job that few people know about outside the rather insular world of others in similar positions. Every day, suicidal individuals suffering from depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other mental conditions come or are brought to emergency rooms across the state.

Many are seeking help to keep them from acting on their suicidal impulses and are willing to do whatever is required to keep themselves safe. Many others, however, arrive at the hospital having just attempted to kill themselves or with imminent plans to do so, yet are unwilling to voluntarily accept treatment to keep them from completing the act.

The latter are the people we see every day. Our job is to determine whether they are truly likely to attempt to take their own lives if no outside intervention is brought to bear. But what we do is not the focus here. They are. We see them in the moment, often just hours after taking an overdose, cutting their wrists or stabbing themselves, shooting themselves or intentionally placing themselves in potentially lethal situations that have resulted in serious or disabling injuries.

We also see their families, most of whom are devastated by something that they cannot truly comprehend.

I admit that I still struggle with the issue. I likely always will—in spite of an excellent education; more than 13 years as a mental health professional; past work counseling people who have lost relatives to suicide; my own continuing struggle with bouts of major depression; and the past three years dealing daily with people who have tried to take their own lives and often are sorry they didn’t succeed. If the will to live is a basic tenet of human experience that most of us accept without question, the will to die is an idea we are most comfortable ignoring.

Ignorance, though, is something we cannot afford when the subject is suicide. Unselfish disclosures like those by Gordon Smith are crucial in helping us to combat our self-defensive tendencies and to bring the problem into the light. We have to push ourselves beyond our revered societal norms of bootstrapping and independence to realize that mental illness can completely rob people of their abilities to achieve self-reliance.

Left alone, kept at a safe distance out of our own need for personal comfort, they can and do kill themselves—leaving us to attempt to reconcile our own blindness and inaction with the overwhelming grief, loss and responsibility we bear as a result.

There is hope, however, as Smith reminded us. Modern medications have proven extremely effective in combating the depression and psychotic symptoms that often move people to commit suicide.

Research is ongoing into more reliable means of identifying and recognizing those who are prone to harm themselves. But the true hope isn’t in a pill or a syringe or inside a psychiatric ward somewhere. Rather, it lies in our willingness to admit our own inherent vulnerability to despair and surrender to the darker elements of our lives—to realize that we’re not so different as we might think from those who actually kill themselves.

And to let others in our lives know that we care for them and are there for them, if for no other reason than that every human life is precious in and of itself. That’s a goal we call all embrace and one that, even if it saves just one life along the way.