Amanda Salisbury

My most recent post was my shell-shocked and hasty reaction to a post by Matt Walsh, though I can’t say that my opinion has much changed.

Matt followed up his post with a second, longer post, in which he considers opinions that have been shared with him and, perhaps, insinuated as his own. He also confronts the cyberbullying that has torrented his direction since the first post.

Let me be clear: I am passionate about this topic. I disagree with Matt on some issues. I don’t lend my voice or my support to any bully who would threaten a person for speaking, even when that speech feels offensive or any other emotion-laden word. Don’t be a bully. It’s unbecoming.

I’ve read both posts and no comments.

After reading Matt’s second post, I submitted a comment. The last time I saw it, the thing was awaiting moderation. There have likely been many, many comments posted in the interim.

Unlike my first post, an email I wrote to my sister, this post was written not as a reaction but as a response. What’s the difference? Well, the first was my gut issuing forth through my fingertips. The second was my brain searching for the words to give Matt pause, to help him reflect on a different perspective. I shared the first, and I was super nervous. I am about to share the second, and I’m super nervous. Though I have a tiny readership and love you all, these are big ideas to put out into the world. I’d think maybe I was sick if I wasn’t nervous : ) 

My comment on Matt Walsh’s second post regarding suicide, 8/13/2014, approximately 9:00 pm:

I can tell a cancer patient to fight and the cancer can still win. I can tell a suicidal person to fight and the suicide still wins. Doesn’t mean I should stop telling people to fight. It does mean that the complexities of life tend not to listen to third parties, including dictionary definitions.

I don’t know if you read my response to your first post on this matter, since it was posted to my own blog, but I think something bears repeating.

“Expecting a depressed person to make a sound decision is not unlike asking a person with dementia to make a sound decision. It may happen by coincidence but not by design. So when choosing life or death, the whole difference between the suicidal and the not suicidal is the depression. The depression colors everything, including life and death decisions.”

Outside suicidal ideation, it is fairly straightforward to apply a textbook definition to suicide as a choice. Inside suicidal ideation, things become much less clear.

In 2010, my nephew was in basic combat training. He ran a five-minute mile. Then he turned 18. Then he was flown to a hospital and diagnosed with leukemia – a blast crisis. Three weeks later, he died. The drugs had done their best and killed the leukemia. My nephew died from sepsis. I was confused. I simply couldn’t understand how the body could betray him so quickly and so thoroughly.

In 2008, I had a plan to commit to suicide. I planned it. Seems, pretty straightforwardly, a choice. My plan was interrupted by the most random thing. The interruption meant the difference between death and life. Now I can hardly believe my reasoning at the time. I was going to kill myself to avoid hurting my children. Postpartum depression turned me very nearly into one of those mothers on the news who is carted to prison for killing her own children. My body had betrayed me – my mind had betrayed me. It betrayed me with thoughts too horrid to contemplate. It convinced me that I would kill my own beautiful children in my sleep. And it betrayed me again when it told me my options were to kill them or kill myself.

I don’t write any of this as woe competition. I write this because I’m trying to elucidate a major flaw in your logic. The choice in suicide is a whitewashed tomb. Sanitized on the outside and rotten on the inside. The family, friends, onlookers of a suicidal person see the sanitized shell of a choice. The suicidal person lives on the rotten inside of that choice. A choice made rotten by disease.

So when you, coldly in my opinion, say that Robin Williams died from his choice, you leave a metric ton unsaid. It is the stuff unsaid that is vital to the conversation. Decisions are poisoned all the time. Sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently. Drunk driving is a choice, a choice poisoned by overconsumption of alcohol. The driver who made that poisoned choice must still bear the consequences of the choice. One who dies from suicide bears the consequences of a poisoned choice. Poisoned, not by alcohol, but by disease.

Don’t simplify it. Don’t sanitize it. Don’t make it so academic that it fails to capture the empathy and compassion possible in unspoiled human nature.

Tell a person in your sphere – loved one, caller, emailer, guy on the ledge – tell a person that he has options. Lead him to them. Love him through them.

But please don’t come online and tell the world that suicide prevention is as straightforward as a rational, clear choice between life and death. To do so is a disservice to the people suffering from their own and others’ choices poisoned by disease.

People of the world, if you are dealing with suicidal thoughts and impulses, your choices are poisoned by disease. You can seek to be healed. Medical science can begin to draw the poison out of your choices so that you can see them clearly, so that you can be informed. Spirituality, family, support structures can help draw the poison away, too. Please don’t choose suicide today. Please seek help. Please seek medication, counseling, and other things that can free you from a poisoned choice. Delay choosing death. Wait and try and fight until you are freed from the poison of depression. And then keep living. Please.

1.800.273.TALK (8255) or suicidepreventionlifeline.org

That’s it. That’s what I wrote. If you are leaning Matt’s way, know that this isn’t a contest. You can take in all of the perspectives and discern for yourself what is true, what is beneficial, what is worthy.