A phrase that needs to be entirely eradicated from the English vocabulary:  committed suicide

In general, I don’t believe in policing words.   I believe that there is a time and a place for just about every phrase.  I think people should think more about the words that they use before they use them… because there is almost always the PERFECT word for each situation… (Heck, be your own Shakespeare… invent your own phrase if one doesn’t exist…)

But for every good rule, there has to be an exception, and I think that the phrase committed suicide needs to go away.

No matter what the reason for taking one’s own life, it is never a “crime.”  It should not be in the same class with horrific atrocities such as genocide or matricide…

Subconsciously or not… when you use that phrase, you’re blaming an innocent victim who died from something else entirely.

I don’t really want to talk about teens or children here because teens taking their own lives is often not the same as when an adult does it.  (SOMETIMES it is.)  But teens, no matter how mature they may seem, are not fully developed enough to understand the finality of the action.  They MAY be reacting to temporary pain.  They may be falling victim to the illogical thought, “I’ll show (insert whomever here).  Imagine how bad they’ll feel when they find out they made me do this.”  But even in the case of kids who can’t think past the moment, they are not criminals.

With this blog I am speaking more of adults.  I’ve mentioned this before, but I had a conversation with a friend today which again left me disheartened and upset about people’s lack of compassion for mental illness.

This friend of mine used two statements so common in reference to taking one’s own life that they have become trite and cliched.  She spoke of the “permanent solution to a temporary problem” and of the “selfishness” of the act.

I talked to her for quite awhile and asked her, “How do you know?”

“Know what?”  she responded

“That the problem was temporary?  That the person was being selfish.”

She responded that all things are temporary and that if God brings us to it, he will bring us through it.  (I’ve mentioned my dislike of that particular phrase before… so I’m not going to get into that…)

Her response made me very sad.  What is it in the human psyche that makes so many want to claim that mental illness is not a REAL thing… that with enough prayer and enough therapy and the right mindset we can THINK ourselves out of a chemical imbalance??

I’m not sure if it’s fear that it will happen to them…  the inability to relate because it HASN’T happened to them. Because they know SOME people who had therapy and it worked for them.

I wonder if these same people believe in THINKING your way out of diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s, ALS…

I have A LOT of people in my family who have had cancer.  A lot of them survived it.  A lot of them didn’t.

Sometimes the problem ISN’T temporary.  Sometimes it’s much more serious than that.

Several years ago a friend of mine’s nephew took his life.  When he did so, he left a note stating that the voices in his head were getting to be too much.  He was afraid of what he was going to do to his family.  He was planning to kill his parents and his sister.  He was in counseling.  He was in therapy.  He was going through all of the right steps, but it wasn’t enough… in the end he took his life to avoid taking theirs.  Is that selfish?  Is that a permanent solution to a temporary problem?

I had a great aunt who struggled her entire life.  Eventually she resorted to electroshock therapy.  Fortunately (?) that worked for her… but the brain is a very complicated organ… and that doesn’t work for everyone.

When we see people suffering through terminal illness like cancer, we call them brave and courageous.  When we see them struggling with depression and anxiety, we call them weak.

It’s so easy to have compassion for someone who is struggling with an illness we can see.  We need to be more compassionate and understanding of those who are struggling with the illnesses we can’t see.

Depression, anxiety, mental illness can be every BIT as fatal as any other horrific disease that no one asked to get…

…so instead of using that horrible phrase let’s say “died from complications due to depression”  or “passed away after a long struggle with her illness”

Let’s not make someone into a criminal just because we are afraid of their disease.  Let’s remember to be understanding.