A letter from Heather, UK group facilitator

Dear reader,

I grew up in a home where there were a lot of problems. Everyone in our house – the adults, me and my sibling – we all seemed to feel the problems weighing heavy but no one had any words to talk about any of it. One of the key messages I received in childhood was that if something couldn’t be changed, there was no point talking about it. There was no point feeling my emotions, no point talking about my problems.

As I got older, I realised how much the topic of death and suicide seemed to frighten the adults around me. I didn’t talk about my intense longing to die. It seemed pointless. After all, nothing would change and I would only worry other people.

I was ten when Kurt Cobain died. I was too young to take much of it in, it took until my thirties to learn about the vigil that Kurts’ loved ones held, that it may have prevented fans from killing themselves in lonely moments. Speaking openly about his death served a protective purpose away from more death and toward collective mourning. I recall reading the suicide note that was published and being fascinated by the words Kurt chose to end his life with. I wrote a lot of similar letters in my teens as I made attempts to end my own life.

In my twenties I fell into the psychiatric system. I say ‘fell’ because I had no idea what agreeing to see a psychiatrist would mean for me. I only remember wanting the pain to stop and simultaneously being afraid that I was a freak. What if I was in this pain for the rest of my life? I didn’t know I was giving up my autonomy and entering a system that would both help me in some ways but also profoundly harm me.

I began to see my problems and the problems in my family through the words the mental health system used about me. Now I suffered chronic suicidal ideation, my actions were now a set of parasuicidal, attention seeking behaviours that I needed to take responsibility for. I wasn’t asking for help, I was eliciting care. I learned to talk about wanting to die in ways that health care professionals responded to more kindly. This always felt dishonest, as though I was spinning a yarn about something real. It made me feel unreal.

My time in behavioural therapy groups taught me that my suicidal feelings were somehow dangerous. Suicide was often referred to as a contagion and I signed contracts. I promised I wouldn’t use words or describe my feelings in ways that would harm other people. This never made sense to me because I spent many a group break sat with other patients, smoking and chatting openly about all the ‘naughty’ fucked up stuff we’d done to get through the week, things that we couldn’t talk about in the group.

The Covid19 pandemic changed the way I related to suicide. Suddenly everyone around me was going through the end of their world as they knew it. People I considered to be normal openly said that life in lockdown was not worth living. I thought about ending my life a lot. I found a therapist who honoured the words I used about wanting to die. Together we used EMDR techniques to go back to those wordless memories of terror to heal them. I realised that I needed to find my tribe, I had lost touch with myself during those months stuck indoors. I wanted to find the others – the people who understood what it felt like to want to die.

I found my tribe via an activist group called Mad Covid, and then Mad Twitter itself. People tweeted a lot about their self injury and suicide attempts – often in real time. Suddenly I was among friends who understood how much it took to carry on and how suicide and self harm was punished in the system. My friends told me that they didn’t want me to call emergency services or try to stop them dying. Friendship meant so much to me and so I started to trust that I didn’t need to jump in to rescue people. There were times I was sure a friend would die, and then they would stay after all.

I worked on the StopSIM campaign after learning that the police were working with my local mental health team to prosecute mentally unwell people who were trying to kill themselves or seek medical care for self harm. I felt rage upon learning people were going to prison for standing on a bridge in a suicidal state of deep distress. The local NHS Trust eventually stopped the SIM scheme but the attitudes behind it persist today.

Belonging to a Mad community of campaigners and friends felt bittersweet. I witnessed the suicides of three of our members in the first few years of being around. I heard a collective cry of anguish rising up, we were losing our friends in a cruel system that would not listen to us in their darkest moments. I couldn’t accept that my suicidal friends could go to jail or die alone in a psychiatric ward bathroom and that would just be the way things were.

That cry brought me into the Alternatives to Suicide movement. I looked at research about suicide, it confirmed that talking about wanting to die did not have a contagion effect, in fact expressing suicidal thoughts and feelings often relieved the pressure of the pain. It seemed like there was a point to all this talk about suicide.

I didn’t know much about learning how to give people a brave meeting space. I wanted to learn all the different words people use when they talk about suicide, to feel what that kind of group felt like first hand. That is what brought me to Alternatives to Suicide Training, to this site, writing to you.

A dear friend died in September 2023. In her last notes to me, she shared her thoughts about safety and suicide for a blog I was writing. She spoke of the ‘why’ when we talk about feeling suicidal, why being listened to mattered to her so much:

‘The why is the important bit. For me the why is about love and connection and community and belonging.’

My friends words, the love and connection and community and belonging, this is why I am setting up this group. It is about love, connection, community and belonging. It’s because the words we speak and the things that we share really matter. I do think that we can change our lives, and I also think there is a point to feeling suicidal. Most of all, I think, no, I know that you matter. I know that we matter when we are alive and we’ll matter even after we have died.

This group is for you. Welcome.

In solidarity,

Heather