Unless you have some other type of serious mental illness such as schizophrenia, its not likely that the urge to kill yourself happens out of the blue one day. Normally, it begins with depression and a gradual descent into very negative thinking. Your thinking becomes very black and white, there are no shades of grey. You have a hard time not assuming the worst in everything and as the depression gets worse, you begin to experience paranoia. No, not the type where you are thinking that the TV is talking to you, although that is a real thing and those suffering from schizophrenia often are dealing with that. Odd that I mention schizophrenia twice(ok, now it’s three times) in the same paragraph. I happen to have some experience with that, but that’s a later post.
Anyway, getting back to the paranoia; it becomes a real problem when you are getting deeper and deeper into depression. You begin to assume that every hushed conversation is about you. Every time my boss had a meeting with someone in her office and she closed the door, I began spinning, thinking that it was about me and that I was about to get fired. At home, every time my wife was on her phone texting someone, I assumed that it was someone that she was having an affair with. My kids were telling their friends how much they hated me. All of these were completely false, but they were my perception and perception is reality. It becomes a rabbit hole where things just get worse and worse.
Ok, but did something trigger the depression in the first place?
Guys experience depression in many different ways. For some, it could be a significant life event such as the loss of a loved one or a job. It could also be brought on from financial stress. It can also be due to stress at work or health problems. Many of these reasons are the same as women but guys tend to hold it all and not share their stress. Women tend to be more relational and seek out support from others. Guys, not so much. Well, for me, it was a little bit of stress from work. But the primary reason was pretty stupid, I stopped taking my antidepressants.
One of the other reasons many guys experience depression is that they are born with some bad wiring. Thats a bit of an overstatement but the general idea is that I was born as being predisposed to depression. Basically, I dealt with it my entire life. However, I wasn’t diagnosed with it until I was 42. Once I was diagnosed, I began working with my doc to find the right antidepressant for me. I learned that Prozac did nothing for me, Wellbutrin made me want to bite everyone’s head off, and Zoloft was the lesser of all evils. Why lesser? Well, it did help me to feel better, but it took my ability to orgasm away entirely. And that is not an insignificant thing. See, it doesn’t take away the libido (it didn’t for me, anyway) just the ability to get, um, get your rocks off. But the positives outweighed the negatives and I knew that I needed some help. So 100 mg of Zoloft was my daily routine for 5 years. Until it wasn’t.
The insidious thing about antidepressants is that they kinda lift the clouds and help you see things more clearly. They don’t magically make you feel happy, they just help you to see things as they are, not as dark as you think they might be. So as you begin to feel the effects of them, its possible you may decide that you no longer need them. And you slide back into depression. Well, for me, I waited 5 years to stop taking them. I would miss a day here or there but thats no a big deal. I will take it tomorrow for sure. And one day becomes two. And two days becomes a week. And then a week becomes, “I don’t fucking need them anymore“. This was how the Spring of 2017 went.
In June of 2017, I realized that I wasn’t well. I was able to identify some of my negative thinking. I didn’t really see the paranoia and I would not have been able to identify the black and white thinking, but I knew that I was on edge. I began to think that my family would be much better off without me. That I was more of a burden than anything else. That I was a complete fuck up and no one would miss me if I was gone. My wife and I were having fights over stupid shit almost daily. I was detaching and isolating myself. I was miserable at my job and I didn’t feel that I was contributing anything there. I had this gorgeous motorcycle that I found no joy in riding, even though it was less than 6 months old. So I knew things were not good. But I also felt that I could justify how I felt, that it wasn’t all in my head. That the pain I was feeling was real. That the misery I was experiencing at work was genuine, and not my imagination. That the fights with my wife were her fault, not my own negative thinking.
So I am going to start to tie this together with the actual event when I tried to blow my head off next time. My point to this post was to (hopefully) show that depression is gradual and there are plenty of things that happen before acting on the urge to leave this life. Its a slippery slope and once you start down this path, its hard to regain your footing. Don’t assume that you can manage this on your own. You can’t fix your cancer or heart problems on your own, depression is no different. If you are not comfortable talking to a stranger at the Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255, contact a physician. But do not put it off. Once it begins, its hard to stop.
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