Before entering the mental health profession, I’d never met anyone who talked about ending their own life. However, I had been more than familiar with how suicide has been, in some peoples perception, strongly associated with attention seeking.
Where does the association come from? Shall we blame it all on TV drama? Or is there something deeper?
This is my reflection:
When we are on the receiving end of someone talking about killing themselves, we can feel panic, fear and guilt. It feels so uncomfortable that we want to get out of it by fixing the person immediately and for good. Frustratingly, it is a severe illness of the mind that can lead to suicide. There is no instant fix and it can take years of hard work with no guarantee of success. We then feel fatigue as a result of helplessness. Our mind then tries to find other adaptations to make us feel better. “Attention seeking” becomes a very effective idea to use. It’s our own mind’s attempt to avoid feeling so bad about being helpless.
So, what’s the difference between attention seeking behaviour and expressing suicidal intentions?
Reasons behind attention seeking behaviour: Low self-esteem, Loneliness, Anxiety, various mental health issues and unresolved trauma. It’s an action people take to get a response which will make them feel seen, heard and loved.
When someone talks about ending their own life, they are actually saying: ” I am in so much pain, I don’t think I can bear it anymore!” They deeply believe that they don’t have any control over their life and the only power or control they can exercise is through suicide. Often, the idea has been in their mind for a long time before they can find the enormous amount of courage to share it with the person/people they trust.
4 out of 10 people who talked about ending their own life die by suicide (Rory O’connor, 2021). We should always take people’s suicidal intention seriously.
Suicide is more about ending the pain that they can no longer bear, than wanting to die.
(Featured in Happiful magazine, issue 90)