DISCLAIMER
I wrote the following post back in November in preparation for suicide but since changed my mind and I’ve written a few pieces on the topic since.
Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before things can get any better and I think I am slowly turning the corner but I still wanted to release this post to show the state of my mind at the time.
It’s not going to be easy, there is a long way to go and a lot that has to change but whereas when I wrote the post above I felt trapped and unable to make the changes I need to, now it feels like I’ve been given permission to recover.
When a plane crashes, it’s normally the culmination of a number of factors coinciding at the wrong time that caused the disaster, take out one of the factors and it’s just a regular flight like any other.
Not that the single death of a middle aged man can be compared to a fatal plane crash, for a start, a plane crash is tragic because it’s so rare. You have to be really unlucky to die in such circumstances, it’s not the same for suicide, a man takes his own life every 2 hours in the UK, and in some age brackets it is the leading cause of death.
If things have gone as planned, by the time this post is published I will have already joined that statistic just one day before the 40th anniversary of my birth. This comes as absolutely no shock to me but I accept that it may cause distress to a fairly small number of people that my existence coalesced with and I want to answer the questions people usually ask when these kind of events unfold, why.
This was not an impulsive act, it was not a knee jerk reaction or permanent solution to a temporary problem. It was a planned decision. In fact, this piece itself was written around six weeks prior to the event.
It was not fuelled by alcohol. Alcohol is often blamed as a factor in these things and I may well have drank the weekend prior to my death but I was stone cold sober when I purchased the equipment needed for a dignified and peaceful exit strategy. Nor was it caused by stopping taking anti-depressants, there seems little point in taking ineffective medication with nasty side effects.
There are many factors at play and I’ve written about many of them on this blog before.
My weight had a chilling effect on my quality of life and the decision to take “early retirement”. Being obese is not fun. I was very conscious of its life limiting impact. People my size do not get to live to old age. If you’re lucky, you get cardiovascular disease and die from a sudden heart attack so there is little suffering in death, for you at least.
If you’re not lucky, you might have multiple strokes that take away your dignity and ability to take care of yourself. Old age is not something that has ever appealed to me. What is the point of extending life if the extra years you gain are spent in a care home, being prodded by strangers and becoming a burden on your family? I’d rather go out close to my peak than experience the slow decline of ageing but each to their own. Perhaps my attitude would be different if my quality of life was better.
I’ve watched my mum going in and out of hospital on regular occasions over the last 20 years. Mum lost both her parents, one of her brothers to suicide and a friend whom died very suddenly and unexpectedly in her early 30s. At the same time her marriage collapse and I suffered depression in my teens. She went from being a busy nursing sister looking after children with infectious diseases to losing everything very quickly.
I have always felt a great deal of guilt that I was the straw that broke the camels back. She ended up under section at Park House, North Manchester General Hospital and took up chain smoking. Mum had smoked in her teens but not in my lifetime until a CPN convinced her that it would be good for her nerves, just because she wanted to smoke in front of her.
At the time I was working and would go straight from work to the hospital to see her and it just tore me to pieces inside seeing her in such a distressed state. It felt like I was constantly having to battle the doctors that were treating her as some sort of human guinea pig.
They were frying her brain with ECT against her will and ignoring my protests. There is no clinical evidence for this Victorian barbarism, it is banned in most sane countries, but in the UK, twisted psychiatrists that spent more time off sick than in work themselves dished it out because the brain damage they caused made patients more docile. She has suffered from memory problems ever since.
Then there was the Lithium fiasco. They released her to stay at my auntys house and put her on a high dose of lithium without monitoring. Her hands were trembling all the time. She kept falling asleep with lit cigarettes in her mouth, often causing small burns but they ignored it and acted like it was part of her mental health problems.
One day, I was looking after her and she was so totally out of it, I decided to call an ambulance. This just wasn’t right, it wasn’t my mum. It turned out she had very serious lithium poisoning. We could easily have sued the NHS for the way she had been treated.
Whilst in Park House my father decided to divorce her. It turned out he had been having an affair with two separate women at the same time, one that we treated like an aunty. It made my skin crawl at the thought of the way she stroke my head as I lay on her lap whilst she was secretly destroying my family.
In fact, because my mum was so ill at the time, it was left to me and my aunty to respond to the divorce petition whereby my father blamed her “unreasonable behaviour” of favouritism towards me as his grounds for divorce. I was livid at the time. I very rarely refer to him as “dad” anymore. I would cut up every card and destroy any Christmas presents he bought for a long time. She may not have held animosity towards him for the way he behaved, but I sure as hell did.
I was lucky in one way, I had already moved out of home by then and had my own flat, my younger brother and sister were left to fend for themselves with the exception of help from my aunty and uncle. I was a young adult, but they were still school kids.
Over the years I’ve spent more time in different hospitals and wards than I care to remember visiting mum. There was the day I was supposed to register for Uni when mum took an overdose. A&E was full of drunken freshers students that had banged their heads and there was I with mum again. I felt quite sorry for myself. After managing to pull myself out of my own depression, it felt very unfair that I was back in carer mode but then again, I felt guilty for feeling that way too.
Every time mum has been in hospital, she’s ended up with worse problems before she’s got out. I can’t even count the number of chest infections and falls she’s had. Everytime, that same sense of foreboding, not again.
So you see, me and hospitals, we don’t get along. I know nobody likes hospitals, nobody wants to be ill. I don’t want to put Mandy through that, visiting me and wishing she was somewhere else.
Earlier this year, my aunty, who was living with my mum as part carer, part company unexpectedly died at the age of 64. She caught covid and ended up in hospital but whilst she was in hospital, her bowels perforated. Too sick for the emergency surgery she needed to deal with her bowels, we had to watch her die slowly over several days, vomiting up her own faeces and unable to eat. It has to be the most traumatic thing I’ve ever seen. The hospital were great but it was a horrible, undignified way to die and I can still see her last breaths when I close my eyes.
I didn’t want that. I wanted to go peacefully and in control, free from pain, at least in a physical sense. The thought of being hospital and catheterised was something I could not bare.
My sense of history repeating with mums career collapsing at its peak was unnerving. I couldn’t be a failure, there was no room for me to be weak when I felt such a strong burden of responsibility for mum. I had to be the dependable one, but what happens when the dependable one can no longer be depended on?
Before I started writing on this blog I opened up on facebook about the fact I was struggling and the pressure I felt to provide. There were a few people that were openly supportive and I was very grateful for just getting some kind of recognition of what was going on inside my skull. I can sometimes be a bit abrasive on facebook when it comes to issues I feel passionately about but this wasn’t about principles or injustices, it was venting a side of me that nobody saw and I was very careful to word it so as not to make it appear like I was associating blame because it wasn’t about right or wrong, it wasn’t about anything other than how I was feeling at that time.
I’m a fairly typical man. I never talked about my feelings, I bottled them up and just kept going to the point where I could contain them no more. It just feels painfully uncomfortable to talk about this stuff, hearing it come out of my own vocal chords just makes the denial impossible and I needed to be strong. I needed to hold it back because the reality is nobody wants to hear your problems. It makes people feel uncomfortable.
One of my wife’s cousins decided that the idea that men could be under pressure to provide was an offence to her and couldn’t possibly be reality. She actively denied my own “lived experience” with the façade of pretending to care.
You can’t criticise men for not talking about their feelings when the second they do, and say something you might not like to admit, that people slap us down. If we don’t talk, it’s “toxic masculinity”, if we do talk, it’s misogyny just to suggest that there are situations where men feel under pressure.
I wasn’t even talking about an external pressure. It’s not that my wife has said to me if you’re not earning, I’m off. On the contrary, for the first fourteen years of our relationship she was the higher earner and she paid all our bills and looked after me for the six months I was a student and not also working.
That doesn’t mean that the pressure is any less real. I feel a strong need to be the one that can look after my friends and family and anytime where I’ve felt insecure about my job, it causes a huge amount of anxiety. Being the Jon that looks after people when they need help, being the one that will give people lifts, pay for family meals or just the one who can be a shoulder to cry on is central to my identity. I was cut from the same cloth as my mum and she was very much the kind of person that would give you the coat from off her back.
The biggest contributor to my death was this feeling of helplessness and threat to that identity.
I was in a lot of debt, £5000 on credit cards, £1000 on an overdraft, a £25,000 loan, a £28,000 loan and a £10,000 loan, a lease car costing over £350 per month. I know that this sounds like a lot and like it was reckless to get into so much debt, and there is some truth to that. I was a high earner and the debt was serviceable when I took it out.
Most of the debt came from the covid period and was spent on home improvements. I should have spent less, I admit that, it was a gamble but it was still affordable at the time with the income I had and the money borrowed wasn’t for selfish reasons. I could and would have been able to service the debt fully, albeit living more frugally, which I had been anyway but the sudden increases in energy and fuel bills exacerbated the problem at the wrong time.
The real problem was that needing to service these debts left me in a position where I needed to continue to earn a high wage but my working life was pretty much turned upside down by covid.
I’d gone from working in an office environment where I knew everybody and had physical contact with colleagues on a daily basis to working mainly from home at a time of great change within the company and it triggered my insecurities, and led to three major bouts of severe depression and suicidal ideation, with periods of coping in between.
I had gone from being someone that was dependable, reliable, enthusiastic and passionate to a dead weight and it wasn’t fair on my colleagues, many of whom had far worse problems than I did but were able to handle them in a much more positive way. I had colleagues in Ukraine that had literally lost their homes and faced the threat of war everyday.
It got to the point where even thinking about work would fill me with a sense of dread and foreboding. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t sleep properly. I just felt like a massive failure.
I want to be clear that my employers are not to blame for what has happened. Change is a natural part of working life and my bosses have gone far beyond in terms of trying to support me to get through this. I am particularly grateful to Jarrod Martin, Richard Kennaugh and Scott Brown. All three have been a tremendous support and it is thanks to them that I have gone on for so long. I’ve never been put under unreasonable pressure or treated unfairly as a result of my mental health problems. They did everything they could.
Despite all the support, I feel jaded and burnt out. My energy levels have just been really low. Therapy hasn’t helped. Antidepressants may have numbed the lows but they didn’t get rid of the suicidal thoughts and the side effects, particularly a sexual desensitivity did not help with my inability to sleep and self esteem.
I don’t suit working from home. I’m better when I can bounce ideas of people and work on things with my colleagues, especially when my confidence is low and I need reassurance. At home I feel isolated and panic can sometimes creep in.
At the same time, working in the office is not what it used to be. As a big guy, I need a strong office chair. At the old office, all our chairs just so happened to be good for my needs but at the new office, the majority of the seats are poor quality plastic seats. I’ve been in a situation before where a seat has collapsed on me at work. It’s humiliating. When I first moved over to the new office, I brought my chair from the old office with me but now we don’t have dedicated desks, it’s hotdesking. I’ve been lucky so far in that I’ve managed to grab my old seat when I was in the office but it is a cause of anxiety.
On the occasions I attended the office it has been very quiet and I haven’t known the people there so there isn’t the same kind of atmosphere. I felt a bit left behind.
There was a temporary reprieve and period where I felt I got back my passion and my confidence returned for a short while but the feeling of being out of my depth and an imposter returned. I can’t keep going through these spells where I fall apart completely. There have been lots of triggers, the past few years there’s been the turmoil of covid and a family situation, there’s been a miscarriage and then the death of my aunty. All hit me hard and I just lacked the resilience to cope.
I’m just not sure that this career is what I should be doing but I was trapped. I considered taking a chance and moving somewhere new to rebuild my confidence but what If I did that and it didn’t go well? My energy levels were so low, my confidence on the floor and my sleep pattern completely screwed. A new job can be very tiring and I might just have discovered that I’m completely burnt out.
I was on a good wage for a senior developer but with that comes high expectations, and rightly so. If I went for a less senior role, I’m sure it would have rang alarm bells at any company looking to hire me and financially, I just can’t afford to take a pay cut. I was only just staying above water as it was. If I could have got through to 2025, the financial pressures would have eased, as all three loans would be paid of by the end of that year but that’s still three years away and in the meantime, all the bills are still going up and there’s no safety gap left. There’s no fat I can really trim, I’d already cut my spending down as much as I could.
I had this internal sense that this isn’t what I should be doing any more. Writing is really what I wanted to do but there’s no money in that, especially for someone unproven like I was. I wasn’t particularly talented as a writer either.
At the same time I could sense my wife getting more annoyed that I was just lying here depressed and not working whilst she was going out and working everyday. If I took a paycut somewhere else or even took unpaid time off to try and write and re-find myself, the financial pressure would have led to arguments. She is much more conservative than I was money wise, and that’s a good thing. She would worry about money and rather save up than spend.
Me having to go begging to her would have been intolerable for both of us. I didn’t enjoy my job anymore but felt too depressed to find a new one. I couldn’t afford to take a paycut but the expectation for the sort of salary I was on comes with pressure that I couldn’t handle.
I didn’t want to just see my life decline right before my eyes, letting down all the people I care about in the process. It felt like a complete no win situation and the only other way out was the permanent one.
This wasn’t a permanent solution to a temporary problem. It was an end to suffering that has plagued most of my life, adult and child. My death would at least secure a death benefit to pay off my creditors and the mortgage. I know people will say that I’m being selfish and not thinking about how much it would hurt my wife and people around me but the way I see it, there’s a good chance I would have lost everything we have anyway. This at least means something can come of the whole mess.
Believe me, I had thought about the consequences for the people that matter to me over and over again. Most nights were filled with incredibly vivid thoughts about exactly what would happen in the aftermath as if presented by the ghost of Christmas future. I just didn’t have the energy to keep fighting. I knew what it felt like to have to look after someone with severe depression. It was exhausting and the unsavoury truth is that you are a burden on the people that love you and no matter how devastating a blow suicide is, at least it can bring closure and an end to the secondary suffering caused by mental illness. It’s a tortuous thought to think that your partner will be happier without you long term but that does not mean there’s not an element of truth to it. Life can be cruel.
I just couldn’t see another way out of this that ends well. The world didn’t owe me a living and I didn’t deserve the job I had based on my performance for the last couple of years. In many other careers, I would already have had lost my job. I don’t know if there was something else going on, a physical reason for my energy malaise.
I’d been grieving for my own life for sometime, the inevitable turned out to be inevitable. It’s nobody else’s fault. I don’t want people thinking what if they did x or y, the problems were too big to solve and maybe I didn’t want a different solution enough.
I went out in control, on my own terms and seemingly on top. Had I allowed the drift to continue, that sense of “why” would have been replaced with that of relief and a sad end to a sad life.
I go out having lived a little, I had adventures, I had successes and triumphs, I had happy times and I hope I was able to bring a little light to the lives of a few people. Death comes to us all.
I regret the hurt that it will cause people that I loved and loved me back. I tried to hold on for the sake of others but eventually the pull of gravity was just too strong to resist. I don’t want people to feel sad or blame themselves but I know that guilt is a natural part of the grieving process. I want you to remember the good times. I was never perfect. I made mistakes but I liked to think that I at least tried to be a kind person, a caring person and a good person. I had a big heart, perhaps sometimes too big for my own good.
Thank you for sharing your lives with me. I wish you happiness, prosperity and above all else, love. Look after each other and keep me in your hearts and share those happy memories!
Rant Over 