An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [43]
I understand why Jekyll killed himself before Hyde had taken over completely. I took a massive overdose of lithium with no regrets.
Within psychiatric circles, if you kill yourself, you earn the right to be considered a “successful” suicide. This is a success one can live without. Suicidal depression, I decided in the midst of my indescribably awful, eighteen-month bout of it, is God’s way of keeping manics in their place. It works. Profound melancholia is a day-in, day-out, night-in, night-out, almost arterial level of agony. It is a pitiless, unrelenting pain that affords no window of hope, no alternative to a grim and brackish existence, and no respite from the cold undercurrents of thought and feeling that dominate the horribly restless nights of despair. There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as “successful” and “unsuccessful” to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who “fail” at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right. Suicide, however, is almost always an irrational act and seldom is it accompanied by the kind of rigorous intellect that goes with one’s better days. It is also often impulsive and not necessarily undertaken in the way one originally planned.
I, for example, thought I had covered every contingency. I could not stand the pain any longer, could not abide the bone-weary and tiresome person I had become, and felt that I could not continue to be responsible for the turmoil I was inflicting upon my friends and family. In a perverse linking within my mind I thought that, like the pilot whom I had seen kill himself to save the lives of others, I was doing the only fair thing for the people I cared about; it was also the only sensible thing to do for myself. One would put an animal to death for far less suffering.
At one point I bought a gun, but, in a transient wave of rational thought, I told my psychiatrist; reluctantly, I got rid of it. Then for many months I went to the eighth floor of the stairwell of the UCLA hospital and, repeatedly, only just resisted throwing myself off the ledge. Suicidal depression does not tend to be a considerate, outward, or other-considering sort of state, but somehow the thought that my family would have to identify the fallen and fractured me made that ultimately not an acceptable method. So I decided upon a solution that seemed to me to be poetic in its full-circledness. Lithium, although it ultimately saved my life, at that particular time was causing me no end of grief and sorrow. So I decided to take a massive overdose.
In order to keep the lithium from being vomited back up, I had gone to an emergency room and obtained a prescription for an anti-emetic medication. I then waited for a break in the informal “suicide watch” that my friends and family, in conjunction with my psychiatrist, had put into place. This done, I removed the telephone from my bedroom so I would not inadvertently pick it up—I could not take the phone off its hook entirely as I knew this would alert my keepers—and, after a terrible row, and in a very agitated and violent state, I took handful after handful of pills. I then curled up in my bed and waited to die. I hadn’t planned on the fact that one’s drugged brain acts differently from one’s alert brain. When the telephone rang I must have instinctively thought to answer it; thus I crawled, semi-comatose, to the telephone in the living room. My slurred voice alerted my brother, who was calling from Paris to see how I was doing. He immediately called my psychiatrist.
It was not a pleasant way not to commit suicide. Lithium is used to teach coyotes to stop killing sheep: often a single experience with a lithium-treated sheep carcass will make a coyote sick enough to keep his teeth to himself. Although I had taken medication to keep me from vomiting up the lithium, I still ended up sicker than a coyote,