Published life experiences help lift the veil on suicides caused by mental illness

One evening, many years ago, I sat with a friend outside my father’s hut in the village.

The sun, looking like a fiery orange ball, was setting and daylight was dwindling fast in the blaze of the dropping sun.

The air was warm and full of promise, beaming with possibility. We had both just cleared high school; I from a poor peasant family and he from a middle-income family. He wore new, shiny clothes.

We talked excitedly about the bright future ahead of both of us. Then a few years later, after I had graduated from university, I received the call that one dreads: my friend had committed suicide.

Then the caller described how he had died: He hanged himself with a rope.

DEAD COW
It was during one of those roaring droughts in Taita when the wind howls like a jackal, hurling speckles of loamy soil against leafless trees, leaving a trail of fine dust in its wake.

At such times, one has to walk long distances just to find water, especially for cattle to drink.

My friend had a prized herd of cattle, and on that fateful morning he had walked for over 10 kilometres to find water for his cattle.

Then something happened: One of his cows died. He snapped, took a rope and hanged himself with it. The caller told me that’s how my friend died.

There was a long pause over the phone and then he ended the call, leaving me stunned, trying to measure my loss.

A dead cow triggered suicide? It baffled me to no end. I never understood that mystery until recently, when I was reading Joan Didion’s book Blue Nights.

OVERREACT
She shares her experience of changing her California driving licence for a New York one after moving there and the deep sense of loss she felt.

She was surprised why such a simple transaction as changing one state’s driving licence to another left her so emotionally devastated.

She wondered, “Or was the business with the license just one more case of ‘the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event?’”

Didion writes that the phrase “the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event” was coined by Karl Menninger in Man Against Himself by way of describing the tendency to overreact to what might seem ordinary, even predictable, circumstances: a propensity, Dr Menninger tells us, common among suicides.

He cites the young woman who becomes depressed and kills herself after cutting her hair.

He mentions the man who kills himself because he has been advised to stop playing golf, the child who commits suicide because his canary (pet bird) died, the woman who kills herself after missing two trains.

Notice: not one train, two trains. Think that over. Consider what special circumstances are required before this woman throws it all in.

“In these instances,” Dr Menninger tells us, “the hair, the golf, and the canary had an exaggerated value, so that when they were lost or when there was even a threat that they might be lost, the recoil of severed emotional bonds was fatal”.

For my friend, it was the dead cow that proved fatal. He couldn’t take it; he ended his life when it happened.

However, there probably must have been a bigger issue he had struggled with (maybe even for a long time) that none of us knew about.

Our lives can be startling when examined. Behind the veneer of apparent glamour, smiles, Facebook and Instagram allure and sweet fragrance, there could be real issues.

MENTAL ILLNESS
We have had cases of people killing themselves after their favourite teams lost a match, or students taking their lives after failing tests or national exams.

It has baffled us. This may be because we don’t really understand mental illness. In Africa, the mentally ill are those we call “mad” who go rampaging in the village square.

However, I have learnt from books and experience that mental illness is much wider and subtle, including various forms of depression and other forms of disorders.

One of the best books on depression is Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron — who in 1985 was in the grip of advanced depression, numbed to the point of being unable to speak or even walk, and was suicidal.

He writes that when depression hit, “Of the many dreadful manifestations of the disease, both physical and psychological, a sense of self-hatred — or, put less categorically, a failure of self-esteem — is one of the most universally experienced symptoms, and I had suffered more and more from a general feeling of worthlessness as the malady had progressed … it was gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, stifling anxiety”.

RECOVERY
The Nigerian superstar writer Chimamanda Adichie once wrote about her struggle with depression.

Some of the great writers who have struggled with depression are Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson. J.K Rowling, it is reported, “ … struggled with clinical depression as a single, broke mother before she became a global success with her Harry Potter books, drawing on darker emotions to create the ‘dementors’, creatures that plagued and tormented the series’ heroes”.

It is said that even fame and fortune didn’t cure her depression.

According to William Styron, while there is no easy cure for depression, he has words of hope that it’s possible to emerge strong even after the darkest abyss, and “once again behold the stars”.