I better understood why my calls - even that plane ticket - could not have prevented this disease from taking its course. We all had.Īfter her death, her parents allowed me to read her journal, which highlighted the terrifying hallucinations that plagued her, devouring her at night when everyone else was safely in bed. One night, she swallowed her stockpile of meds and died a few hours later.
Someone consumed by a severe mental health illness is not able to make a reservation, pack a suitcase, go to the airport and get on a plane.ĭeaths of despair: My sister doesn't have COVID-19, but I'm scared she won't make it out of 2020
I even sent her an airplane ticket, to be used any time, to visit me. For what turned out to be her final months, I spoke with her every day, thinking that my attentions would help safeguard her. She spent her last year in and out of the psychiatric ward at a major medical center, where she had the best of care. Mental health crisis: New 988 suicide hotline can be our fresh start.įive years later, my friend was suffering from hallucinations and most likely bipolar disorder. Her condition turned out to be much more serious than that still it was the openness about our mutual maladies that brought us together. We had met at the University of California, Berkeley, when I was in the throes of depression and she had suffered what she understood to be a concussion. I, once, had to learn the limits of “being there” in the hardest way imaginable many years ago when I lost a friend to suicide. The Raskins said their son had been “ enveloped in the love not only of his bedazzled and starstruck parents but of his remarkable and adoring sisters.”Īlas, not even that was enough to prevent his death. It’s not that Tommy was alone - he had an army of family and friends who loved him dearly. One posted that she wished she could have been there for him, as if she had a superpower that might have saved him. Indeed, depression turns us into secretive people who conceal their pain - and their risk. As one blogger wrote a few years ago for a mental health campaign, “People suffering from mental health problems (pull) a shroud of secrecy over their lives in the hope that people don’t find out how they’re really feeling.”
My bipolar friend who died by suicide did not.Īs much as I was pained by Tommy’s death, I also found myself vexed as I read comments on his public Facebook page, because some posts highlighted wrong notions about depression and suicide. Capitol, where the congressman was present because he believed it was his duty to count the electoral votes and confirm Joe Biden’s presidential victory.Īn invisible burden: I have a disability everyone can see. It took courage for the Raskins to come forward. The family continued to show courage when, the day after Raskin buried his son, the grieving father found himself caught in the Trump-fueled insurrection at the U.S. The hotline: Finally we can call 988 suicide hotline when we fear that we or a loved one is at riskīecause of the stigma surrounding suicide, many researchers say these numbers are underreported.
His depression was "a kind of relentless torture in the brain for him, and despite very fine doctors and a loving family … the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last.” Misunderstanding depressionĪ friend sent me the Raskins’ message because she knows I’ve been an advocate for openness about not only mental illness - especially depression, which I also suffer from - but also the plague of suicides in this country, which took nearly 50,000 Americans in 2018. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the annual suicide rate increased 35% from 1999 through 2018, with the suicide rate among men nearly four times higher than women. He also had a secret, which ultimately took his life.Īt the end of the statement, the Raskins named the disease that killed their son. Tommy “had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind,” they wrote. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Sarah Bloom Raskin, memorialized Tommy in a lengthy post on Medium, introducing many of us to their brilliant and much-loved son. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. He left a short note for his family, which read: "Please forgive me. On the last day of December, 25-year-old Harvard law student Thomas Raskin died by suicide.
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