A Splintered Mind

NOTICE: Since I am disabled, sometimes I am offline. Please don't expect a speedy response to your comments. If you need immediate help, please call the hotline or reach out to somebody you trust. Update 2016: This article was featured in my book "Saying NO to Suicide" , with added commentary. On National Suicide Prevention Day last week, many Twitter celebrities did their civic duty by retweeting the same two tweets over & over again, both pointing to suicide prevention hotlines. Some people who discuss suicide the other 364 days of the year were irritated by the superficial emphasis on hotlines—as if tweeting a hotline constituted quality support. Certainly, Twitter can be vapid. Twitter advocacy is usually about feeling charitable more than actually being charitable. But were suicide prevention hotlines as bad as people claimed? I generally considered a hotline the last option because there are so many other better, more personable, resources out the...

During #NSPW17 , my ebook for the suicidal (& their families) is FREE for iBooks, Kobo, B&N & Kindle https://t.co/qkcmqt8PkC #suicide Plz RT pic.twitter.com/JsFVDEy7T5 — Douglas Cootey (@SplinteredMind) September 14, 2017 Another year; another National Suicide Prevention Week has passed. This year I thought it would be a good service to the community if I offered my ebook, Saying “NO” to Suicide , for FREE throughout the week. Since I’d never made my ebooks FREE before, I had no idea what an ordeal this would become. I started last Saturday, and soon Kobo reflected the new price. Yes! Excitement! By midnight, Apple’s iBooks was also reflecting the price. This was going to work! But then World Suicide Prevention Day arrived on the 10th, and neither B&N nor Kindle reflected the newer, freer price. This was a problem because I sell most of my books on Amazon’s Kindle (followed closely by iBooks). I decided to hold off making any an...

September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month . This means that your social media timelines will suddenly be filled with celebrities sharing the national hotline. The cynic in you may roll your eyes. These celebrities will care very, very deeply in 280 characters; lots of their "show somebody you care" posts will gets thousands of likes and reposts, but where were they on August 31st? Where will they be on October 1st? Chasing a new cause, probably. Mounting their social media steed and charging to the next virtue signal over the hill beyond while shouting, "Don't forget to like and retweet!" With the sea of hotline tweets will come angry killjoys ranting about how these celebrities don't really care, or they don't care enough, or those hotlines are terrible and they trace your call and alert the police so don't call them guys! It can all be a bit much.

Just a few thoughts before my day takes me away. The other day, I thought I’d celebrate St. Patty’s Day with The Cranberries. Dolores O’Riordan has been on my mind lately, and her voice was just the Irish taste I was looking for. However, I couldn’t listen to her voice and not remember what had recently happened to her. We won’t know officially how or why she died until next month. In the meantime, rumors swirl from police at the scene of fentanyl and suicide. People pay a heavy price for addiction. Dolores struggled with depression, suicide, and addiction for years, then paid with her life. She sang in 1996 about the dangers of allowing drugs and external forces to have control over our lives, but it seems that years later she still hadn’t gained control. I suddenly felt very sad for her. This brought an end to listening to The Cranberries. The pain was too recent and personal. I experienced suicidal ideation early last week. It was the fir...

On this World Suicide Prevention Day , I wanted to write to people who hide behind the illusion of strength. They give the appearance of mental well-being by posting excellent advice, uplifting memes, and beautiful quotes, but privately they struggle with the overpowering tidal forces of suicidal depression. When that tide sweeps them away, their friends are left surprised and stunned. As many of you know, Ronnie McNutt ¹ took his own life while live streaming on Facebook last month. It was traumatic and devastating to those who witnessed it. According to his friend, Ronnie was severely drunk, so it’s easy to assume that he might not have been thinking clearly when he posted such a strong, demanding, yet earnest post before ending his own life. What can we learn from his example? Ronnie didn’t reach out for help. He posted on Facebook, then, while inebriated, streamed his last moments. That is such an extreme and unusual situation, you may feel you have nothing to l...

As National Suicide Prevention Week comes to a close, I wanted to share a few words. I was once suicidal. I hated myself. I hated my life. I was blind to the love of people around me. I was virtually on the precipice, but stepped back at the last moment because of their love. They mattered to me, and I mattered to them. I remembered that at the moment it would do the most good. I survived that dark period, and other dark periods that followed. I survived, healed, and now I try to help other people as desperately miserable as I once was by opening up about depression , ADHD , and suicide with my writing. In fact, I wrote a book to #StopSuicide , but helping people doesn’t need to be that elaborate. Just listen and care when somebody is in crisis. Take the time to care. Don’t recoil from the subject. The fact somebody is opening up to you about such a difficult subject is an amazing blessing in your life. Don’t waste it. The other night I spoke with a gentleman whose b...

If you struggle with suicide, depression or anxiety, the types of people you have in your support network can make the difference between them being a lifeline or a weight. It’s been over two years since I was last suicidal. I wasn’t making dark and deadly plans at the time. I simply thought I would be better off dead. It was the matter-of-factness of the “epiphany” that startled me the most. It seemed perfectly logical. Fortunately, I’ve heard this logic before and immediately engaged my coping strategies. I let family members know, I prayed deeply, and since I didn’t have a current counselor, I reached out to a bishop for a recommendation. Quite quickly, I put the suicidal ideation behind me. That’s the benefit of coping strategies. It also helps that I was able to analyze my feelings and separate my awareness from the emotional maelstrom. I could outthink the destructive thoughts. This is very difficult for many people, though. They get caught up in the emotional maelstrom. ...

  It's not a great day today. The bug the children brought home with their homework & happy tales of school days may have finally left me yesterday, but after spending an afternoon at the Salt Lake Comic Con, the effort took a greater toll than I had prepared to pay. I swallowed copious amounts of Vitamin C, then rubbed my hands with sanitizer every thirty minutes, but there was nothing I could do to keep the ticking at bay. I'm hobbling about today on two forearm crutches when I'm not lying in my bed willing my body to stop moving. Tic disorders are inconvenient things. The Leprechaun is in the other room bundled in blankets in her bed—something I wish I could do, but I cannot return to sleep. Only the Brownie is bouncing with energy. Too bad we weren't able to send her to church with her mother, but on the upside I have a nurse on hand to bring me protein shakes and be amazed at my photo skills. I only have a few more years to amaze her this way until she is able ...

Even despite the worst sickness in years, I’ve maintained an even keel. Come celebrate with me. Today is the 650th day since I was last suicidal. Keeping track of this stat is only something I began six hundred and fifty days ago. Before that was a hard spell in 2013, and before that was the two year rollercoaster at the end of my marriage. I thought about ending things quite a bit back then. I’m grateful that I was able to ignore those urges, but as I marvel at the number of days free from suicidal ideation, I am more grateful that I have retained my positivity through almost five months of being housebound with a chronic respiratory illness. I’ve written here before about the dark clarity that suicidal ideation can bring ¹ . When our minds are awash in sadness and overwhelmed by the undertow of confusion that suicidal depression brings, we tend to grasp at any bit of flotsam that crosses our path. Some of that flotsam, like suicidal ideation, ironically seems like a ...

Update 2016: This article was featured in my book "Saying NO to Suicide" , with added commentary. Suriviving suicide requires having a reason to live. In fact, it requires many reasons. Start your list today. I was supposed to start my week with a bang . Here was my big opportunity to blog every day to honor National Suicide Prevention Week . I’d get the blog out in the morning, promote it on social media, and maybe share my story with new readers. Instead, my tic disorder & sickness put me out of commission. I didn’t even climb out of bed until 5:30pm, finally able to move. My soon to be thirteen-year-old had kept tabs on me. She fed me half of her Fluffernutter Sandwich in bed, told me about her exciting Sonic the Hedgehog findings, and gave me hugs & kisses. Eventually, my mind and body drifted slowly into sync, and I was able to get going. At that point I was supposed to start blogging immediately, but the virus the kids gave me last week still kept me ...

Or Why Be Suicidal When You Can Careen Down a Hillside on a Block of Ice for Fun?   Update 2016: This article was featured in my book "Saying NO to Suicide" , with added commentary. I try to maintain a balance in my writing on mental health issues. I want to be upbeat and show how I've licked the li'l beasties, but if I'm too chipper many people assume that I never really had a problem. How easy it is for them to assume that their depression is the only real DEPRESSION . How exactly they are like those who don't believe there is such a thing as clinical depression because everybody feels sad once in a while. Unfortunately, both parties are wrong. I truly do have clinical depression , and it's a constant condition I manage on a daily basis. With divorce and a terrible car wreck in my recent past, I haven't been so chipper lately. My bank account needs a trip to the ER to stop the hemorrhaging, my minivan is off the road because my mailman thinks ot...

If you’re feeling down from too much social distancing, how do you build a support network when you’re sheltering in place‽ Support networks are the sort of things you’re supposed to have already put into place for that time when you need them. You’re also supposed to file your taxes on time, separate your recyclables, and brush your teeth twice a day. There are a lot of things we’re supposed to do, but for one reason or another, we sometimes don’t get around to doing. Support networks take effort to build. Because of that, it is easy to avoid putting yourself out there when things are going well. Then your government tells you to stay inside or else, and suddenly that support network seems a lot more important than it did before. Fortunately, communicating with each other over distances isn’t limited to letters via post. Now we can private message, video chat, audio chat, and text over phones lines and the internet. If you deal with dep...