It's 3.46am as I write this. A pot of coffee by my side; I've given up on sleeping tonight. I tried. But my insomnia's bad at the moment. So I cut my losses and decided to get up and do some work. What's on my mind? Mostly Izuko, a friend of mine who took her life. She did it four years ago to the day. When most people were stretching and flinging the windows open and admiring the pretty flowers and getting ready to start afresh with the coming of spring, she made the momentous decision to stop living. I thought by now I would be over it, but the hurting seems to go on and on. It's like that cheesy government anti-drug ad campaign says: sometimes the effects last for ever.
I've had more than my fair share of run-ins with suicide. Back in my teens, there was my friend Rachel, who slashed her wrists and ended up being sectioned to a psychiatric ward. When they released her, she tried again (16% of attempted suicides make a second attempt within a year). Eventually, they diagnosed manic depression and lithium saved her life. Last I heard, she was happily married and living in Edinburgh.
Then, when I was at university, my friend Jonathan took an overdose one night. I remember standing in the hospital car park at two o'clock in the morning chain-smoking cigarettes while the doctors pumped his stomach. A year earlier I had had my own first-hand encounter of what it feels like to not want to be around any more. Fortunately, it went no further than "suicidal idealisation", psychologist-speak for thinking about doing it, planning doing it, wanting to do it. So I knew how he felt, how Rachel felt, like they had no way out, no one who understood, like this terrible thing had taken over their lives.
Once his stomach was pumped, Jonathan yanked the drip from his arm when the nurses weren't looking and insisted on leaving the hospital before his regulation appointment with a psychiatrist. In the taxi going home, he told me he was fine, that it was just a cry for help, nothing more than a case of childish, drunken, attention-seeking. Within a few years, he was hooked on heroin. And I was a raging alcoholic. Both of us had become cliches of depression: self-medicating our illness, finding pain relief, a quick fix, a temporary "cure" in drugs, alcohol. By the time I had stopped drinking and he had been through rehab, we had lost touch.
Today, I hope he's out there somewhere - still clean, still alive. Later, after university, throughout my 20s, especially during the time I kicked drinking, there were plenty more episodes and eras of suicidal idealisation. But I pulled through, and on the other side I found love with a wonderful woman who became my wife, and found friendship with another wonderful woman, Izuko, who became my best sober friend.
She had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals all her life, battling depression, going under for long periods of time, then coming back to life. We looked out for one another, counselled, pepped up, boosted, encouraged, sympathised, shared. We depression people are prone to creating support networks. We crave friendship, relationships, with others who have been through the same thing, who are going through the same thing. We provide one another with a lifeline when families, partners, GP's, employers, teachers, professors, psychiatrists leave us feeling misunderstood.
Izuko was my depression buddy. She helped me when I wasn't well and vice versa. The last time I saw her, talking over drinks at the National Film Theatre bar, sitting at a table overlooking the Thames, she gave me a compilation tape that she had made a year earlier, shortly before being admitted into hospital for the umpteenth time. "This is a relic from last year. I was planning to kill myself and I made this tape as a goodbye letter for you. It's got all my favourite songs on it. I was going to send it just before I did it. Now it means something else, it's a thank-you for all your support while I was in hospital."
The worst seemed to be behind her. And then, six months later, she was dead. Since then, I have had to deal with another person in my life attempting suicide. I thank God every day that this person hasn't tried again and that she is now out of danger. Let me tell you this, though: I hate suicide. Every 40 seconds, somebody somewhere in the world takes their own life. They also take the lives of those who loved them. Four years after Izuko's death, only one thing is clear in my mind. I miss my best friend.
