People don’t want to have a mental disorder

[Dion]

While the topic of depression and suicide has been discussed on the forum before there is some interesting points in the article below that are worth pointing out. The article focuses on Celebrity suicide and in particular Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade.

Both Spade, 55, and Bourdain, 61, reportedly suffered from depression and, in Spade’s case at least, crippling anxiety. Spade had been under the care of doctors. Bourdain once spoke of his battle with depression during an episode of his show, Parts Unknown, confessing to a therapist how an airport hamburger could send him into a spiral of depression for days.

It’s impossible to know whether Spade’s death had any influence on Bourdain, or the suicide of Queen Maxima of Holland’s youngest sister, who was found dead Wednesday, one day after Spade. Some experts are nervously worrying of a “copy cat” effect. Suicides jumped 12 per cent following the death of comedian Robin Williams in 2014. But Leenaars said two celebrity suicides, and the death of the Dutch queen’s sister, doesn’t necessarily make a contagion or cluster.

“We need to look at this over time,” he said.

For more than four decades Antoon Leenaars has tried to construct a theory to explain why people kill themselves. Among his findings, that those who die by suicide are often tragically gifted at concealing their true intentions, even from themselves.

“We find it in the suicide notes and in the psychological autopsies,” said Leenaars, a Windsor psychologist whose archive of more than 2,000 suicide notes is believed the largest collection of its kind in the world. “There’s both a conscious and unconscious intent to be deceptive, to hide, to mask,” he said.

“People don’t want to have a mental disorder.”

Media coverage of celebrity deaths may pull at those already feeling vulnerable, said University of Toronto professor of psychiatry Dr. Sidney Kennedy. “We obviously have to be more sensitive in how we report people’s deaths and be aware of the effect it can have.” That can be especially challenging in an era of social media, where news is shared and spread relentlessly, most of it seriously unfiltered, the Centre for Suicide Prevention has warned.

But there’s no one path to suicide, Kennedy said. “There’s no brain region that is going to be the area that triggers the act.” While it may be hard to wrap our minds around why people who seemingly “have it all” would commit suicide, “that’s the real essence of the point,” Kennedy said. “The reality is extremely different from the way the person perceives it.”

In a 2016 study comparing suicide notes written by men and women, Leenaars and his co-author found notes written by women had a higher percentage of negation words like “never” (“I’ve never been more alone than now”) and a sense of hopelessness. “Women tend to be much more absolute in this kind of mental constriction,” he said, meaning a kind of all-or-nothing thinking. And it can be deadly.

Spade left a suicide note, reportedly addressed to her 13-year-old daughter. Kennedy said some people need to ease the guilt or self-blame of a family member. Sometimes they want it to be clearly known their intent was to die by suicide, that it wasn’t an accident. “Sometimes people bear a lot of anger,” he said, “and a note can be a way of getting back at somebody.”

“We may never know what all was in Kate’s mind,” Leenaars added. “But I’m sure the note would give us some deep insight into her struggling mind, what she couldn’t cope with, what never was going to change … What could we have done to stop Kate Spade’s suicide? What would have helped her? What did she need?”

People shouldn’t be afraid to bring up suicide with a loved one or friend who seems to be struggling because they’re worried about putting the idea in their heads. “That never happens,” Taylor said.

“Instead, what may happen is that you may actually give somebody an opportunity to have a conversation with you about something they’re probably pretty scared about. Because for a lot of people, when they start having these thoughts, they’re scared.

“Suddenly your brain starts to make you think about these things, and it seems very out of character for you.”

http://nationalpost.com/news/world/a...t-discriminate