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Autumn 2008 | Vol 12 No 1

Profile

After my suicide attempt

Survivors share their stories of choosing to live

By Lesley Young

Not a single day goes by that Brent Seal* doesn’t feel lucky to be alive. But it wasn’t always like that. Seal attempted suicide in May 2007, after experiencing a relapse of schizophrenia. He’s recovering very well, and slowly but surely reclaiming his life. “I feel very hopeful,” says the 24-year-old. “I have the goals I had before, plus more.”

Since the near tragedy, Seal is pursuing a business degree at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, does volunteer work and is about to launch a club that offers microfinancing to people with mental illness. When asked what he would tell someone who is considering suicide, he says, “Just knowing there is hope might help. All the despair you feel is temporary. You can get past that phase and be hopeful again. I had no hope but it got back into me. I am full of it now. I have so much to live for.”

Just how people who have attempted suicide get to that dark place – and emerge with new hope – is a mystery Dr. Jennifer Brasch is hoping to crack. Brasch, medical director of psychiatric emergency service at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Hamilton, Ontario, and her colleagues at McMaster University, launched the Reasons to Go On Living project this summer so mental health professionals would be better equipped to help people who are suicidal get to a positive place.
Getting to that place is important, given, given that more than 3,700 Canadians die by suicide every year, according to Statistics Canada, and countless others make an attempt or contemplate suicide.

It is this latter group that Brasch is focusing on. “It is surprising how much research is devoted to looking at risk factors for suicide and how little looks at how people make the transition,” says Brasch, who is also an associate professor in psychiatry and behavioural neurosciences at McMaster University. “We know hopelessness is associated with high risk of completed and attempted suicide. I presume that a state of hopefulness is associated with choosing to go on living,” she says. “If we have ideas about how people move to a state of hopefulness or how they transition to wanting to go one living before they make the suicide attempt, that would be powerful and effective.”

Brasch is hoping to elicit some of those ideas through a narrative approach. She has asked people who have attempted suicide to recount their own stories anonymously on the project’s web site (www.thereasons.ca). She will publish her findings after analyzing the stories for demographic information and common themes and structures. When enough stories have been collected, Brasch will post select ones on the web site to inspire and educate others. She thinks that for some people, telling their stories will be a valuable, reflective exercise to share how they have learned and grown from their experience.

The anonymity of the Internet may encourage people who might otherwise have remained silent to share these stories. Yvonne Bergmans, a suicide intervention consultant at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, says this is the first time people’s stories are being elicited via a public medium that is completely anonymous and transparent. “People are given the freedom to talk about their story without being judged,” she says. “I hope this project will give us a different approach for interventions – strategies that have meaning for clients. Right now a lot of what we have is based on risk factors and deficit models.”

According to Karen Letofsky, executive director of the Distress Centres of Toronto, “Research increases the odds in what can sometimes feel like a crap shoot, because at the end of the day, suicide is highly individualistic,” she says. At the very least, Letofsky is hoping that Brasch’s findings will make clinicians better listeners. “Suicide risk assessment is an art rather than a science,” she explains, adding that while there is a scientific component in terms of the types of questions to ask and signs to look for, the sensitivity with which those questions are asked and how we understand the answers is very nuanced. “The more stories we hear, the more we start to make sense of subtext, nuances and context, the better we fine tune our listening and train our inner ear.”

* not his real name

For more information about the project and how to get clients involved, visit www.thereasons.ca.