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| My courageous brother, Chris, hours before he died of AIDS, emaciated, but defiant to the end. Both Keane brothers with chins up, laughing at Death. |
(link to YDN article)
Comments
theantiyale
My brother, who died of AIDS eight years ago at age 57, called me in Vermont when he was 55 from Seattle where he lived, to tell me he was having suicidal thoughts.
He knew I had experienced the same thoughts after the Kent State shootings which I witnessed in 1970, years before the diagnosis PTSD had been thought of.
I told him, "Chris, you do not HAVE to have these thoughts. They can be INTERRUPTED: by therapy, by medication, by practice. This is a chemical problem as much as an emotional one."
He sought therapy and medication and resisted the temptation to end his life, an end which came with much pain and courage and dignity later.
I share this realizing that some readers will trivialize and violate my family recollection here as part of the Yale posting game. I am willing to endure that with the hope that ONE person reading these words might see light in an otherwise dark world.
The darkness is a chemical imbalance. It can be reduced if not eliminated. Seek help. There is no shame in having a medical condition It can be relieved.
The darkness is not reality.
Paul D. Keane
M.Div. '80
M.A., M.Ed.
erikalin
Dear Elaine, Thank you for giving what it took to write this.
Dear Paul, I am sorry for the struggles endured both by you and by your brother. I have a list of responses that your reply brings to mind, but I will distill that to one point of clarification reguarding your sentence near the end, that "The darkness is a chemical imbalance."
The "darkness" can be a chemical imbalance, I suppose, but to assert that a chemical imbalance underlies the process that can tragically end in suicide is quite the leap. Medication is the first line of treatment for major depression, although not all suicides are preceded with major depression. Further, there is no quantitative indication that medication (the remedy for your "chemical imbalance", I believe) mitigates risk of suicide for those diagnosed with major depression. If you know otherwise regarding the latter, please point to the source.
This is all to say that "the darkness is a chemical imbalance" is far, very far, from appropriately generalized. Personally, I find such statements hurtful, oversimplified, and lacking of dignity for those who are no longer living, to suggest that they and presumably those who love them have overlooked something so simple. For them, Paul, no matter your intentions in signing off that "the darkness is not reality", it certainly is.
I am not a Yale student, just a reader. Erika, M.A., M.Div
River_Tam
Paul,
I hardly seek to trivialize or violate your recollection, but you need to see that your words are pop-psychology, not expert advice. Some need therapy and medication. And others do not. Not all suicidal tendencies have psychiatric (that is to say, medical) etiologies.
A close friend of mine committed suicide in the not-too-distant past, and the memory of him is still raw in my mind. I have no doubt that he fought inner demons, and I am beginning to realize what some of them were, but the existential abyss cannot always be treated with drugs. Sometimes, it is just a terrible thought, niggling away at a brain.
The way forward may involve professional help, but it might just as easily involve devoted love and attention of the kind you gave your brother.
theantiyale
Dear Erika,
May I say respectfully that it is my experience that reality is absolutely NEUTRAL. “for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet, II, 2)
Weltschmerz and “the existential abyss” are created by the mind and have been romanticized by literature, opera, and philosophy as somehow the “burden” one must accept for having an artistic temperment.
The mind, paralyzed by panic attacks and “free floating anxiety,” can be restored to its pliable state by various types of interventions to short-circuit the repeated messages of doom and despair.
One age-old intervention is prayer, not because there is a Listener and an Answerer to such petitions, but because the intervention of the ritualized words INTERRUPTS the repeated negative ideation which is flooding the system with adrenalyn. (Forgive the lay analysis).
I speak from personal experience, not hypothesis.
I wish to honor different perspectives, but not those which lead to unnecessary suffering.
Respectfully,
PK
erikalin
Dear Paul,
I do not understand your second reply re: neutral reality and Hamlet.
My response is to your first reply and to your saying things like "This is a chemical problem... The darkness is a chemical problem... the darkness is not reality." As the writer of this story has shared, and as in the story referenced therein, this is a reflection for people who have lost a dear one to suicide. The chemical business is not only inaccurate (pop psychology as another noted) but inappropriate as well, to post here to people who find hope through their faith and alongside those who bear witness to the profound pain of such a loss.
If you would, reread your first reply as a mom whose son committed suicide two years and seven months ago. My purpose in replying here is to honor that story shared here bravely, and to thwart implications that interventions were chosen to not be taken advantage of, chemicals were left to run awry... Yours doesn't seem the right reply to such a sacred story of loss and hope and death and life as what is shared here.
Respectfully as well, Erika
theantiyale
Yours doesn't seem the right reply to such a sacred story of loss and hope and death and life as what is shared here.
It is what I have to offer, pop-psychology or not. I did not know there were "right and wrong" in gifts.
Respectfully,
PK
Yale12
PK has yet to learn the art of "not responding at all." Sometimes a respectful silence is the best gift, and I mean that honestly.
theantiyale
I am willing to endure that with the hope that ONE person reading these words might see light in an otherwise dark world.
For me, and not for others, it would be irresponsible to be silent for that "one" person. There have been at least two suicides at Yale in the last year and six at Cornell.
Mine here is not to debate or eulogize. It is to throw a lifeline out on to a dark sea.
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