When I was 21 I tried to kill myself. It was the evening of the 26 November 2012, at 5:52pm. I remember looking at the clock, aiming for 6pm before thinking – what am I waiting for? I sent texts to loved ones, put up a pre-written Facebook status and attempted to take my own life. Two months later I tried to do it again. This time there was no status, no warning texts, just another brutal attempt. Two months later I tried to do it again. This time, I called an ambulance half way through – alone and scared on the Euston Road.
I spent some time at my mum’s, pushing through the pain, surviving second by second. I looked into my future, and I couldn’t see anything. It was dark. Cloudy and obscured. Drained of colour in the way that only a deep dark depression can do.
We tell ourselves stories to make peace with our present. In that moment, I told myself that I wouldn’t live past 27. Having an expiration date suddenly made it easier to survive those seconds. They turned to minutes, the minutes to hours, hours to days until I was living through months without thinking about ending it all. At 21, having a use-by date that effectively extended my life by almost a third of what I’d already lived seemed entirely logical. It was a way of getting through. Of pushing onwards. Of trying to squeeze a little more life out. It became something that defined me. Something I celebrated and leant in to, and so, what started as a tool to keep me alive slowly took over my life.
In February, I turned 28.
It’s a weird thing, unravelling your own narrative simply by surviving. What’s even weirder is how wedded to the idea of your own demise you can become. How entrenched within your own mythology it’s possible to find oneself.
I have bipolar. As a group, we die younger, and often by our own hand. The average reduction in life expectancy for someone with bipolar is between 9 and 20 years. Bipolar increases the risk of suicide by 20 times and is named by the World Health Organization as one of the top causes of lost years and life in 15- to 44-year-olds. Despite this, it’s an illness that carries a certain element of mystique. It is the “creatives’ disease” – one that sees us gripped with indefatigable energy for periods of our lives while crushed under the tortures of life’s gruesome reality at others.
As a child obsessed with the idea of making a mark or leaving a legacy in order to placate the scourge of self-loathing, the mysticism of it all sucked me in. Kurt Cobain was said to have bipolar. So did Jimi Hendrix, Ernest Hemingway, Carrie Fisher and Lou Reed. To me, the chaos and the torture, the erraticism and the self-destruction carried with it a coolness. The pain and the hollowed-out horror of the illness was a necessary evil. Something to be suffered, in order to be the best version of myself. But now I sit here, among the rubble of a life lived teetering on the edge for the best part of a decade, and I wonder how true that can be.
In her blistering Netflix special Nanette, comedian Hannah Gadsby touches on this. At one point, retelling the story of an interaction with a man who claims Van Gogh wouldn’t have created Sunflowers while on medication, she asks, “What do you think, mate? That creativity means you must suffer? That that is the burden of creativity – just so you can enjoy it?” Later she talks more broadly on the subject, “this whole romanticising of mental illness is ridiculous” she proffers. “It’s not a ticket to genius, it’s a ticket to fucking nowhere.”
Mental health provision in the UK is chronically and shamefully underfunded. It represents around 28% of the “disease burden” but received only around 10% of funding in 2017/18. As a society, creating and reinforcing this mythology around mental illness, we let off the hook a government that has consistently fallen short of its promises where mental health provision is concerned. Beyond that, we set up those with mental health difficulties to fail.
We relish in the desirable qualities that come with many mental health diagnoses, be that creative flair, wit, intellect, “blue sky thinking” or simply a penchant for partying hard. But when it comes to less desirable qualities, often we either ignore them, or wrap them up in a mythology without trying to offer concrete help or assistance.
As I begin to live a life without an expiration date, I’m starting to realise that the legacy, that indelible mark I was so desperate to make on the world and those around me, won’t be built of pain, it will be made in spite of it. If we don’t start telling ourselves the truth about mental illness, instead of coating it in lies, we run the risk of generation after generation of young people believing they have to suffer, with swathes of kids not making it, simply because we told them they never would.
• Ben Smoke is a freelance journalist and activist
• In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
• This article was amended on 16 May 2019. An earlier version said Hannah Gadsby was told by a fan that Van Gogh wouldn’t have created Sunflowers “without” medication. This has been corrected to “while on” medication.
