6:06am July 6, 2014

A trick a friend taught me for evaluating how serious your suicidal feelings are.

Obvious content warning for suicide.

She told me that when you’re at your most suicidal, you can’t generally imagine very far in the future.

So when we talked about my suicidal thoughts, she would always ask me, “Can you picture the funeral?”

If I couldn’t picture the funeral at all, we knew things were much more serious than usual, and we would plan around that. Mostly, I had a small group of friends willing to keep me on suicide watch. I was unable to use the psych system for very good reasons, and I was lucky to have an amazing, if small, support system outside the system. That support system also helped me come out the other side and not be depressed anymore, which was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done, and was not a bootstraps kind of thing, it more resembled cognitive-behavioral therapy but without a formal system or a therapist.

Anyway, you might want to try this as a rule of thumb when you struggle with suicidal thoughts. I guess first you’d want to make sure that at your least suicidal, you can at least vaguely picture the funeral. That way you know that if you can’t, it probably is the suicidal thoughts keeping you from doing so. Or rather, the time fog that accompanies suicidal thoughts. Because suicidal thoughts often come with being unable to see the future, unable to see a way out. And not being able to imagine your own funeral becomes a big warning sign that your suicidal thoughts may be out of hand.

Of course, some people are going to be stuck in that mode for a really long time, so that it’s normal for them not to be able to picture the funeral. For other people, not being able to picture the funeral will be a temporary state. Either way, it’s a warning sign. How you act on that warning is so individual I’m not going to give any advice on how you manage it. Any advice I give could be dramatically horrible if the wrong person took it. So all I’m going to say is that the less you can picture the future, the worse things probably are.