PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2019 Anna Mehler Paperny
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Paperny, Anna Mehler, author
Hello I want to die please fix me : depression in the
first person / Anna Mehler Paperny.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780735272828
eBook ISBN 9780735272842
1. Paperny, Anna Mehler. 2. Paperny, Anna Mehler—Mental illness. 3. Mental health services—Canada. 4. Depressed persons—Mental health Services—Canada. 5. Depressed persons—Medical care—Canada. 6. Depression, Mental—Treatment—Canada. 7. Journalists—Canada—Biography. 8. Depressed persons—Canada—Biography. I. Title.
RA790.7.C3P363 2019 362.20971 C2018-902723-1
C2018-902724-X
Cover design and hand lettering by Jennifer Griffiths
v5.3.2
a
for Dr. Silveira
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—
—ROBERT LOWELL
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
PART I: IN THE FIRST PERSON
1: Cataclysm
2: When You Try to Die and Don’t
3: Psych-Ward Sojourn
4: What, Me Depressed?
5: When Diagnosis Makes You Crazy
6: Killing Yourself Is Tougher Than You’d Think
7: Know Thine Enemy
8: Checking Boxes
9: Suicide Blues
10: Getting in Trouble
PART II: TREATMENT ATTEMPTS
11: A Pill-Popping Parade
12: Good Noticing!
13: Zapping, Shocking and Burning Your Brain into Submission
14: Brainiacs
15: A Dry Pharma Pipeline
16: Old Illness, New Tricks—The Electrode in Your Brain
17: Old Illness, New Tricks—From Psychedelics to Smartphones
PART III: A KICK IN THE TEETH
18: Stigma and Related Bullshit
19: Through the Cracks
20: Mental Health Is for Rich People
21: Trying to Heal the Littlest Minds
22: “More Children Do Not Have to Die”
23: Race as Barrier
PART IV: IN THE MAZE
24: Who You Gonna Call?
25: How to Talk about What We Talk about When We Talk about Wanting to Die
26: Certifiable
27: Trust Issues
PART V: A DENOUEMENT OF SORTS
28: First Person Afterword
Resources and Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Notes
Preface
How do you talk about trying to die? Haltingly, urgently: in messages and calls to friends. Abashedly: you stand in the middle of a hospital hallway on a parent’s cell phone as your grandfather bellows, “No more stupid tricks!” Gingerly: you stand in your psych ward at the patients’ landline, conscious of fellow patients watching TV just behind you, white corkscrew cord curled around your finger as you murmur to your grandmother who understands better than she should. Who is the first to tell you, as you lean against the orange-tinted counter with its row of cupboards for confiscated belongings below the sink, that you have to write all this down. And even though you put it off for months, agonize for years, you know she’s right.
Quietly, desperately: in one medical appointment after another. Trepidatiously: to colleagues. Searchingly: in interviews. Increasingly loudly. In a book? With the world?
A disorder hijacks your life and becomes an obsession. Know thine enemy. Chart in minute detail the way it wrecks you and seek out every aliquot of information out there. Butt up against the constricting limits of human understanding, smash yourself against that wall and seek instead to map the contours of collective ignorance. Know the unknowns of thine enemy, learn them by heart. Because even if you never best it, never loosen its grip on your existence, at least your best attempt at understanding will give you some semblance of agency.
No one wants this crap illness that masquerades as personal failing. I had no desire to plumb its depths. The struggle to function leaves me little capacity to do so. But in the end I had no choice. I approached this enemy I barely believed in the only way I knew how: as a reporter. I took a topic about which I knew nothing and sought somehow to know everything. I talked to people in search of answers and mostly found more questions.
Personal experience has made me more invested in addressing the gross inequities depression exacerbates, in hammering home the human, societal, economic costs. The depth of depression’s debilitation and our reprehensible failure to address it consume me because I’m there, spending days paralyzed and nights wracked because my meds aren’t good enough. But this isn’t some quixotic personal project that pertains to me and no one else. Depression affects everyone on the planet, directly or indirectly, in every possible sphere. Its very ubiquity robs it of sexiness but not urgency. I found this in every interview I did, in every article I read, in every attempt I made to sort out how the fuck this can be so bad and so badly unaddressed.
This book is also my way of exorcising endless guilt at having been so lucky—to have benefited from publicly funded inpatient and outpatient mental health care; to have maintained, for the most part, employment; to have had patches of insurance lighten the burden of paying for years of drugs. This shouldn’t be the purview of the privileged but it is. We fail the most marginalized at every level, then wonder why they worsen.
I don’t want to be the person writing this book. Don’t want to be chewed up by despair so unremitting the only conceivable response is to write it. But I am. I write this because I need both life vest and anchor, because I need both to scream and to arm myself in the dark. Maybe you need to scream, to arm yourself, too.
PART I
IN THE FIRST PERSON
1
Cataclysm
What scares me most is what I don’t remember.
And that’s everything between scarfing sleeping pills on a Sunday night to waking fuzzily in the ICU days later, Velcro ties strapping my wrists and forearms to cold metal railings ringing the bed, keeping my erratic sedated writhing from disconnecting a maze of IVs plugged into my arteries. I discovered I was wearing a hospital gown and attached to a catheter (the latter, especially, not something you want to take you by surprise).
I was shocked when I surfaced at how much time had passed.
I’ve no recollection of the hours on dialysis. Just the lasting image of a churning strawberry-red slushee machine, which is how my dad described the lifesaving contraption days later.
I don’t remember drinking antifreeze. Don’t recall if it tasted acrid or cloying, its texture watery or viscous. The arresting electric blue I do recall vividly from staring at the family-size jug sitting under the sink every time I used the bathroom in the months after I bought it. (I’ve never owned a car.)
I can’t remember being found in my apartment, overdosed on antifreeze, by two senior editors at The Globe and Mail, the newspaper where I worked at the time. Mortification overwhelms me each time I imagine the scene and I still wish I’d died rather than be found that way.
* * *
—
THAT, IN SEPTEMBER 2011, was my first suicide attempt, my first post-attempt hospitalization and my entry point into a labyrinthine psychiatric care system via the trapdoor of botched self-obliteration. For me it was an inexorable resolution—the only possible culmination of a conviction I’d had for months but kept putting off.
I was twenty-four and I’d just come off a pair of great assignments working as a staff reporter at my dream newspaper. But the preceding eighteen-odd months had been characterized by worsening, lengthening episodes of despair during which all I wanted was to die. For a while I could still immerse myself in my work, could still get that reporter’s high, that bright weightless bubble filling my diaphragm as I chased a story. Could still convince myself, in giddy interludes, that my life had purpose.
But those interludes of story-chasing joy became spotty and infrequent, a radio signal subsumed by static. The bilious taste of failure swallowed everything.
* * *
—
THAT LATE-SEPTEMBER FRIDAY, two days before the attempt, I put the final edits into a political feature as sheets of rain thrummed against the wall-wide newsroom window. The nadir that in recent months had begun to engulf me at the end of every story’s high was, this time, too deep to clamber out of. I felt scraped empty, nothing left and nowhere else to go.
I met family visiting from out of town for dinner that night at a fancy, poorly lit restaurant where if you drink enough silky-cold gin you don’t notice how little actual food is exquisitely plated in front of you. I vaguely recall acting stupid-sentimental but not much else.
Stopping at the downtown Toronto office to pick up some things on my way home, I did what later felt like the first dumb thing. An acquaintance—someone I’d met once who had subsequently added me on Facebook and with whom I’d exchanged muted messages during periods of mutual insomnia—struck up the most casual of “how you doing” online conversations. To which I responded that I was finally going to kill myself.
Ha ha, not funny
Not joking
Don’t kill yourself
But I want to
The exchange ended with my saying I probably wouldn’t do anything. Anyway, g’night. Talk to you later. I think this is when I deleted my social media accounts.
I wouldn’t have said anything to Facebook Guy in the first place were it not for the tenuousness of our acquaintance and the atonality of online conversation, which left me feeling fairly confident he wouldn’t do anything.
Wrong. Wrong on all counts.
I didn’t kill myself that night. Didn’t even try. Crashing hard from serial work weeks without weekends and a boozy family dinner, I collapsed in my apartment, fell into zonked sleep fully dressed on an unmade bed.
The second dumb thing was missing the incessant calls to my phone, left on vibrate. This poor dude I barely knew panicked. He contacted a mutual friend, who called me, then the police. It was their call that I finally surfaced from slumber to register. I was just out of it enough to see the blocked number and irrationally assume it was the desk—my editors—calling in the middle of the night with some urgent query or request. Workaholic reflexes overrode my desire to be eternally alone.
Instead it was a police officer wanting my address and I, in sleepy half-stupor, gave it to him. Except then, of course, they came to my apartment.
I didn’t know how you’re supposed to respond when a pair of cops shows up at your door at three o’clock in the morning saying they’ve been sent because someone told them you’re trying to off yourself. The keenest emotion I recall was embarrassment.
“The place is a mess,” I apologized.
That was an understatement. I’ve never been neat but the conditions of my ground-floor apartment in a shabbily aging building with a mouse problem compounded by my own apathy were probably startling. In my defence, the hole in one kitchen wall leading straight outside, the mildewed bathroom ceiling, the missing bathroom tiles where sink met floor, the warped wood floorboards that seemed impossible to clean, were not my fault; they predated me. I just hadn’t mustered the will to have them fixed. The overall disarray, the papers everywhere, the food wrappers and containers, the sticky mousetraps in need of chucking, all contributing to the overall thick atmosphere of must that had crescendoed over the preceding months—that was my bad.
“It’s okay,” one officer said. “We’re used to messes.”
But there was something in this mess or in my bleary “everything’s fine” mumblings that convinced them I should not be left alone. They didn’t cart me away or cuff me but when I asked if I could stay home and go back to bed, the answer was firmly negative. So I went with them, unwilling; their force implicit, not physical.
I wondered only later how that scene would have played out had I been Black and male, and what would have happened if I had simply refused to go.
That was my first ride in the back of a cop car, a barrier between me and the front seats. It was a short trip to the nearest hospital, where the three of us sat in the dull beige fluorescence of the ER waiting room and made small talk until someone arrived to usher me into the psychiatric crisis ward at St. Joseph’s Health Centre—St. Joe’s, as its familiars call it. We somehow—reporter reflex—started talking about their careers. One of the officers had been a sound technician in another life and I made a mental note to pass the name of his program to a kid I’d interviewed days earlier who wanted to study music production after finishing high school.
They were decent guys. They must’ve been all too accustomed to dealing with situations like mine, with people more erratic and less cooperative than I. My situation—despondent suicidal chick in an apartment given over to entropy—was a breeze compared to nightmare scenarios of agitated, sick, harmless people killed by police in hospital gowns,1 on streetcars,2 in their own homes or apartment buildings.3 These cops just talked to me until they were free to go back to their jobs, catch some bad guys. Given that some cops spend hours effectively babysitting someone until a hospital can deal with them, they were no doubt relieved when I was led away into the crisis ward and became someone else’s responsibility.
If you’re ever picked up by police and carted off to hospital in the middle of the night, I recommend bringing a warm sweater and a good book (cell, charger, wallet, writing implements and health card are also worthwhile accessories). I, short-sighted fool, was wearing the previous day’s skirt, a T-shirt and a thin raincoat I’d grabbed groggily on the way to the police cruiser so I’d have a pocket for my keys, which were quickly confiscated along with my phone, pen and the digital recorder still in my jacket pocket from work, a day and a lifetime earlier.
The crisis ward was dark and bare and cold and I was bored out of my mind. Curled up shivering on a plasticky hospital chair, grimly suicidal, I mentally cursed Facebook Dude for freaking out when clearly—I told myself as I brooded on death—I hadn’t been serious. Kicked myself for caving to the desire for human contact and then not even bothering to try to follow through on my own death.
I was almost demented with fatigue. I remember someone offering me a bed, which I declined—afraid that acquiescing would mark me a patient, someone who belonged there, no different from the bedridden man quietly moaning behind me. I didn’t belong, I told myself. I just needed to clear up this misunderstanding.
&n
bsp; A young kid—fourteen, maybe—regained consciousness in an adjoining room. The orderly returning his backpack had to explain to him how he’d wound up there after police found him unconscious and alcohol-poisoned at a friend’s house party. For the next six hours I sat there envying his escape. The blessed orderly took pity on me when the paper arrived; I’ve never been so glad to see the flyer-filled Saturday Star. By the time a tired-eyed psychiatrist saw me around nine o’clock I would have said anything to get out of there so as to kill myself as soon as possible.
It became immediately clear she had no idea I’d been brought to the hospital’s psychiatric crisis ward in a cop car, against my will: when I said I didn’t want therapy, just wanted to go home (with some pills to help me sleep, please), she gave me a withering-pitying look as if to ask why I was wasting her time. By ten o’clock I was out in the sharp bright morning making a beeline for a pharmacy to fill a disappointingly small prescription for the sleeping pill zopiclone. (I’ve never needed chemical help falling asleep.)
The rest of Saturday was strange. I think I slept. I think I tried to go for a run along the lake but couldn’t muster much energy, run-walking and petering out about a kilometre from my apartment, on a rocky outcropping on the Etobicoke side of the Humber Bridge. Pacing the rocks, I exchanged a surreal series of short emails with a colleague who’d heard about my night in the crisis ward and was tentatively trying, it seemed, to make sure I was okay without becoming embroiled in whatever weird life drama I had going on. Accustomed as we’ve become to communicating textually, I can tell you there are times when hearing someone’s voice—as anxiety-inducing and time-consuming as that can be for the caller—would make a big difference.
I knew better now than to say how I felt. “I’m fine. Really. Don’t worry.”
I think I would have tried to kill myself that night were it not for an unexpected Sunday assignment, a campaign budget announcement for which I felt obliged to stay alive. I remember astonishing watery sunlight and cold wind whipping wet hair against my face as I biked downtown Sunday morning. I negotiated the incongruous banality of a technical briefing in a windowless hotel conference room. I remember joking with a fellow journo about our lack of math skills. There was a scrum: something about provincial debt, something about early voting; a web file that needed updating and contextualizing; counter-claims from opposing parties to parse and write up.4 Then I was free.
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