I know something of the struggle of mental illness. I’ll never forget the phone call I received in 2011 from my older sister informing me that my father had committed suicide at the age of 64. He had been my rock and my safe place. He and I were both bi-polar and I had told myself for many years that if he could fight off the suicidal urges, so could I.
One of the great tragedies a family faces when losing a loved one to suicide is tiptoeing around the whispers, stigma and morbid curiosity that people have around “how” your loved one died. My father refused to get treatment because he didn’t want to be seen as crazy.
So many people I encounter still carry a mindset that mental illness is “all in your head.” To which I now reply, “Yes, and cancer is all in your body.” I used to think that it was a gun that killed my father, but I think that’s incorrect. Instead, I believe that his mental illness killed him just as cancer and strokes kill people.
Because of negative stigmas I took great efforts to hide my mental illness and refused to seek treatment.