It Took a Friend’s Suicide for Us to Start Talking About Mental Health
- Elliot Smith
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Trigger Warning: The following article contains references to suicide and grief, which some readers may find distressing
The text came through on New Year’s Day, 2022. My partner would later inform me that I tossed my phone across the room, yelled an obscenity then darted for the door to the balcony. When she and my mum asked what was wrong, I just muttered: “Jack’s killed himself.”
My friend Adam’s then-girlfriend sent the text. They had found out the day before, but he was too distraught to type that message himself. They had been for dinner at Jack and his girlfriend Anna’s apartment only a week earlier. They’d discussed plans for Jack’s birthday in February, and he’d been in his typical sparkling form – always inquisitive, disarmingly kind, and beaming from ear to ear.
We were a tight-knit group who supported each other through two years of COVID via typical male means, sharing jokes in a group chat and seizing any opening in lockdown restrictions to drink away the weight of our boredom and isolation. We never spoke earnestly about our mental health, but Jack always presented as the most perennially optimistic of all of us, the proverbial life and soul of the party. He and Anna were the postcard couple, exuding an infectious lust for life and forever plotting their next adventure. I had been messaging him just before Christmas, and he was excited to leave the country and travel to visit family. A few days later, he tested positive for Covid, and the trip was cancelled.
The news of Jack’s suicide was like a hydrogen bomb dropped at the epicentre of everything I thought I knew about the world. Incomprehensibility was the dominant emotion at first, intermittently giving way to bouts of rage, guilt and hopelessness.
I spent the next few weeks oscillating between confusion and fury, trying to recall every interaction I’d ever had with Jack, looking for signs I may have missed. If I had been as attentive to others’ lives as Jack was, maybe he might have felt comfortable talking about what was devouring him from within. I could not get past the unimaginable pain he would have been in to take such sudden, violent action with the love of his life in the very next room, and the impotent urge to rewind the clock and call him on that morning haunted every waking moment.
To try and assuage the guilt, I’d remind myself that even the person who knew him better than anyone hadn’t seen it coming. That, in turn, led me to view my grief as self-indulgence and to loathe myself for it. How dare I take the liberty of self-pity when the damage to his partner and family was so much more profound?
In late January, we finally managed to get together at Adam’s flat, and it turned out we had all been experiencing the same ebbs and flows of emotions. We would never learn his motives, and that terminal unknown had been gnawing away at all of us. For the first time, we all began talking openly about what we were thinking and feeling.
I shared one worry I had tried to bury for fear it would appear selfish: if Jack’s mental state could short-circuit so devastatingly, what was to stop any of ours from doing the same? I began characterising what had developed in his brain as akin to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (a type of heart disease where the muscle wall thickens), building up undetected towards a sudden, fatal collapse. That eased the guilt and confusion, but only gave way to fear.
I had suffered from bouts of depression since I was a young teenager, and on several occasions struggled with suicidal thoughts, often concluding that the only thing keeping me alive was my atheism and associated fear of the great abyss.
Having grown up in a working-class town where traditional notions of stiff-upper-lip masculinity were prevalent, I had always resisted seeking professional help until about a year before Jack’s death. There came a point at which I felt incapable of experiencing joy, excitement or passion, and could only see the world through a heavy blanket of listlessness, with no discernible future worth existing for. Fortunately, my GP had been great, and I was prescribed antidepressants. Despite seeking professional help, I still never discussed my mental health with anyone else apart from my partner.
Suicide is the biggest killer of people under the age of 35 and men under the age of 50 in the UK. In 2021, there were 5,219 suicides registered in England, according to Samaritans, of which 3,852 were men. I had shared these statistics on social media, along with campaigns to encourage men to talk, but Jack had still not felt comfortable enough to discuss his affliction, and neither had I until three weeks after his death.
I told the lads everything, and they implored me to give them a call or a text or to show up on their doorsteps whenever I felt like it was getting the upper hand. I promised to do the same for them. We made a pact, of sorts, never to suffer in silence. Over the ensuing weeks and months, that conversation and the collective resolve we found in one another, especially supporting Anna, seemed to give direction and purpose to our anguish, triggering a collective impulse toward a more active, unified kind of grief and remembrance.
Our friendship group always made ourselves available to Anna, always meeting up to share stories about Jack. We all placed mementoes in our flats of nights we enjoyed with him, rather than mourning the absence of those we would never get a chance to. We went to see his favourite band, and I ran Jack’s favourite half-marathon to raise money for a mental health support charity in his name.
Three years on, we are now all living in different countries, with different partners and leading very different lives, but we know there will always be someone on hand in our darkest hour. The harrowing events of three years ago forged bonds seemingly unassailable by time and circumstance.
What became clear throughout this process was that there is no right way to grieve, but a support structure is invaluable. I also learned that once a group of male friends begin talking about mental health, those clouds during the bleaker days, weeks and months will part just a little. We would trade it all in to have Jack back in a heartbeat, but I hope his legacy is that nobody whose life he touched will ever feel alone again.
This article has been sponsored by the Psychiatry Research Trust, who are dedicated to supporting young scientists in their groundbreaking research efforts within the field of mental health. If you wish to support their work, please consider donating.