Is Attempting Suicide Supposed to be Embarrassing and Terrible Enough to Attempt it Again?
Cara Anna: 'Are we just supposed to zip it up and pretend it never happened?' Photograph: Dese'Rae L Stage
When Robin Williams' death was announced, much of the media in the UK and elsewhere speculated wildly about what might have caused him to take his own life. US-based journalist Cara Anna was following the coverage closely. However, unlike other reporters, her interest in the subject was more personal than professional. As someone who tried to take her own life twice and has since gone on to campaign for better support for people who have attempted suicide and lived, another high-profile death served as a stark reminder of how much still needs to be done in the area of suicide prevention.
Since trying to take her own life in 2010 and 2011 while working as a foreign correspondent in China, Anna, 41, has become known as one of a rapidly expanding and increasingly vocal cohort of suicide-attempt survivors in the US who are "coming out". They have been arguing that the time is long overdue to address the taboo surrounding the "hidden" suicide-attempt survivors who all too often feel shunned and left without adequate support while they recover.
"Is [attempted suicide] just so terribly shameful that we all have to walk around in silence after something so traumatic and dramatic?" she asks. "We're just supposed to zip it up and pretend it never happened?"
The dearth of tailored support for survivors in the US and other countries, including the UK, is serious not least because previous suicide attempts are a major risk factor for eventual death by suicide, she says. And she finds this all the more bewildering in the light of the fact that an estimated1 million people in the US alone attempt suicide annually. "This is not a small group," she says.
While people living with a mental illness have been speaking out in greater numbers in the US and UK in recent years, Anna points out that, by contrast, suicide-attempt survivors remain largely in the shadows. She is an admirer of Alastair Campbell who, after Williams' death, wrote about his recurring suicidal thoughts, and of the UK's anti-stigma campaign,Time to Change, for featuring attempt survivors in its projects.
However, it is the rarity of examples of people with first-hand experience of suicide attempts being given a voice or supported that has driven Anna over the past three years to speak at public events and lobby on behalf of survivors.
It was her own fruitless searches for support groups online that spurred her to action. The vast majority of "survivor sites" and support groups she found were for people who had been bereaved by a suicide.
"I thought, surely there are organisations just for people like me. But there was this growing sense of amazement to find that there was nothing out there. You can find support groups for anything online, so to have this big echoing nothing was really startling. Do we no longer exist after an attempt?"
On a guest blog on Campbell's website last year, Anna wrote: "Anonymous suicide forums were shadowy and focused on feeling bad, not feeling better. I tried joining a depression forum or two, only to be solidly told that 'we don't talk about that here'."
In response, she launched her own support website,talkingaboutsuicide.com. The site harnesses her journalistic skills through blogging and by hosting interviews with other survivors. It soon made an impression and led to her being asked by the American Association of Suicidology (AAS) to manage a site for them, attemptsurvivors.com, on which she mostly curates the contributions of other survivors. Both sites point visitors to established organisations such as Samaritans that help people in crisis, and Anna makes it clear she is not an expert, therapist or counsellor.
She has recently joined forces with other outspoken survivors on a range of projects, including a documentary due for release in 2015, The "S" Word, which features another resourceful survivor, Dese'Rae L Stage. Her website, livethroughthis.org, uses photography and first-person stories of survivors to demystify the subject. Anna has also contributed to an online documentary released this year, A Voice at the Table, and to a report, The Way Forward, published in July as part of a taskforce set up by the US National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention. The report proposes sweeping changes for the way suicide-attempt survivors are addressed and included.
The AAS, "after decades of nervousness" about involving attempt survivors in its activities, has this year created a specific division and hosted a "new voices" panel at its annual conference.
Anna says the reticence of survivors, wherever they live, to speak about their experience is often due to fear that it will come to "define" how they are seen or lead to discrimination. "It's such a heavy subject," she says, adding that being unable to talk or find the right support can exacerbate feelings of isolation – something that is another risk factor for suicide. Describing her own experience she adds: "[You think] 'What if everybody backs off? What if nobody wants to talk to me any more?'"
She is keen to work with survivors and prevention organisations in the UK as part of a burgeoning international advocacy network. Says Anna: “I am doing my best to break open a long-held and really dangerous taboo – dangerous in the sense that people are dying because they are too scared to talk about it."
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