Two of my friends have killed themselves recently and I want badly to know how to help others deal with suicidal thoughts and depression with more than psychotropic medications.
When I wrote INVISIBLE CHILDREN in 2005, a 70-year-old friend asked me out to lunch. After the meal he explained how he told no one of his abuse at the hands of a priest when he was a 12-year-old boy and how finally at the age of 45, after two failed marriages and several failed business partnerships, he sought out a therapist.
He was still seeing that therapist 25 years later.
Of the children I’ve worked with as a guardian ad-Litem, a high percentage of them have been sexually abused. I have seen the horror of child sex abuse and how 10 or 25 years later, a troubled being is still fighting the darkness every day.
Child sex abuse may be the most under-reported crime in America. It could also be the most under-treated horror in America. As a guardian ad-Litem, my first visit to a hospital suicide ward was to visit a four-year-old girl who had been horribly abused; her abuse was never made public. Neither was the seven-year-old who had been prostituted, or any of the family members that practiced child sex abuse.
There are successful sex abuse recovery programs, but our local governments and state agencies don’t support them in a large scale, and the under-reporting of abuse means most children do not receive the help they need. As these children age, the damage from abuse does not disappear – it is often magnified and becomes a serious behavioral problem.
The medical people at http://www.avahealth.org/ are working to make the discovery and treatment of child abuse a normal part of medical examinations (support them). This would be a big first step in identifying the scope and scale of the problem and making treatment available to those that need it.
This is the most powerful and articulate suicide note I’ve ever read and it has great meaning to me for its power to relate these two incomprehensible sorrows (abuse & suicide).
I could not read Bill Zeller’s last letter without feeling the terror, physical and mental impediments, and daily reminders of his childhood nightmares, adult confusion and suicide.
To read the story that was originally published in The Daily Princetonian, go here -- Bill Zeller, Princeton Grad Student And ‘Brilliant’ Programmer, Dies In Apparent Suicide. Here are the first few paragraphs of the story:
Bill Zeller, a Princeton Ph.D candidate and renowned internet programmer, died Wednesday from injuries sustained in a suicide attempt. He was 27.
Zeller stunned the programming community with a 4,000-word suicide note detailing a childhood of physical and sexual abuse, which he had never before disclosed to anyone.
“I’ve never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions,” Zeller wrote. “… I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.”
According to the Daily Princetonian, Zeller posted the note on his website and e-mailed it to friends before taking his own life. The note in full can be seen below.
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