Real stories

My story of surviving suicide and of mental health treatment is one of someone who had to advocate for themselves, for safe and competent care, even when no person should reasonably have been asked to be still fighting. 

It’s a common story that I share with many amazing peers: we were made to survive not just our own suicidality or attempt, and not just our own personal hells, but also the incapacity and lack of care shown too often by caring professionals. It’s a story where continuing our existence requires our activism, and our activism deteriorates our mental health. 

I attempted suicide because I lost all hope for a future life worth living.  I ended up at a hospital after my attempt. I stayed there for 3 or 4 weeks, and then spent an additional 2 weeks at a different facility.

I couldn’t find hope. I just could not. I had done all the right things: reaching out, seeing psychs, taking meds, breathing exercises, yoga, more water. I had tried 6 different antidepressants over 10 years, and they had few options left. I was put onto an experimental blend called “California rocket fuel” at an extremely high dose (400 ven /50 mirtaz). It permanently damaged my neurology and has caused me to struggle with a disability I didn’t have before. I was always autistic, but I now have functional neurological disorder, odd seizures and photosensitivity as well.

 Sometimes well-meaning people ask: “how is it that being trans affects what you need in suicide prevention and care?”.

• Being trans informs how likely it is that you have a support network, competent existing care, existing economic security and safe relationships. It impacts the likelihood you’d consider suicide at all, as well as the reasons why you’d consider it. Those reasons include the treatment, attitudes, prejudice and bigotry that we face routinely in healthcare environments. We are a community that is likely to delay, not afford, or avoid accessing support as a result of this treatment. 

• For me, being trans when attempting suicide meant being held in the emergency room for hours and hours and hours while I was approached repeatedly and told ‘being with the men would put you in danger’ and being forced, as a person who just attempted suicide, to explain that I was in fact not a woman and no I would not ‘just go home’ or ‘just accept a bed with the women’.

• It meant being accused of ‘trying to skip the queue’ for gender affirmation procedures via the emergency room - as if attempting suicide was an attempt to get ‘a quicker access to surgery’ or hormones. Never mind that I already had and already used hormones. I was treated as if I was betraying the trans community – those who are patient in the queue - by expressing I had no hopes for life, but that if I could have my top surgery fixed one day that might mean something. I must only be bringing that up if I ‘expected them to make that happen’.

• It meant being told, point blank, that I was not trans until Monash Health had diagnosed me as such in a gender specialist clinic appointment - and refusing to take the call from my endocrinologist (and head of Trans Research Australia, Dr Ada Cheung), to hear how utterly trash a position that was for a psychiatrist to take. How exactly does it help someone in post attempt care to doubt their gender and undermine their sense of reality or self?

• It meant hearing the staff repeatedly misgendering you to both patients and other staff members, and occasionally being proudly told ‘oh - I always stand up for your gender thing in meetings!’ - as if it is helpful to know my existence is in contention between the professionals responsible for my care when they’re behind closed doors.

• It meant being repeatedly told ‘we try not to make a big deal of things to upset the other patients’ whenever I tried to care enough about myself as to correct use of my name and pronouns and try to explain why it was counterproductive to my attempts to want to live if I can’t have that much respect in our groups or common areas. Speaking up meant being told I was behaving in a ‘hostile way’ and being offered sedatives by the nurses who didn’t have time or care to stay and hear that maybe the quality of care was below competent standards.

As horrible as that might have felt, it wasn’t being trans that made me feel horrible. If anything, knowing I was trans was one of the few things that held me to the hope that my life could transform, that I could transform, and that a future was possible for me. Being trans is not, and never was, a bad thing for me to know about myself.

• I learnt that mainstream services are not always suitable care for people like me, and have found some validation and genuine caring connection in more specialist supports.

• I have heard the most powerful, inspiring stories of learning true strength and self-compassion from my TGD peers, whose voices leave me fuelled to ensure they have a world worthy of them.

• I’ve started to build meaning and a sense of life purpose in being there for my peers. I can be part of a world that celebrates peer work that isn’t only ad hoc “friends-helping-friends” (which is still super valuable! But I’m glad I can make regular, sustained programs and healing environments).

I know I am dynamic, I know I am capable of change, and I know I am exceptionally lucky in how much of the world I have experience and knowledge of living. It’s this lived experience that makes me able to be one piece of a larger wave of real, amazing people that shifts our country closer and closer to safe and suitable services.

By T.