Mental health issues - a global pandemic with no vaccine, herd immunity or Operation Warp Speed
- Josh Jones
- Feb 8, 2022
- 9 min read
Mental health illness is long referred to as a Cinderella disease – a strong man doesn’t ask for help is our past generation speaking, they say pull up your boot straps and march on. But today we have to think differently to act differently and reap different outcomes – consider that not everyone has the flexibility to touch their toes, or maybe their hands are already full from carrying a heavy load. No matter the reason, we should work to recognize and then take action to pull each other’s boot straps up and lock arms before we think of moving on. And move forward together.
Cinderella was a fairy tale, the issues of mental health are nothing of that nature so I don’t know where that came from at all. There’s no fairy godmother or royal gala anywhere in the kingdom of suicide, substance abuse and self-destruction. I find mental health issues to be more like a poisonous tree frog or a moose – they come in all shapes and sizes, are sometimes hidden in plain sight and have the ability to cause a range of trauma from intermittent nuisance to swift death. And once they truly appear, there’s no mistaking them for something else, you can’t unsee them.
Statistics around Cinderella that I certainly didn’t know and think are important to frame the issue and provide context:
Depression is the number one silent killer - More than cancer. Period.
50 million in the US are impacted by mental health issues, over 450 million people in the world or around 20% of our adult population on the planet suffer from mental health issues
Depression is the leading cause of disability around the world contributing greatly to the global burden of disease
15% of our youth are living with major depression, and it’s the number one killer of young people, more than all other diseases combined (age range 15 to 24)
Over half of adults with mental health issues in the US do not seek treatment
Mental health issues routinely coincide with substance abuse at a rate of over 50%, the prevalence of both mental health issues and substance abuse are increasing each day in the US
5% of US adults have serious thoughts of suicide, with 46, 000 suicides in the US last year (14 in 100,000 individuals). With the COVID pandemic, numbers are rising dramatically.
My own personal statistics, over the last 20 years, I have seriously thought of ending my life at least 500 times, nearly acted on that thought a dozen times. I conservatively figure that I've spent 10,000 of my waking hours in deep depression, only on the inside of course. And as Malcolm Gladwell points out so well in his book Outliers, you can get really good at something when you devote that amount of time. There’s an immeasurable amount of energy that could have been applied to productive things, instead it was just a lot of entropy, and very sad.
Statistics don’t have a heartbeat, a face so even with staggering numbers we lose the human impact and true relevance. People are not statistics. And if it’s a Cinderella disease, a fairy-tale, how can suicide take down Marilyn Monroe, Robin Williams, Kurt Cobain, Alan Turing, Vincent Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Anthony Bourdain, Chris Cornell, Cleopatra, just to name a few. Just today (two weeks into my moment on Feb 1st) I saw that Former Miss USA Cheslie Kryst has died, taking her own life jumping from a building in Manhattan, she was 30. “Her great light was one that inspired others around the world with her beauty and strength. She cared, she loved, she laughed and she shined” her family said in their grief. Before her death, Miss USA 2019 Cheslie Kryst posted to social media “May this day bring you rest and peace”. And how I wish she could have used prospection to clearly see the emotions, the hurt, the pain which all comes from the positive impact she had on so many, the gaping holes she will leave in all of them now that she has left this world. Many don’t realize that and make a poor, fatal choice. I am so lucky I did not. As so many have commented regarding Anthony Bourdain’s suicide: he was clean and sober at the time, not drunk or high, so how could he not properly weigh the pros and cons, how could he do something so cruel? And in that question, a simply why, is the depth of this issue, we can’t see what is right in front of us, we can’t properly use logic and reason to conclude that suicide is not writing your ending, its writing a chapter of pain and suffering for so many for so long. Over two years after Bourdain’s death, the pain had not subsided, as is surely the case with millions of family members and friends of others who have succumbed to the darkness and jumped into the abyss. The stories and comments resonate: He let me down, its crippling, I moved to the other side of the planet, I cry every day. What am I supposed to do? There is no fairy-tale ending here, no truer words have ever been spoken. This is beyond a serious matter.
Here's a sick joke, the sickest to make the point and going too far in the process, as I often do: “Miss USA, a pro football star, a world-renowned top chef and one of the worlds’ most beautiful women all walk into a bar”
Then Robin Williams the all-time great comedian, God rest his soul, bursts out laughing and says red-faced and out of breath as only he can, “And here’s the punchline - then they all jump off the roof and die because it’s a rooftop bar AND THEY JUST WANT TO FINALLY REST IN PEACE”
That is sick yes, but that is the point here, we have to wake up or many many more will put themselves to sleep and we will continue to grieve, mourn and have regrets about what we could have done, never knowing why as it eats us up day after day forever more.
Cheslie Kryst’s mother April Simpkins encapsulates this perfectly when she said shortly after her daughter’s death, “I have never known a pain as deep as this. I am forever changed.” April went on to say “While it may be hard to believe, its true (about her daughter’s suicide). Cheslie lived both a public and a private life. In her private life, she was dealing with high-functioning depression which she hid from everyone – including me, her closest confidant – until very shortly before her death.”
April Simpkins doesn’t elaborate further on that last point, shortly before her death, and no suicide note has been disclosed at this time, but it’s another one of those whys? That quote from Cheslie’s mom pops off the page for me. Why did Cheslie still do it if she was able to let her mother, her greatest ally, know of her struggle. Why couldn’t her mother help her, why did Cheslie take the step off of her building and into the abyss instead of another step towards help and safety, recovery. Unanswered questions.
For every 1 person who overcomes mental health issues that lead to suicide, hundreds more do not escape the darkness. More than 125 a day in the US alone commit suicide, almost 50,000 a year, 125 a day every day of every week of every month of every year. More than 5 people every hour in the US die from suicide. In the time you read chapter 1, another has lost the battle. And through chapter 2, we are talking about another 5, by the time you finish the book, its easily 30 lives – the equivalent of everyone from your third grade class, your baseball team, your entire family, if you go cover-to-cover in the average of 6 hours it takes to read 100,000 words. And that is not factoring in any of the approximately 75,000 substance abuse deaths that occur each year, many of which are deliberate escapes in the same vein as suicide, not properly counted.
And back to calling mental health issues a Cinderella disease, that is a tragedy and despicable in itself. Makes me think of a simple game we have all played: Paper – rock – scissors, a game that I will never understand. Paper will never be stronger than your rock. Find your rock, be someone else’s rock, bedrock. And you can win against any force or object. Perhaps the game should be dynamite – rock – scissors as it takes a big force to defeat a rock, and many times dynamite can’t break the rock either. So again, think about being a rock for someone in need of strength or seek out that rock if you are looking for strength, support and love. The courage to help another or ask for help, that is true courage. The only way you will fail, is if you try to do things all by yourself, which is like swallowing a stick of dynamite.
I want to go back to Cheslie Kryst, who I learned of while on a recent trip to Mexico. The news hit me extremely hard and shockingly, that the former Miss USA had committed suicide, jumping from her 60 story Manhattan apartment to her death. To fall 60 stories takes around 6 to 8 seconds. Count to 8, really coutn it out and process that:
one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand, six one thousand, seven one thousand, eight one thousand
And really think about that amount of time. I won’t ever know what Cheslie was thinking before she jumped but I have a good idea. And of course nobody can ever know what happens once you jump, but again I think I have an idea. To jump, to escape, to stop running, to give up and go to sleep forever, that is difficult to imagine for most that read this, but so easy to understand for those who suffer from mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. Its finding peace, selfishly, running out of stamina and realizing, surrendering to the fact that you can never outsmart pain, end the suffering any other way. Which is wrong, but its not about right or wrong, it’s the reality inside. But I also feel, in my heart I feel that as she jumped, Cheslie realized a mistake was made, that she shouldn’t have given up, that she made a selfish decision. Unfortunately these acts are irreversible and irrevocable, prospection is absent in the moments prior. It is a tragedy within a tragedy, she had to realize all the lives she had touched, would touch, that she had such a bright future even though in her day-to-day mind she didn’t see it. Her last thought was likely that she let so many others down, friends and family who care about her deeply. And she let herself down.
Would anyone ever think that someone so beautiful on the outside, talented as a journalist, lawyer, emmy-nominated TV reporter at 30 years of age in her prime, would succumb to such mental sickness and take her own life in a verdict with no appeal? This is another CRYSTAL CLEAR example that no matter what someone projects, what we think we see, we have no idea what is happening on the inside. Unless we really ask and engage, unless we are truly attentive to pick up on signals that may indicate someone who needs help and support. Why wonder when you can know? Think about that important question, as it can be the difference between life or death for a friend, love, family member, co-worker, anyone around you, and chances are one of those people in your life, or perhaps a few, are struggling and need you.
Remember they don’t teach us how to ask for help, and while it seems so logical that someone would let you know they aren’t doing well, it doesn’t happen for mental instability is shunned in our current society and internally, the person struggling is miles from logic and balanced reality. And similar to the end of the documentary film Roadrunner where a number or Anthony Bourdain’s closest friends and business associates reflected on their failure and the impact of his loss, there will be countless in a similar position thinking about Cheslie and what they could or should have done, how they will grieve forevermore. There is no way to resolve those thoughts, ever. We will see in a few days what the toxicology report says about Cheslie, but my thought is that she will show clean of substances of abuse, just as Tony Bourdain did. This was likely another deliberate act of an unwell mind and decision-making process where logically weighing the pros-cons and impact is absent or distorted from years of internal trauma. We will never understand it, Cheslie’s friends and family will never get to know the answer to the most important question: Why? and that’s very, very tough. Another bright star, who created so much light for others but succumbed to the darkness within. The pressures, the injustice, the spotlight, the internal spiral and unattainable expectations beat her. I have read a number of articles about Cheslie, some interesting excerpts are pasted below:
"How do I shake society’s unwavering norms when I’m facing the relentless tick of time? It’s the age-old question: What happens when “immovable” meets “unstoppable”?"
"I discovered that the world’s most important question, especially when asked repeatedly and answered frankly, is: why? "
"Rather, I fed the passion that made waking up each morning feel worthwhile: speaking out against injustice."
"After a year like 2020, you would think we'd learned that growing old is a treasure and maturity is a gift not everyone gets to enjoy." Kryst wrote.
And in Cheslie’s case, just as so many others – surely signals were present but went unchecked. Time will tell as we learn more.
As said many times before and will be said many times again, mental health is an epidemic, a pandemic, is endemic and all around us. The time is right to talk about this topic, to put our resources towards making a better effort in this battle. We can all do something for ourselves and those around us, take a small step, take a step, engage and reflect on yourself and those around you, ask for help, seek help. This is a life or death matter. In the time you read this blog, its very likely that someone in the United States has committed suicide.
Comments