In this episode I talk about suicide … my own experience of numerous suicide attempts, the hopelessness and sense of trappedness, and how I’ve moved towards recovery.

Transcript Hi there! I’m Carolyn Spring and welcome to my podcast where I talk about all things trauma. I dig into the nuts and bolts of trauma, how we can recover, what blocks us, and all things neuroscience-y – what actually goes on in the body and brain during and after trauma, especially from the perspective of evolutionary neurobiology. This podcast is for anyone who’s experienced trauma, or knows someone who has, which is pretty much everyone. For more podcasts, blogposts, books and training check out my website at carolynspring.com.

Welcome to episode 1 – simply titled ‘Suicide’. In this first episode, I’m going to be talking about suicide because that’s what trauma has driven me towards and it’s the biggest, the most profound impact that trauma can have. So why is this and what can we do about it?

My caveat to start with though is that in reality I don’t have any experience at all of suicide itself. Because I’m still alive. And by saying that, I’m not joking or being facetious. I’m saying that I think it’s important that we recognise that what we know about suicide is by its very nature limited. And that there may well be a difference between people who go on to kill themselves, and those who engage in suicidal feelings and even actions, but who do not actually end up dead – people like me.

So, although I have a long history of suicidality, and I’ve talked to a lot of people and I’ve done tonnes of reading and research, it may be that people who end up killing themselves are in some way qualitatively different from people like me. So, in everything I train on and everything I say, that’s my caveat.

What I do have though, is a lot of experience of suicidal feelings. I distinctly remember the first time I was hit by suicidality, even though it was so long ago. It was a Friday afternoon, possibly October or November, and I was, I think, about 15 years old. It was a couple of months before I went down with chronic fatigue syndrome or ME as it’s also known. As a teenager, I had been super-sporty, very athletic, being involved in absolutely every sport I could, running on a morning, that type of thing – and in the January I went to hockey practice after school as usual, as I did on a Monday. And I came home and fell asleep on the settee before dinner. And I didn’t really wake up. Not that day and not really for the next 9 months. I was completely bed-bound, absolutely exhausted, and in a lot of pain. I could only get around in a wheelchair because I was so exhausted. I was like that for about 3 years, all through my GCSE year and my A-levels.

Anyway, it was a couple of months before that happened that there was this day which was in many respects a precursor to that … it was a Friday afternoon and I was at school in an English class. For some reason I remember the weather – it was threatening rain clouds but not yet any rain. And I remember that because that seemed to mirror my mood. I remember the class because we had been turfed out of the normal English class and we were in the physics laboratory for some reason. It’s strange the details you remember. And it was a lesson with my favourite teacher, Miss Barr. But it was on my least favourite aspect of English, which was poetry.

And this dark cloud just seemed to be enveloping me and I felt like I’d fallen down, deep, deep down within myself. I felt utterly bereft and hopeless and empty and despairing. And I didn’t engage in that English lesson at all – and that was very unusual for me, because I was a proper geek, I was a model student – but all I could think about in that lesson was how I wanted to die. It’s like I got wrapped up in those thou