Suicide: Finding the X Factor that Treats the Soul

Robyn Williams shocked the world. Who knows why Robyn jumped from the brink of the precipice, that high rock of despair. He did know one thing. By taking such action, he would end his heart beat; his lungs would breathe no more.  He knew this.

I have had good friends jump from the same brink. Most recently, my friend, Steve jumped. His life with the woman of his dreams and their six children ended in a divorce. This rendered my young friend alone in an apartment paid for by his soon to be ex-wife without the life he previously knew and the children he raised as a stay at home dad. It rendered him “difficult to employ” because of the measure of years he spent unemployed by choice. Add to that medications meant for other purposes, alcohol, it becomes easy to come to the conclusion that perhaps it’s better if you fall asleep and never wake up.

Fame does not make suicide more acceptable or even understandable. Suicide is not ok. There may be no culpability in the moral sense because of the physiological and psychological roots that lead one to the brink of darkness. But nevertheless, the ripple effects of such tragic losses are shocking, always shocking.  Suicide is not a good thing because it only leads to the sorrow of others to whom the victim is inexorably connected in body and spirit. 

For this reason, perhaps, the great counsels of the medical researchers should investigate what is the x factor that helps avert the suicide. What factors cause one who is at the very brink of hell itself to decide NOT to jump because they think there is no hope anyway?  The lure of ending pain, sorrow, and self-debasement is natural, but nonetheless a “lure”. If you believe in an afterlife, this is an important factor. If you don’t believe, well then it doesn’t really matter, does it? Or perhaps there is a lure to end one’s current pain under some understanding of the universe that makes us think we will be reincarnated into a better life. In Williams’s situation, this is ironic because in the film he starred in, called What Dreams May Come, he stars as a husband who dies in a car accident with his two children only to find that upon getting to heaven, his wife had reached that brink and killed herself. So his goal is to go into the far reaches of hell itself as the movie postulates that suicide separates one from heaven.  (I do not postulate that.) In that movie, Williams demonstrates the far reaching power of love to rescue the irretrievable. Then as they both achieve the heights of heaven, they unexplainably choose to go back to be reincarnated so they can meet again.  How fun; let’s do it all again. I wonder how this role moved Williams to the brink instead of away from it.

Here’s my point: There is a spiritual aspect to the illness of depression. It may be clinical. It may be treatable with meds; it may be treated with psychotherapy. However, there is something within our created being that is unreachable by anything other than our very nature of spirit. It is that nature that gets so marginalized and moved, relegated and segmented toward prayer on Sundays or at a funeral or in consoling the families of the victims. 

In the end, it is that x factor that should be researched as part of the holistic approach to depression therapy. The “other” that we believers call the person of God is the only elixir that can redirect and reorient a person to move away from so much self-reflection that they simply allow themselves to fall off the precipice. Despair is attractive to the depressed. It is an extremely inward looking act. It takes being able to see a glimmer of hope in taking a leap of faith as opposed to the leap of despair. 

I will miss Williams and my friend, Steve, as will their families. Memories of the life once led cannot satisfy the void created by suicide. There will be no equal or fitting compensation for William’s humor that will be missed; no will there be any just compensation to that child who will miss seeing dad at baseball games, graduations and weddings. The ripple effect of suicide is tsunami-like. Clinical depression, while a matter of physiological health, must include the x factor of treating the whole person: body, mind and soul. As Francis of Assisi intones: “where there is despair let me bring hope, where darkness, light, and where sadness, joy.” These are spiritual factors that are essential in our fast moving world and we must not avoid and forget them. To deny them is utterly existentially suicidal.