He’d tried a different hospital first, which was more like a glorified holding pen-no therapy, no group activities, the exact opposite of rehabilitative. Watching my brother Jordan check into a Long Island hospital for his own suicidal depression, the project seemed more than anything like a simple intellectual pursuit.īy all objective measures, Jordan’s program was doing everything right. More likely, I think, it was a way to move on without actually moving on, rejecting my depressed self while also keeping her close. I don’t know how much I believed in this goal. Nominally, it was a project about preventing my future suicide-something I’d often suspected was inevitable but, now, in a new recovery and hoping to start a family, wanted to formally defy. I’d been ruminating on the tendency toward suicide since leaving the hospital, reading the writing of people who’d killed themselves, chasing this idea that doing so might demystify the moment in which a person goes from wanting to do it to doing it. This was a year after I’d been discharged from the Maimonides psych ward in Brooklyn for a massive depressive episode. I wrote this in May of 2018, on a blank page in the middle of a notebook full of research on suicide. My brother wants to die and I can’t make him better.
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