Confessions

#worldsuicidepreventionday

As is fitting, on this arbitrarily assigned day, I endured a conference on suicide prevention, attended by academics, mental health professionals and practitioners from all over Scotland.

True to form, it contained little of real substance and was largely an exercise in self congratulatory backslapping. I literally spent hours cringing myself inside out. The primary researcher into suicide, from one of our nations most prestigious universities, dropped the devastating list of the groups that are most at risk of attempting or completing suicide:-

Neurodivergent

Childhood trauma

LGBTQ+

Addiction

Men

No shit Sherlock. Anybody with an internet connection and a passing interest in the topic already knew this.

Especially me, since I fit into four of the 5 groups (and even experimented with the other on a couple of occasions).

No details on the big questions regarding this most despairing of Top 5's and obviously no answers - as, inevitably, the research is ongoing.

But this is going to be some highlights of why suicide ideation sits upon my shoulder, unable to be brushed off.

As we all know, Autism is a different brain type, not a mental health disorder. It is an entire life, a way of processing and experiencing everything encountered in a day, in a completely different way. As soon as you encounter other people you feel as separate and different as otters and buffalo. Like you have imposter syndrome for simply being human. This doesn't do a lot for your sense of self from the earliest age.

It also makes you a target for bullying, from simple name calling to getting the country breakfast kicked out of you. Finding it impossible to make friends, let alone girl or boyfriends. And in my personal case, a target for predators. Which in the fullness of time led to drugs and alcohol and all the risky and self destructive behaviours this weaves into your life. I have insurmountable guilt regarding this large part of my life. For the things I did, the things I witnessed and the things I got away with. And for surviving it all.

By the time I finished my post-grad in Maths and IT I was looking for a flat. I took the first crappy flat share I found, before learning that my new landlord was a certain infamous local gangster. After moving in, he unexpectedly turned up and offered to take me out for a drink. Which was weird, but all neurotypical behaviours seem weird to me. We go out and do a pub crawl of the city centre bars and nightclubs. We never paid for a drink (or entry fee) all night. If I was smart I should've realised then. He offered me a job, which as a graduate desperately firing off CV's into the abyss, I accepted. This is probably the worst decision I've made in a life overflowing with them. This was the domino that accelerated my descent - I say accelerated as I would have got their on my own, but ****** turbocharged that trajectory. Not intentionally on his part. We always got on well, and in his own way, he looked after me. Too well on many occasions and in one instance in particular, I wish he hadn't. An offhand comment I made about an absolute cunt i knew, resulted in something no amount of hard drugs has been able to wipe from my conscience. The cunt in question had threatened to kill me after I smacked him around for beating up his girlfriend (who was a friend and ex of mine). After the predation I suffered in my younger years, I made sure that was never going to happen again and had taken up working out, kickboxing and shotokan karate throughout my under and post-graduate years. The cunt was no threat to me. He was just a cowardly prick who beat up women and hung out in the same metal/punk/goth clubs i did. We were even quite friendly before I learned about how he treated his partners. I saw him every Thursday/Friday/Saturday for years. Until I made that comment to ******. He "disappeared" and has never been seen again. Let's leave it at that.

This led to a ramping up of my already burgeoning substance and alcohol abuse. And my incorporation into that lifestyle. The cronies of ****** would tell me if I ever experienced any other shite and they would "shoot their fucking legs off, all I had to do was ask". Fuck me. A young dumb, naive highland, autistic man had gotten in way over his head. One night a "top enforcer" woke me in the middle of the night and asked me to hide a fucking crossbow in my flat's attic. I knew I couldn't say no. I also knew that I couldn't live like this any more.

This was where my general unease with who I was, switched into full blown depression and pitch black self loathing. Pathetically, it took me another year before I just did a midnight flit from the property I rented from him and never went back to "work". That year was filled with too many things to recount that I'm ashamed off.

I was crashing in the spare room of the singer in the band I was mangling guitar for. While I was free from the danger of ***** I had become a danger to myself. And yet this is where I got my first foot properly on the IT ladder. A blessing and a curse. It gave me a veneer of respectability and the means to further fuel my drug habit. If you have the money and a steady secure supply of your poison of choice, you can function as an addict for a surprisingly long time. Just ask all your favourite musicians/actors etc.

My career went from strength to strength, fuelled by cocaine and whisky. Having my bone dry autistic delivery, speech patterns and my odd stims, I got away with it. People undoubtedly suspected. A couple of colleagues even asked, to which I replied honestly. They always assumed I was being "funny" and joking. Once on a work night out when all my colleagues were demonstrably hammered, our help desk girl sat down next to me and asked why I never looked drunk, when everybody else was, saying "I've never seen you drunk even though you've been drinking neat whisky all night." I had to reply that's not actually the case, "what you've never seen is me sober, that's why you can't tell the difference."

Yet even here, when I'm superficially successful I manage to do things I'll never forgive myself for.

At the peak of my career I was one of three consultants who never had to turn up to an office and sit at a desk. We just had to wait for phonecalls from customers when the excrement hit the air distribution device. Usually when their in-house IT teams couldn't fix whatever career ending disaster was destroying their promotion prospects. When you test and implement networks, servers and routers properly, with full User Acceptance there are few long term problems to come and bite your arse. I didn't get a call for about a year. I was earning stupid money for doing nothing. I was abusing drugs in horrific quantities, now out of boredom just as much as dependency.

I was also in a relationship with an incredibly beautiful woman, punching well above my weight in all honesty. The problem was she was just as deep in the drug and alcohol well of despair as I was. I think we were actually attracted to the damage we recognised in each other.

Roughly 3am while we were in the middle of our usual consumption my work BlackBerry pinged. Totally unexpected but no big deal, as I wasn't on-call that night. Thank fuck! Then it started ringing. I was far too coked and methed up to be dealing with the help desk calling the wrong guy, so I answered intending on being unbearably sarcastic to the unfortunate bastard. Only my on-call colleague was unable to make the call, he'd been ambulanced into hospital earlier that evening. My other colleague was too far away to make it on site within the service level agreement. This was a multimillion pound contract - what is the first company you think of when someone asks you to name an oil and gas corporation? Yeah the one that rhymes with Bell. In an instant I knew elaborate house of cards hiding my double life was going to collapse. At a conservative guestimate, myself and M**** had consumed 5 grams of coke, 2 grams of meth, a handful of eccies , 3 bottles of wine and had moved onto spirits with still more drugs waiting. I would've been kicked out of any nightclub in the country, certainly in no shape to drive to Aberdeen and enter one of the most important data centers for the European economy and fix a problem that would make the national news if I didn't. Should I stay or should I go?

Both options had the possibility of ruining my life, reputation and career. I decided to go for broke. I changed into a suit and tie and hit the A90, hyper-coke fixated on keeping precisely to the speed limit. I fixed the issue in under 20mins and drove home. No accidents, no police stops. Superficially a job well done, a disaster averted. But I crossed a personal and professional line. Driving in that shape put others in danger. The fact that I didn't care whether I lived or died was one thing, but potentially putting others at risk - unforgivable. This act haunts me just as much as the predators that stole my innocence as a ten year old, or the disappearance of a complete cunt I caused when making a "joke". The next night I OD'd intentionally. The guilt from this 15 or so years of my life is too frequently unendurable.

This is why "suicide prevention" is almost impossible to achieve, like world peace, or abolishing global hunger. It's a lovely utopian fantasy to think you can prevent it and it's causes. By the time you are suffering suicide ideation, that genie is already out of the bottle. It's too complex, deep-rooted to be jargoned away by earnest, well intentioned people. No external policy can revert a lifetime of trauma and shame. I will always want to end things and think I deserve it. And by most reasonable metrics I do.

(All names anonymised for obvious reasons).