by James Rhodes
As a kid his family was so broke he was forced to play the piano in ‘dance halls’ (read ‘brothels’) to earn money, and possibly because of some dodgy experiences that occurred at that time he remained unable to form any real, functional relationships with women as he grew up. He did, however, have a massive boner for Schumann’s wife Clara. The fact that immediately after her husband Robert’s death Brahms rushed to be with her and that they both destroyed numerous personal letters to one another seems to imply there was something going on worth hiding.
In 1865 his mother died and, wracked with grief, he wrote his ‘German Requiem’, which to this day is one of his most celebrated and performed works. It had a slightly inauspicious beginning when the timpanist at its premiere misread the dynamic marking as ‘ff’ (very loud) rather than ‘pp’ (very quiet) and drowned out the other musicians, but since then it has become one of his most performed and admired works.
There is something overwhelmingly haunting about religious grief, and this piece of music, like Mozart’s and Fauré’s requiems deserves its place in music history as the absolute pinnacle of the genre.
MY WIFE PUT HER ARM around me one evening. Normal thing to do. Rather nice, even. That afternoon had been stressful for me and I’d cut. I’d got it down to once or twice a week, but this was a fresh one, and when her hand touched my arm, I flinched. Couldn’t help it. She asked me what was wrong, I got flustered, she wouldn’t believe me when I said ‘nothing’, there was the weight of a lie in the air, and she told me (not asked me) to show her my arm. And so I did. I was so tired of hiding stuff from her. I’d remembered back in the day when she and I had first started dating, how kind she had been, how solid we had seemed, how invincible. That couldn’t have just disappeared, no matter how big an asshole I appeared to have become.
So I took off my shirt and showed her and, genuinely horrified, she properly lost her shit. I’d carved the word ‘toxic’ into my upper arm with a razor blade.
I know. Very teenage and melodramatic. But it was how I felt. And razor blade font is awesome. But she thought it was much more serious than I did. I could see her anger, and underneath it love, concern, kindness, fear. She made me promise to go see someone for help, and of course I agreed. She wasn’t buying my whole ‘it’s really not as big a deal as you think’ routine. She gave me a deadline of a week, and, another secret out in the open, I began to spiral more and more quickly out of control.
I didn’t sleep. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t talk. Properly ‘on the bed prostrate, eyes glazed over, head hot, fucked’. And when you’re like that you have finally reached the point where you don’t care any more. There is simply no deeper level of self-hatred and shame you can go to. You’re at the bottom and everything falls apart. It is at once exhilarating, freeing and excruciating. It felt like the link inside me that was holding everything together had just snapped – as if any semblance of doing the right thing, being a decent person, had been swept away in a wave of gigantic indifference.
I seemed to accept that nothing was going to work and had there-fore made the decision to kill myself, and with that acceptance came the most amazing sense of liberation.
The best part about wanting to kill yourself is the energy you feel once you’ve made your decision. It’s a bit like being given wings after trudging through quicksand for a few years. Also, the planning involved is extremely fun. It’s like making a playlist for someone you love – it needs a lot of thought, you get all excited about what it will end up like and how they will react, you enjoy the process of making it as much as the final product.
I’d figured jumping or hanging was the way to go. And, fuck me, the internet is a big help with this stuff. Swathes of pages about what height to jump from, suitable locations, what to avoid, how best to do it. I even found a ‘height to weight’ chart for those wanting to hang themselves – it ensures the length of the drop is suitable for the person’s weight so that they’re not left in a coma or still functioning after they do the deed. Handy.
A friend of mine called me as I was in the midst of planning. Stephen. He was a remarkable guy – left school in a Welsh mining village at fifteen with no qualifications at all and by sixteen was playing to a sold-out Madison Square Garden with a huge British rock band. Twenty years later, covered in tattoos and still without any qualifications, he decides he wants to become a surgeon, enrols in Columbia med school, works his ass off and is now, astonishingly, a fucking surgeon. We’d been extremely close a few years previously until he’d moved to New York and we’d lost touch. He caught me on a bad day. I cracked a joke about finding a building to jump off, tried to backtrack, didn’t think I’d successfully convinced him I’d been joking, put the phone down and punched myself in the face. I guess Jane had been in touch with him, asking him to check up on me.
I’m rereading this (should have left it to my editor). And I am so aware of the light this shows me in. It is text-book narcissism and self-pity. I see that now. But when you’re in it, feeling like you’re drowning in this shit, and everything seems so damn real, you cannot see the whole picture. There is no room for reality with depression, trauma, PTSD, whatever you want to call it. My world had collapsed in on itself and there was room only for me and my delusions and ego. There was no other option than to remove myself from the world; one of the most dangerous misunderstandings about suicide is that to those considering it, it is almost always an absolutely valid choice. It’s a bit like being absolutely starving, having not eaten for days, and suddenly being at a restaurant where the only thing they serve is something you absolutely fucking hate and would not in a million years have eaten before, but it’s the only possible option. You order it, you eat it, you cram it in your mouth as fast as you can using your hands, you don’t stop until you’re about to pass out. The reality of my situation as I saw it, together with my raging head, had begun to shake the foundations of my complacency to the point where the element, the luxury, of choice had been removed from me.
There was one possible last-ditch solution that was thrown my way a couple of days before I was going to go through with my plan (my in-laws were due in town from the States and it felt right to wait until they were there so there was at least some support for my wife in the aftermath). I’d gone to an AA meeting, a regular one of mine, and when I got home Jane and my buddy Matthew were there waiting for me. Clearly, Stephen’s report of our telephone conversation hadn’t been great.
I don’t want to talk much about AA because, well, the second A stands for Anonymous. But I will say that in my experience (nineteen years without a drink and still attending regular meetings), it is the easiest and most successful way of stopping drinking. It is a remarkable invention and one that creates miracles day after day, but it is predicated on the fact that there is a certain level of honesty, especially self-honesty, amongst its members. Even that is not necessary all the time; simply having the willingness to stop drinking at some point is enough. But I was going to meetings and chatting to other people there with a degree of fundamental dishonesty that made it impossible for me to get well. I stayed sober physically, but mentally was a different story. And therefore, other than being dry, I was not a well bunny, and missed out on the opportunity to transcend my demons that so many others in AA have managed to do. I do know this though – had I started drinking again I would be dead. There is no doubt in my mind it is much, much easier to kill yourself drunk than it is sober. And in that respect I owe AA my life. And now, today, with a newfound honesty that can only really come from emerging out of a violently degrading rock bottom, I also owe it my peace of mind. It is the best thing ever.
So I got home from lying my ass off at yet another meeting about how great I was doing, and was greeted, gently, by my wife and best buddy. They told me they had looked into hospitals that dealt specifically with sexual abuse and suggested (as in, ‘If you don’t go we’ll make sure you’re put there regardless’) I go down the next morning and meet with the inta
ke team. They had no idea that I had already found the building I was going to jump from, had made a will, written a letter with computer passwords, bank account details, burial requests etc. And it put me in a quandary. I could lie to them and, instead of going down to the hospital the next day, I could simply top myself then, or I could do as they asked. I could do as they asked because there was nothing else left, and even if there was a fraction of a percentage chance of finding something helpful that could avoid such a permanent solution, then perhaps it was worth it.
And so after a few hours of them repeatedly reassuring me that Jack would be OK, that they could function perfectly well without me and that my in-laws were in town for a couple of weeks to help pick up the slack, I said OK. And the next morning I drove down to the hospital.
It was a fucking disaster from the start.
I’m not sure how much of this was me being a dick and how much of it was them being unprofessional wankers, but Jesus Christ, this place was horrific. For all their spiel about specific programmes to help deal with sexual abuse trauma there was none of it. A couple of morbidly overweight ‘therapists’, a sulky group of heroin addicts sent there against their will by a well-meaning NHS, a psychiatrist who could barely speak English and a bunch of rules enforced with all the glee of a bullied red-headed stepchild finally able to exact revenge on his tormentors.
Any time I opened my mouth to ask a question or see if I could speak to someone higher up in the team I was told to shut up, bootcamp style, and accused of being a troublemaker. I lasted forty-eight hours before deciding it wasn’t for me. I’d hidden a pack of razor blades when I’d arrived out in the back garden, which I retrieved and used to cut yet again. Even that didn’t do it for me. And so I packed my bags and asked them for my mobile phone, car keys and wallet (confiscated on arrival) as I was leaving. And they said no. Just like that.
I laughed a bit and then said, ‘Seriously, I need my stuff back and then I’ll be out of your hair.’
And then they said they’d discuss it and I should come to the office in a couple of hours.
So I wander round the place for a bit and just before lunchtime in I go. There in front of me are a bunch of people I’ve never seen before. Doctors, nurses and a few others, all looking severe and vaguely threatening. I giggle and crack a joke about this being some kind of intervention. Nothing. Stony silence.
It was like some low-budget TV court scene. They had searched my room and found the packet of razor blades (‘I never leave home without them’ not an adequate defence apparently); they told me that the consensus amongst staff and clients (‘patients’ was not adequately PC) was that I was a negative influence; they told me they deemed me a danger to myself or others as a result of this and that they were going to send me to another hospital where I could be ‘more appropriately looked after’. And just like that, the walls came tumbling down.
The removal of choice is one of the greatest terrors you can inflict on someone. From the age of ten, when I left the school where the abuse was happening, I had always had a choice. I could have told someone, I could have been less promiscuous, I could have asked for help, stayed single, pursued the piano, said no to drugs and on and on. I chose to not do all of those things. I even chose, eventually, to ask for help. And now, for the first time since I was five years old and face down on a gym mat, squashed under the weight of a giant, I once again had no choice. I couldn’t talk my way out of this (though I tried), I couldn’t fight my way out of it (again, I tried, despite a couple of well-built male psych nurses just smirking as I did), I couldn’t bullshit my way out of it. I was allowed to call my private GP (at £110 per visit I’d arrogantly assumed he’d be able to sort this) but he simply said there was nothing he could do. I was told to leave my car there and was driven to another hospital about an hour and a half away, crying with rage and frustration.
The intake there was terrifying. I was told to take meds – the first pharmaceutical I’d had in eleven years. When I refused, I was forced to swallow something I couldn’t even pronounce. The room spun, my head flew away, everything diminished and I slept for very nearly twenty-four hours flat.
This new hospital was a whole different kettle of mental. It was incredibly meds-friendly. I was basically muzzled with chemicals and left alone for the first few weeks. Getting high after more than a decade drug-free was unpleasant, scary, overwhelming. My short-term memory went immediately – I would introduce myself to the same people again and again – I lost control of my coordination, drooled, sweated all the time. I became a cartoon parody of the ‘mental patient’.
Jane and I decided Jack should not come and see me – he shouldn’t have to witness me stumbling around, literally walking into walls, unable to focus or speak properly. I became some kind of lab rat for psychiatrists eager to practise their diagnosing and prescribing skills. After a few days I was, apparently, officially suffering from: bipolar disorder, acute PTSD, autism, Tourette’s, clinical depression, suicidal ideation, anorexia, DID, borderline personality disorder. And I was medicated ‘appropriately’.
Medication is a bastard. I can’t tell you. Clonazepam, diazepam, alprazolam, quetiapine, fluoxetine, trimipromine, citalopram, effexor, lithium, tramadol and dozens of others, some at the same time, some cycled through in succession, some combined, some in the evening, some in the morning. And I had no choice – if I refused they were given to me by force.
There was therapy (group and individual) but none of it made any difference at all because I was incapable of lucidity, of rational thought, of any fucking thought at all. They even had me on a drug to help combat self-harm. It was a vicious fucker that stopped the brain releasing endorphins in response to pain, so if I did find a way to cut myself it would just really, really hurt and there would be no high at all. Vile.
Some of the other guys on the ward were genuinely terrifying; one found out I was a pianist and told me he’d break my fingers one by one. Then he just stood really, really still and stared at me, not in a good way. I told him to knock himself out and he still didn’t move. So I turned around, closed my eyes and told him I would count to thirty and during that time he could do whatever he wanted to me. He still didn’t move. Pussy.
They’d searched me thoroughly and I had nothing to help me die. Everything got too much – guilt at what I was doing to Jack, my fucking head hurt so badly, I couldn’t leave, I couldn’t stay, I couldn’t think, speak, act, dream, imagine. I was stuck in some weird, Big-Pharma-sponsored circle of hell. And there was nothing I could do to escape.
And so I figured I’d tried the ‘healthy way’ of asking for help. It clearly hadn’t worked. And now it was time to do it my way once and for all. Which meant death once again. And planning to kill yourself in a secure ward on a cocktail of mega drugs ain’t easy.
I had a mental health nurse (bodyguard) nearby all the time, even when sleeping. There were no blades, sharp objects, no access to the roof, meds were kept ultra-secure under lock and key. So I figured hanging was the only viable option. I knew there was a changeover of my psych guard around 2 a.m. each morning. And I knew that the TV had a nice long aerial cable. So I pretended I was out cold around 9 p.m. and simply waited. The guy was bored out of his skull and when his replacement arrived they made small talk for a few minutes during the handover. Why wouldn’t they? I was dead to the world, it was the middle of the fucking night, the guy was on £8 an hour with better things to think about than keeping an eye on some privileged wanker like me.
They were chatting quietly in the corridor outside my room. I scampered over to the TV set and unplugged the cable. I snuck into the en suite bathroom and stood on the toilet seat, throwing and threading the cable through a vent in the ceiling. I made some kind of noose (not too different from tying a double Windsor), shoved my head through it, gave it a good tug to check it would hold, and jumped.
Thing about hanging – it doesn’t strangle you. The whole point is that if you do your calculations correctly, it sn
aps your neck. Should be over in about 0.6 seconds, lights out, fade to black, done. And had I had the luxury of a giant roof beam, stepladder, proper rope, calculator, internet connection, isolation and Boy-Scout-worthy knot skills it would have been just like that. But no. I fell, nothing snapped (except the last little grubby bit of my mind that was still intact), I saw lots of weird colours, everything become instantly focused and vivid and ‘in the moment’, and I could feel myself starting to choke. This is the worst thing that can happen with hanging. I couldn’t get down to do it again properly; I knew that if I was found I’d be rescued; depending on how long that took I could suffer some kind of brain damage due to oxygen deprivation; and then I’d be (a) forever (more) retarded, and therefore (b) unable to finish the job.
So I’m, quite literally, hanging out in my bathroom and starting to lose consciousness when the door is pushed open and my nurse/ bodyguard walks in. His eyes seem to pop out an inch or two, his right hand smacks hard against the wall and bang on top of the panic button, and with the same movement he rushes forward and grabs my legs in a bear hold, lifting me up and shouting for help. I’m not having any of it and start kicking out, wriggling like a motherfucker and grunting, snot pouring out of my nose, spit flying out of my mouth. We’re doing this fucked-up kind of salsa dance together when more orderlies run in, assume various positions around me and somehow get me down.
There follows some kind of ‘Benny Hill in a psych ward’ sketch I drop into their arms, they relax for a second, I sprint out of the bathroom in my boxer shorts, television aerial around my neck like a pretentious fashion show moment, and start running down the corridors in search of the exit with all the nurses haring after me. Unsurprisingly the ward door is locked, so I grab a giant light stand next to it and start pounding on it. It doesn’t budge, I look fucking stupid, and whirl around using the lamp like a Cuckoo’s Nest light sabre, waving it threateningly at the (ever-growing) group of orderlies fanning out in front of me.
