With the recent suicides of Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington, I feel it an appropriate time to talk about mental health issues and illness, as many people have done in recent weeks. I understand that my opinion is but a drop in the ocean and but I would hope that sharing my opinion and exeprerience of mental illness would encourage some discussion on the subject.

As a fan of both Audioslave and Linkin Park, I was shocked and saddened by the deaths of Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington. Their music was part of the soundtrack to my teenage years, so to lose two people who were a part of some important years of my life was a hard loss.

My own mental health is not something I find easy to talk about (this post has been in various draft forms for 3 weeks) but here goes. In 2012 I was diagnosed with depression, I’ve been on and off medication for it, I recently restarted taking the medication, I also have had counselling for it. Now this next bit is possibly going to be the hardest to write about or read, partly because it makes me realise how bad things are, I am suicidal and have been for a while. Even on medication and on the “good days”, I plan out how I’m going to commit suicide, it’s going to be one of two ways that I’ll use to take my own life, the question for me is not if, but when will I do it.

I have felt this way for what feels like a large part of the last two years. I find it difficult to put in to words how it feels to be suicidal or why I feel this way, but I’ll give it a go. Wanting to commit suicide is a constant, oppressive feeling in the back of your conscious, it’s always there, circling other things that you think about, occasionally forcing it’s way to the front and sitting there like are large, dense and heavy fog that refuses to shift on anyone else’s terms. It sucks of all motivation, even small things become difficult to do and the big things become astronomically unimportant and meaningless. It makes me realise how unimportant and useless I am how much of a burden I must be to those around me, how no-one really cares about me and why should they, I don’t deserve it, I’m not good enough.

It is times like these I look for distractions to shift my focus, these are one of three things usually, loud music (usually metal if anyone is interested), excercise or video games. These three things have helped me with the burden of depression, video games particularly because it’s somewhere where I get to be anyone but myself for a while. Loud music helps drown the voice that casts doubt on everything I do, that tells I don’t deserve to exist and that I’m a waste of space and time.

I’d like to say there’s a happy ending to this, that I bounce back to achieve something, but I’m not convinced, in fact the only thing I see is suicide, it is so consuming that I can’t see where my path takes me to whatever future is out there for me, I not sure how long it will go on for, but for now it will go on.