Where to start? It’s difficult when one is already in the middle of it all – so I will start with a piece I sent to the Guardian today in response to their request for people with chronic illness to tell them about it due to a report showing that 10% of suicides are related to chronic or terminal illness http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/23/suicide-chronic-illness-study
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Living with chronic illness and pain everyday makes me, I admit, feel suicidal on a fairly regular basis. It is not so much the illness itself (in my case ME and spinal arthritis) but, instead the social attitude to illness that makes me consider taking my life.
Of course constant pain and feeling very unwell and unable to do much of any use takes its toll,and people, even those who are close, easily forget what the ill person cannot – that suffering is ongoing even when there is no outward sign. But for now I can live with the physical pain and illness.
No – it is the fear caused by the relentless haranguing for being unable to work that will kill me in the end. That and the loneliness of it all.
The government constantly reminds me, through its willing mouth piece, the media, that I am worthless. I can’t work and I claim benefits and am therefore to be mistrusted to the point where I am told that my very perceptions of my own body are not reliable and, that I will, at some point, have to, again, prove my inner physical truth to a privately employed bureaucrat working for a flawed system in order to be allowed to continue to live.
Last week I called the Samaritans – the man was nice but he can’t change the fact that society as a whole has decided that chronic illness doesn’t really exist and that all those suffering it must be lying, workshy scum. We are all young and fit until we die now – didn’t you hear? Wasn’t it people like you who told us all that in the first place?
I live in a Kafka novel and my self esteem is being eroded just a little more everyday – soon there will be none left.
Much to my astonishment the Guardian decided to use an edited version of this on their Comment is Free reader's panel:
Much to my astonishment the Guardian decided to use an edited version of this on their Comment is Free reader's panel:
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