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Loading ...Killing ourselves: Part 2
It’s been 13 years since Mark Finch killed himself by jumping off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge on January 14, 1995.
I knew Mark through various film and gay-related projects, notably as co-director of the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.Mark was a tall, lanky Englishman with a lilting voice and a sardonic demeanor and he was chronically, suicidally depressed for most of the time I knew him.
The news of his dramatic suicide, which came from another colleague, lesbian film maker Jenni Olson, was both infinitely shocking and no surprise at all.
Olson recently completed a film, The Joy of Life, which details not just her good friend Finch’s suicide, but the history of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge, which number in the thousands. Olson has argued for a suicide barrier.
Another gay male friend – an editor at one of the publications for which I wrote in the 1990s – killed himself a few months after Finch took his life. Like Finch, Brad Newman* was sardonic and also somewhat cynical. He, too, was chronically depressed.
After an unusually long bout of depression that unnerved his closest friends, a couple of them took Brad to the hospital and made him sign himself in. But a day later Brad signed himself out, went home and hanged himself in his apartment.
“The isolation of depression is difficult to describe to people not experiencing it,” asserts Jennie Goldenberg, LCSW, a trauma specialist. “There is still such a stigma attached to mental illness. Many people who suffer from severe depression are emotionally isolated. The more depressed they become, the harder it is for them to reach out.”
Goldenberg explains that accessing help for depression may seem simple, but is more complex than the non-depressed understand.
“People have a really hard time asking for help,” she said. “We want to do it ourselves and are told we *should* do it ourselves. ‘Snap ourselves out of it.’ There’s a lot of shame attached in asking for help. People who attempt or commit suicide are traumatized people with a damaged view of themselves. Their capacity to have strength is limited. And then the pall of depression creates a real inability to reach out for help.”
Next page: When being gay is not the issue
To Robert Mosley
Your rant borders on the insane. What business is it for you to condemn people’s preferred form of sexual expression?
It is not anal sex that kills, it’s a virus that kills – and fortunately much less frequently than in the past. A virus that can indeed be transmitted anally, but also vaginally, through any open sore, through needles and countless other ways.
Perhaps you have a problem with anal sex, but that’s your problem. It’s up to each person to determine what form of sexual expression they need or desire. It’s, for sure, not up to you.
In response to this article about killing ourselves,I want to point out the greatest killer of us all: anal sex.With a prevalence rate of 25% and at a cost of 500.000 lives of innocent gay men almost nothing is mentioned about this form of destructive sexual behavior. Condoms and antiviral medications have led many to abdicate their personal responsibility and to become complacent allowing the scourge of anal sex to continue. How many more lives are going to be jepordized before people realize that anal sex is the greatest killer of us all.
Tremendous review of the hows and whys of depression, in general. I don’t know if this is printed anywhere other than here, but it would be great if this could get some extrememly wide read.