Content warning: this post discusses a suicide attempt. If you are feeling suicidal, please talk to someone about it. If you have no one else to talk to, there are telephone hotlines you can call to talk to a trained volunteer who can help you through this. In the USA and Canada you can call

• USA Trans Lifeline – For transgender people – 1-877-565-8860
• Canadian Trans Lifeline – For transgender people 1-877-330-6366
• The Trevor Project – For LGBTQ youth – 1-866-488-7386
• Suicide hotline in USA and Canada – For everyone – 988

So now we come to my fourth, and if the rest of my life goes well, last suicide attempt. It was 18 months after the previous one. In November of 1999 I was finally diagnosed as bipolar. Over that year I had begun learning about bipolar disorder. I think talking to a friend who was diagnosed with it was the first thing that turned me on to the possibility that I might have it, but regardless of how the thought got into my head, I started reading about it. I read personal accounts by people on the Internet, and perhaps most influentially I read Touched By Fire, by Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychologist who specializes in bipolar disorder and who is herself bipolar. This particular one of her books discusses the link between bipolar disorder and creativity in the arts, and at the time that was very much on my mind because I was writing music of my own and was on the periphery of the Irish music scene in my city, occasionally doing things like live recording of one of the local bands.

The discussions and descriptions in the book felt really familiar to me, because I recognized that my own mood swings were very similar to what Jamison was talking about. Based on that, and other things I read, I decided that it would be a good idea to talk to a psychiatrist about this, because the previous treatment I’d received for major depression had done absolutely nothing useful for me. So I made an appointment with a psychiatrist and went in to talk to her. I described to her my research and described my own experiences with mood swings, both high and low, and how they just kept repeating themselves over and over, and she agreed with me that a diagnosis of bipolar disorder was appropriate. She then wrote me a prescription for Depakote (valproic acid) and I started on a years long journey of trying one medication after another without success.

That’s right, the Depakote did not work. In fact, it may have made me worse. The official website for Depakote lists this warning: “Like other antiepileptic drugs, DEPAKOTE may cause suicidal thoughts or actions in a very small number of people, about 1 in 500.” It seems as though I was that 1 in 500, though there were triggering events to help move things along, too.

First, in mid December, a couple of weeks after starting treatment, I was fired from my job. To be fair, I had been doing really badly at work, being chronically late and missing deadlines for generating reports that needed to be submited to government agencies. It was the depression, of course, that was messing things up for me, but while I was now being treated finally, it was too late to save my job. Then a couple of days later, my mother, a very narcissistic woman who always needed to be the center of attention, told me she had an incurable liver disease and led me to believe, falsely, that it might kill her. This double blow coming on top of already severe depression just sent my mood careening off the edge of a cliff.

The next Saturday after being fired, in the week right before Christmas, I was feeling absolutely horrible, and in an attempt to cope with this I did something I was doing a lot of at the time: I went to my favorite restaurant. It was a Chinese cafe that some ex coworkers from the People’s Republic of China had introduced me to, saying it had more genuinely authentic Chinese food than most places in the city, and it was true. The food there was fantastic, and the way it was set up I could get unlimited self service refills of my drink and sit at a table undisturbed for literally hours while I ate and did things like read books, or draw in my sketchbook.

That day though, nothing I did helped to calm me down or improve my mood. I had my favorite dish, I had my fill of drinks (Mountain Dew, as it happens, so it had lots of caffeine, which probably did not help me to calm down any), and I tried reading and writing for a while, but nothing worked, so eventually I got back on my bicycle and rode back home. On the trip back I got more and more agitated. As in the previous incident, I think I got into a mixed state that day, combining the horrible feelings and suicidal thoughts of deep depression, with the energy and will to act of mania.

As soon as I got home, I walked in the door, went into my bedroom, put down my backpack and purse, opened up the drawer of my desk, and pulled out a loaded .32 caliber revolver that I had inherited from my grandmother the previous year. I was going to shoot myself in the head and end my suffering finally, once and for all.

But my hands were shaky and I was really not thinking or acting quite coherently, and as I raised up the gun I pulled the trigger prematurely, sending a bullet across the room into a window sill. The sound of the gun firing scared me – I am noise sensitive, among other things – and suddenly I felt that I couldn’t go through with it. I walked into the next bedroom and found my housemate standing there looking shocked and afraid and I handed him the gun and walked out of the house.

I just started walking down the street with no destination in mind. I just wanted to walk off the energy, and fear, and the loathing I felt for my own life, and just somehow clear my mind. I got down the street to a convenience store and went inside to buy a soda. While inside I saw a police car driving slowly down the street with it’s lights flashing but the siren off, and I just knew they were looking for me, so I stayed inside the store and used a pay phone to call a friend, the High Priestess of the Wiccan coven I was a member of. I told her what was happening and that I needed help, and she came and got me and took me back to her house to stay the night. The next day, she drove me back home, and I found out that my housemate had called our landlords and I was now being evicted because he felt unsafe around me. He told me he had given the gun to my boyfriend.

So that was the single worst week of my life. Fired from my job, told my mother had an incurable disease, tried to kill myself, and got evicted, all in the week before Christmas.

Now looking back on all of these incidents, I see the following. The first suicide attempt when I was 12 was purely driven by my gender dysphoria. I wanted to die not because I felt like my life was worthless, but because I felt that living life as a man would bring too much pain and I didn’t think I could handle it. The other three incidents, though, were not really gender related, and they followed each other in close order, the first being in 1997, the second in 1998, and the third in 1999. What they all have in common is that they all happened during the years where, in retrospect, I was in the throws of bipolar disorder, either undiagnosed and untreated, or immediately after starting treatment and being put on a medication that can increase suicidal thoughts in rare cases. Since that time, I have experienced lots of suicidal ideation during the 13 years it took to find a medication that actually worked for me, but I’ve never again actually come close to attempting to kill myself.

Even when I was on medication that did not fully control my bipolar disorder, I can now see that the medication did, at least, eliminate the worst of the lows and enabled me to continue living. If I had not had the medications – and there were 13 of them before finding the one that worked – I think I would have continued to make attempts to kill myself and it seems likely that at some point I would have succeeded. But that fate was avoided, thankfully, and so I am around today to share these stories with others.

I don’t know if these stories can really help anyone, but my hope is that someone out there who is feeling suicidal and thinking that they are alone in the world with no one who can understand them will read about my experiences and feel a familiarity in them and know that there really are people who have been there and who know how they feel and, most importantly, have lived and eventually found their way out of the darkness. Suicide can seem very appealing. It promises an end to pain and suffering. But it’s not an easy thing to do, and if you can just manage to avoid it, either by willpower or even by sheer luck, then there is hope for a brighter future. I found that future. In 2013 I finally found the right medication for me. In my case it was Latuda (lurasidone) and it was the first drug to ever actually stabilize my mood and end the cycling up and down. It stabilized me in a permanently depressed state, unfortunately, but my doctor continued working with me and we found that adding in Wellbutrin (bupropion) served to also bring my mood up to a non depressed level so that for the first time since I was a child I was both stable and more or less happy.

If you are reading this and think there is no hope for you, please let my own experience be an example to you that there is hope! You can find a way out of the depression or the mood swings that are making you feel the way you do. It may take a lot of trial and error, and it may take time. It may take 13 years like it did for me, but don’t give up! When you find your own solution, life will open up for you in ways that you can’t even imagine, and you’ll finally have the life you deserve!

Previous: My Closest Call