Have you ever been so weighted with the grief of a lost relationship, job, freedom, or even a life that your entire world felt like Hurricane Katrina had slammed into your emotional levees and violently drowned you in melancholy? I mean, we are talking when the riptides of pain pins you in a Full Nelson and even refuses to let go on a tap-out or 3-count! As recent as a few hours ago, I was driving on a winding, dark, lonely highway in the Valley area of Connecticut. I had left a day filled with grant prospects and meetings behind me at the office. My best friend and I had dinner at a restaurant the evening before, after a Spirit-filled church service. We both had burgers. She ate hers with coleslaw and drank a seltzer water with lemon. As I cruise-controlled in total silence, my thoughts drifted off to my 40th birthday I’d be ‘celebrating’ on February 7th. I began to think about aaaaallllll of the trauma I had experienced in life.
I suddenly remembered how, at the approximate age of 6 or so, my 16-year-old baby sitter made me play ‘house’ with and touch her breasts. Before I could muster a defense to shake away that thought, I was assaulted with the embarrassment I had of both of my parents being in federal prison around the same time. As I was staggering against the ropes, I got a left hook from another event that occurred about a year later of my older cousin having me incest her. While I was falling to the canvas, a montage of other terrifying memories seemed to cinematically flash across my mind as wide as the windshield my eyes were misty trying to see out of: The 1990 incident when my sister was shot in the face by her then-boyfriend; the verbal altercation I had on August 17, 1991, over a drug deal that left me shot in the chest at the age of 14 and having to relearn how to walk; the 1992 tragedy where my cousin was murdered at the age of 16 in front of his mother — shot 32 times!; the 1999 situation when my brother survived a gunshot wound to the head, and the plurality of unnamed encounters I experienced during the interim with having shot, kidnapped, and/or robbed people. Then...the culmination of the aforementioned landed my thoughts in the 2000 federal indictment that sentenced me to nearly 16 years at the age of 23. I remember how formidable the notion was for me completing that sentence to term. I just knew at the time I would stock-pile the Benadryl I’d been prescribed and have a fatal overdose the moment I had completely got sick and tired of being sick and tired.
The interesting thing about suicide is that it is 8 times higher than the national average among males released from custody! The Grapevine reports: Preventing suicides while offenders are in prison has been a much bigger priority than preventing them once prisoners get out...over 25 percent of suicides occur in the first four weeks of their release. I remember my very own secret — (shh!) — “diary” struggles I had when I was released after 13.5 years in prison. The pressure to stay home. The pressure not to return to the illegalities that indicted me. The pressure to not seek reprisal against the individuals who killed my nephew in 2012. The pressure to shatter the stereotypes associated with “jailhouse religion”, and the likes thereof. The pressure to “keep it real” with and for the fellas I left behind. The pressure to be all things to everyone else...but nothing to myself! Even after you are suited in the moderate level of “success” that I’ve been both blessed and privileged to wear — Author of the Year, White House and DOJ consultations, Huffington Post contributor, and the beat goes on — there is pressure of sustainability. It’s enough to make you want to check out — permanently! Now, before you go referring me to the National Suicide Prevention hotline, or Googling my address to call 9-1-1, let me challenge your understanding. While in prison, it’s common knowledge that you don’t go to the psychiatry department looking for the proverbial couch to lay on for the pre-incarceration issues you may be drowning in. Not that there isn’t a desire to have an external modulator help you make sense of all the internal turmoil. It’s just the social structure doesn’t produce much of a therapeutic environment. Not to mention you run the risk of either being placed in administrative solitary confinement (’for your own protection’) and/or on psychiatric medications that zombie you out, when all you may have simply wanted was a reassuring word that you aren’t “crazy” for feeling the way you do.
When returning citizens, in particular, are so low on life that we want to commit suicide, it’s not that we are “weak.” It has nothing to do with us taking the “easy” way out, or any of the guilt-trips we take people down when they don’t want to live. Most times, it’s simply because we are hurting(!)...from years of accumulated pain that the experience of 23 hours in an 8 x 10 cell may have exacerbated, and the shock of “freedom” may have compounded.
If you know a returning citizen — especially one who is recently released — I want to encourage you to occasionally check the pulse of her mind to simply ensure she is doing okay. If you are a returning citizen, I want to strengthen your understanding to dispel the stereotypes associated with seeing a trained professional (i.e “therapist”, “clinician”, etc). We all need a listening an objective, listening ear who will guide us through our most fearful concerns.