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Dealing with suicidal thoughts isn't easy. RAAGA spoke to some survivors to better understand their journey. Here are their stories:

True Story 3:

I almost committed suicide once in my life. However, I still struggle with suicidal thoughts to this very day. It all began as a game. I was enrolled in an all-girl school and for most of my education, I felt like I did not fit in, as I am not very feminine in nature. My physique is small and my voice is meek. My outdated glasses did not do much for me in terms of popularity. For a very long time I struggled to make friends.

Then in Form 2, I learnt to play the suicide game. It was right before schools broke term for leave. Teachers rarely came to check on students in classes, so a majority of us spent the period playing some games among ourselves. However I was very rarely invited to join.

One of those games was a suicide game called Blood. A group of 5 girls who used to pick on me in primary school asked me to join them. Deciding to put aside our differences and make new friends, I took up their offer. 

We all took turns to say something mean about another player in the game. Whoever who got a mean statement about them would have to self-harm with a blade that was placed at the middle of the circle. At every round all the other 5 girls only said mean things about me and I ended up getting too many cuts that I wanted to opt out.

The girl who initially asked me to play said in order for the game to end someone has to ‘die’. So if I were unable to continue the game today, they would play again tomorrow. I was in so much pain that I just agreed to play the game the following day instead of continuing to cut myself today.

This went on for a few days until it came to a point where I was numb to the pain on my skin. But I couldn’t get the mean things they said about me out of my head. It all felt so real. In the final round, I learnt the other girls really did expect me to kill myself. I got scared when they told me to slash my wrists open. I couldn’t, so I gave up. They ganged up and beat me to a pulp and left me on the ground. 

However, ever since that incident, I often think of suicide and I do think of executing it with a less painful option. I am 18 now and I work at a Bubble Tea Shop as a part-timer. Should my day get a little stressful, I literally can hear the call of the knife for me to cut myself. 

To make sure my colleagues never find out, I hide my scars with hand-socks. They often tease me for wearing them because I am an Indian girl and religious Malay women often wear hand-socks. But I don’t have much of a choice. I want my secret to remain a secret!

Thanks to Facebook, I came across a post by a local journalist who wrote about her struggles and fight with the matter. After dropping her a message, I finally made a friend who understood what I am going through. So I share my thoughts with her and she often helps me see a different perspective, every time I feel suicidal. I know I am not the only person she extends such help to and she tells me there are other people like her who make themselves available to people like me. I just want to thank all such people and organizations for helping and having faith in the likes of my case. Thanks for giving us the strength to fight.

-Para, 18

True Story 4:

I tried committing suicide at a very young age because my parents wanted to separate. I was 7 when I tried the act. The thing is, I wasn’t really aware of the consequence my actions would bring about, as I was really way too young to understand. 

I got the idea off a Tamil movie, as suicide was a prevalent theme, depicting it as a solution to problems, in the days of my childhood. 

At that point in time, all I understood was that my parents were going to live in separate houses and I might only get to live with one of them. It was too much for me to accept, as I loved them both with all my heart.

My parents often quarrelled at home and the fights got physical some times. They would bad mouth each other to me and made me pick sides. When I refused to, my father wouldn’t speak to me and my mother would tell me that I couldn’t eat until I came up with an answer. There were times I HAD TO PICK one or the other so that I’d get to eat or so that I’d get to play with my dad. It was very pressuring and difficult for me at that age.

I started acting out at school and would often get into fights with other students. Teachers thought I was merely a problematic kid, as everything in my life seemed perfect from the outside. 

One day, things got really out of hand and I couldn’t get my parents to stop quarrelling. They were just going at each other, paying no heed to my cries for them to stop. So I took my mother’s sleeping tablets from her night stand and threatened to eat them all. They were too busy screaming at each other to notice me. I didn’t think people would die from consuming sleeping tablets. So, I emptied the bottle’s contents into my mouth and tried to swallow them with water. There were too many tablets in my mouth and I started to choke and sputter. 

Finally my mom noticed what I was doing and she grabbed me and slapped me hard across the face. She made me spit out all the tablets in my mouth. Unfortunately, I had swallowed some. My parents got worried and immediately rushed me to the hospital to get checked. I don’t remember much of that hospital visit. I was drowsy. But I felt a little happy that my parents were working together again. 

At the hospital the doctor asked how it happened and my mom spun some story. The doctor made my parents wait outside and she asked me what happened. I told the truth. I remember the doctor was kind to me. 

I don’t really know what was said to my parents, but they stopped fighting in front of me and we started going to the hospital every few months once to talk to someone. Sometimes, I’d get to play outside with the other children while the adults talked in the room. 

In time, my family got better. My parents had my siblings and we don’t talk about that time of our lives anymore. But it is something I can never forget. 

All I would like to say to people who are reading my story is that suicide is never the solution to our problems. If I died that day, I wouldn’t have lived to see my family get better. I wouldn’t have lived to start my own business and my own family. Family is everything in life. If you have family, even when you have nothing it would feel like you have almost everything. Be there for each other and love each other. With love, there is no space for suicide in this world.

-Des, 32

RAAGA would like to thank these individuals for sharing their personal stories with us in the hope it might help another struggling person. Names have been altered to protect their identities. If you are dealing with suicidal thought yourself, please don't hesitate to reach out to the following organisations for help. You are a fighter, we believe in you!
 
Befrienders:
Call the hotline  603-79568145 or email sam@befrienders.org.my

Zero Depression:
FB: Zero Depression
IG: zero_depression

Malaysian Invisible Illness Association (MIIA):
FB: MIIA or email miia.org.my@gmail.com