Anxiety is a feeling that everyone experiences, even without a diagnosis. Because anxiety is so common, it’s often dismissed as a ‘less serious’ mental health condition. Many people have trouble understanding how debilitating anxiety can be and how closely related it can become to suicidality. When people think about the warning signs for suicide, depression is always the number one factor. What people don’t talk about enough is how anxiety can push someone toward suicide. For me, untreated anxiety was a driving force behind my suicidal thinking.
I experienced extreme anxiety as early as elementary school, often in the form of panic attacks that left me overwhelmed and inconsolable. I was lucky to get a therapist early on and begin anxiety medication that helped me tremendously. As I got older, I stopped taking the medication, but my anxiety didn’t disappear; it just changed. However, because it manifested so differently, I didn’t recognize that I was still struggling.
In middle school, I learned that even small amounts of stress would send my nervous system into overdrive. My brain just couldn’t handle any additional stress. I now say it feels like your brain is on fire. It felt like my brain was a computer with too many tabs open, overheating, slowing down, and eventually shutting down completely. At the time, I didn’t know this was abnormal. I just assumed this was something everyone dealt with. That assumption kept me from realizing I needed help.
I tried to deal with my anxiety on my own, but that led me to a much worse place. In an attempt to escape what was going on in my head, I turned to increasingly dangerous coping mechanisms. I would self-harm in ways I hoped would make me unconscious. This was the start of a very dangerous thought pattern that would take me many years to untangle. The cycle was always the same: overwhelming stress, physical pain engulfing my head, and an urgent need to make the thoughts stop, which ultimately led to dangerous coping.
This progressed into my high school years, and my coping would become more extreme. I started using any substance I could get my hands on. I wanted nothing more than to numb my thoughts so I would get high. I continued to self-harm and began using ways that were more concealable. Over time, those coping strategies stopped working, and suicidal thoughts began to feel like the only complete escape. This is when I started fantasizing about suicide. I would fall asleep imagining my death because the idea of complete silence was the only thing that calmed me down enough to sleep.
I now recognize how scary those years were. After lots of treatment, medications, and hospitalizations, I no longer think this way. I am back on medication that manages my anxiety, I have support in the form of my friends and family, and I know, possibly every coping skill that exists. But I also now know how big a trigger my anxiety is and how fast it can spiral into something very dangerous. I share this because anxiety is still rarely treated as a suicide risk. When we talk about suicide prevention, most people focus on depression, but extreme, untreated anxiety can also be a big risk factor. When we limit suicide prevention to depression alone, we miss people whose anxiety is quietly becoming just as dangerous.
Written by a young adult guest blogger who wishes to write anonymously
