youarenotarobot
Learning
Hello. I originally came to this site as a younger teen searching for what was wrong with me. I was very vague about details and I can remember people on here being quite confused about the lack of information I was handing out. That was because I was still convinced what happened was my fault, and I was too scared to talk about it in case people blamed me. Back again as an adult because...I'm still struggling. Hugely.
I met a girl online when we were both about 10-12 years old. We became best friends and we are still best friends to this day. We talk almost every day. Around 13/14 I began wondering if I was actually in love with her, and confirmed it when I was 17 and realized I liked girls. Fortunately I've gotten over that crush now so it's all good.
When I was 14 and she 16, we were talking and we were happy. It was a good day. She told me very suddenly that she had attempted suicide 2 weeks prior. I did not know what to do or say and just kind of stumbled through the supportive bits. She had been depressed for a while and had talked to me before about wanting to overdose on pills; her temper was sometimes quite difficult to handle on occasions and sometimes she really hurt my feelings because she was too depressed to kind of look outside of her own little bubble. I never thought she'd actually try to kill herself, though. She went into quite a bit of detail of how she slit her wrist.
I did not know what to do and shut down. A week or so later I started feeling really angry. I did not understand suicide at the time and thought it was selfish to leave people behind. I was angry and hurt that she had tried to leave everybody who loved her. I was particularly angry that she had promised me before that if she ever wanted to hurt herself, she would go to a hospital-but she didn't. She did not tell any adults that she tried to kill herself, only her friends.
I was overwhelmed with everything that was happening. I was so angry I couldn't think straight. But I also did not want to upset her by telling her how angry I was. I had become obsessed with searching up 'how to talk to suicidal people' etc and knew that would only make her feel worse.
I did not want to tell my parents because I wasn't supposed to have online friends and knew they'd take my laptop and phone away. So I went online and found a depression website with a part marked off for 'support for friends & family'. I thought it was okay for me to vent about everything I was feeling, and that these people would help me feel better. I was happy I'd found it and I felt happy to get my feelings out.
Unfortunately it all went wrong very quickly. The people on the website did not agree with me talking about my anger, which, looking back, I can understand that it wasn't suitable for a depression website. However, instead of redirecting me to somewhere that could actually help me, they tried to deal with me by themselves. They acknowledged that I 'sounded very young', but that did not stop them from taking part in a week-long pile on where I was told that I shouldn't be feeling angry, I shouldn't be angry with my friend for breaking her promise because 'it doesn't work like that', my feelings were harmful to everybody else, I didn't add a trigger warning so I obviously didn't care who I would hurt (at 14, I did not know the importance of trigger warnings), and that the only reason I had 'any sense or compassion' was that I hadn't told my friend how I felt.
At the time my grandmother had also died a month or so earlier. She had severe, severe, severe depression for the last few years of her life-as in, the most severe depression I had ever seen. She spent years and years just laying in bed, getting bed sores, wetting the bed...she put on a lot of weight, and then lost it so quickly she looked like a skeleton. My parents knew it scared me and so tried to protect me from the situation. I now know, through conversations with them, that they constantly barraged doctors to take this seriously, would talk to her, would try to get her out of the house, were desperate for somebody professional to help her. But, rightly or wrongly, to try and protect me they did not talk about this in front of me. My dad was also dealing with a severe heart condition that meant he was in and out of hospital throughout my teenage years, so I suppose they maybe thought one ill family member was enough for me to worry about.
From my point of view, it felt like my family had given up on her. They explained to me later that they wanted to go in and look after her, but she didn't seem to want anybody else around, and they were afraid of interrupting her privacy (my grandmother was a private person anyway), so they would just buy her shopping and leave it on the door for her.
From my point of view it seemed like they just left her to get on with lying in bed all day. She died two days after Christmas and I was feeling guilty that I could not go to see her in the psych hospital she was in for the last few months of her life, because I had a cold on Christmas Day and so couldn't enter the hospital. I was upset that she never opened her present from me. I talked about all of this on the website, and they told me that they hoped I never interacted with a depressed person again and that it was so upsetting my family treated my grandmother so badly.
I was crying myself to sleep throughout the week and constantly checking to see what they were saying about me. I apologized many times to try and de-escalate the situation, and begged them to take my post down. They refused, and locked it so I couldn't comment anymore, saying that they wanted to show the world how to fight the stigma of suicide and depression. But to me, it was public humiliation for talking about how I was feeling after a traumatic event.
All of a sudden I could no longer trust my own feelings. If I was angry at oppression I was seeing, that was bad, because anger is bad. If I was frustrated my friend was late to our meet-up, that was bad, because anger is bad. My anger at suicide grew and grew to the point I would start shaking and seeing red. I would sit in class ignoring my work to write down how angry I felt. Any mention of suicide whatsoever made me go from 0 to 100 in a second. I would scratch myself to punish myself for these feelings. I would intentionally trigger myself by searching up things about suicide, sometimes very dark and that looking back a 14/15 year old had no business looking at. I would stop sleeping and toss and turn all night. I would see the words they wrote about me in my head when I was triggered, like it was all happening in my head again. I became convinced I had to prevent every suicide. I would look at groups of children wondering which ones would statistically end their own lives. I stopped trusting adults altogether. I eventually grew so suicidal my counsellor had to contact my mother and tell her I was at suicide risk. 2 years after it happened, my counsellor contacted the
website and forced them to take my post down. Things slowly got better after that, but not brilliant.
I actually told my friend, a few years after, what had happened. She now refers to the people on the website as 'those f*cks'.
Last year, when I was 20, I contacted the website to tell them the effect they had had on me. By this point I was old enough to pinpoint what they had done as emotional abuse, child abuse (since they knew I was young), and that it was not my fault. The woman who runs the website completely rewrote history. She insisted she would never say or do things like that, and that I must be remembering wrong. I gave her evidence I had seen a counsellor over it, and that my counsellor had had to force her to remove the post. At this point she got defensive and dug her heels into denying it had ever happened, and then banned me so I couldn't talk about it again.
I have been diagnosed as traumatized, but I have never been officially diagnosed with PTSD. I have attempted many times but it's been really difficult to get people to take online trauma seriously. At this point it's been 7 years and I'm still not better. I don't know what else I could have.
However, I have been getting better. My anger at suicide has dissipated and I am now passionate about raising awareness of it instead. If someone says suicide is selfish (as long as they aren't currently grieving one, I think it's fine to say whatever you want in grief), I am the first to step in and tell them to be more sensitive. I worry about people who kill themselves every day and how to prevent it.
I met a girl online when we were both about 10-12 years old. We became best friends and we are still best friends to this day. We talk almost every day. Around 13/14 I began wondering if I was actually in love with her, and confirmed it when I was 17 and realized I liked girls. Fortunately I've gotten over that crush now so it's all good.
When I was 14 and she 16, we were talking and we were happy. It was a good day. She told me very suddenly that she had attempted suicide 2 weeks prior. I did not know what to do or say and just kind of stumbled through the supportive bits. She had been depressed for a while and had talked to me before about wanting to overdose on pills; her temper was sometimes quite difficult to handle on occasions and sometimes she really hurt my feelings because she was too depressed to kind of look outside of her own little bubble. I never thought she'd actually try to kill herself, though. She went into quite a bit of detail of how she slit her wrist.
I did not know what to do and shut down. A week or so later I started feeling really angry. I did not understand suicide at the time and thought it was selfish to leave people behind. I was angry and hurt that she had tried to leave everybody who loved her. I was particularly angry that she had promised me before that if she ever wanted to hurt herself, she would go to a hospital-but she didn't. She did not tell any adults that she tried to kill herself, only her friends.
I was overwhelmed with everything that was happening. I was so angry I couldn't think straight. But I also did not want to upset her by telling her how angry I was. I had become obsessed with searching up 'how to talk to suicidal people' etc and knew that would only make her feel worse.
I did not want to tell my parents because I wasn't supposed to have online friends and knew they'd take my laptop and phone away. So I went online and found a depression website with a part marked off for 'support for friends & family'. I thought it was okay for me to vent about everything I was feeling, and that these people would help me feel better. I was happy I'd found it and I felt happy to get my feelings out.
Unfortunately it all went wrong very quickly. The people on the website did not agree with me talking about my anger, which, looking back, I can understand that it wasn't suitable for a depression website. However, instead of redirecting me to somewhere that could actually help me, they tried to deal with me by themselves. They acknowledged that I 'sounded very young', but that did not stop them from taking part in a week-long pile on where I was told that I shouldn't be feeling angry, I shouldn't be angry with my friend for breaking her promise because 'it doesn't work like that', my feelings were harmful to everybody else, I didn't add a trigger warning so I obviously didn't care who I would hurt (at 14, I did not know the importance of trigger warnings), and that the only reason I had 'any sense or compassion' was that I hadn't told my friend how I felt.
At the time my grandmother had also died a month or so earlier. She had severe, severe, severe depression for the last few years of her life-as in, the most severe depression I had ever seen. She spent years and years just laying in bed, getting bed sores, wetting the bed...she put on a lot of weight, and then lost it so quickly she looked like a skeleton. My parents knew it scared me and so tried to protect me from the situation. I now know, through conversations with them, that they constantly barraged doctors to take this seriously, would talk to her, would try to get her out of the house, were desperate for somebody professional to help her. But, rightly or wrongly, to try and protect me they did not talk about this in front of me. My dad was also dealing with a severe heart condition that meant he was in and out of hospital throughout my teenage years, so I suppose they maybe thought one ill family member was enough for me to worry about.
From my point of view, it felt like my family had given up on her. They explained to me later that they wanted to go in and look after her, but she didn't seem to want anybody else around, and they were afraid of interrupting her privacy (my grandmother was a private person anyway), so they would just buy her shopping and leave it on the door for her.
From my point of view it seemed like they just left her to get on with lying in bed all day. She died two days after Christmas and I was feeling guilty that I could not go to see her in the psych hospital she was in for the last few months of her life, because I had a cold on Christmas Day and so couldn't enter the hospital. I was upset that she never opened her present from me. I talked about all of this on the website, and they told me that they hoped I never interacted with a depressed person again and that it was so upsetting my family treated my grandmother so badly.
I was crying myself to sleep throughout the week and constantly checking to see what they were saying about me. I apologized many times to try and de-escalate the situation, and begged them to take my post down. They refused, and locked it so I couldn't comment anymore, saying that they wanted to show the world how to fight the stigma of suicide and depression. But to me, it was public humiliation for talking about how I was feeling after a traumatic event.
All of a sudden I could no longer trust my own feelings. If I was angry at oppression I was seeing, that was bad, because anger is bad. If I was frustrated my friend was late to our meet-up, that was bad, because anger is bad. My anger at suicide grew and grew to the point I would start shaking and seeing red. I would sit in class ignoring my work to write down how angry I felt. Any mention of suicide whatsoever made me go from 0 to 100 in a second. I would scratch myself to punish myself for these feelings. I would intentionally trigger myself by searching up things about suicide, sometimes very dark and that looking back a 14/15 year old had no business looking at. I would stop sleeping and toss and turn all night. I would see the words they wrote about me in my head when I was triggered, like it was all happening in my head again. I became convinced I had to prevent every suicide. I would look at groups of children wondering which ones would statistically end their own lives. I stopped trusting adults altogether. I eventually grew so suicidal my counsellor had to contact my mother and tell her I was at suicide risk. 2 years after it happened, my counsellor contacted the
website and forced them to take my post down. Things slowly got better after that, but not brilliant.
I actually told my friend, a few years after, what had happened. She now refers to the people on the website as 'those f*cks'.
Last year, when I was 20, I contacted the website to tell them the effect they had had on me. By this point I was old enough to pinpoint what they had done as emotional abuse, child abuse (since they knew I was young), and that it was not my fault. The woman who runs the website completely rewrote history. She insisted she would never say or do things like that, and that I must be remembering wrong. I gave her evidence I had seen a counsellor over it, and that my counsellor had had to force her to remove the post. At this point she got defensive and dug her heels into denying it had ever happened, and then banned me so I couldn't talk about it again.
I have been diagnosed as traumatized, but I have never been officially diagnosed with PTSD. I have attempted many times but it's been really difficult to get people to take online trauma seriously. At this point it's been 7 years and I'm still not better. I don't know what else I could have.
However, I have been getting better. My anger at suicide has dissipated and I am now passionate about raising awareness of it instead. If someone says suicide is selfish (as long as they aren't currently grieving one, I think it's fine to say whatever you want in grief), I am the first to step in and tell them to be more sensitive. I worry about people who kill themselves every day and how to prevent it.