“In Canada, suicide accounts for 24 percent of all deaths among 15 to 24 year olds and 16 percent among 16 to 44 year olds. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for Canadians between the ages of 10 and 24.”
The Canadian Mental Health Association
Over 23,000 Canadians are hospitalized each year for a suicide attempt.
Canada Safety Council
“In clinical samples, about 50% of persons with bipolar disorder (BD) were found to have a history of a suicide attempt. In the largest epidemiological study on the topic to date, the suicide attempt rate in persons with BD was twice that of individuals with unipolar depression.”
Suicide Attempts and Completions in Patients With Bipolar Disorder; May 1, 2007
“The causes of physical illness and death among psychiatric patients are much the same as those in other groups — cigarette smoking, obesity, diabetes — and are treatable. The problem is that people with serious mental illness tend to be low on the socioeconomic totem pole and often don’t get the best available health care. Frequently, their own doctors pay little heed to their patients’ physical health.”
Time Magazine: Why Do the Mentally Ill Die Younger? Dec. 03, 2008
I was diagnosed with manic depression in 1989 in a pre-Internet era when information regarding the disease was almost impossible to find. But I knew the basics. Some days I felt like dying, and some days I didn’t.
It has been twenty years since, and I am only now becoming aware of the damage done to my body over that time. I’ve only recently begun the basics of trying to repair my body from the damage done by living so long untreated and unmedicated.
That process of trying to change, even just modify, the damaging behaviours which have become my life has been slow. And it’s only within the past few months where I’ve begun to realize most of the damage is permanent, and will be the cost.
And the cost of resisting treatment, of misunderstanding what the disease is, and my outright general ignorance, will be a severely reduced life expectancy, not of days or years, but of decades. According to several recent studies into mental illness, the cost will be my death from natural causes decades too early.
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