My Response to Megyn Kelly's Post on Facebook on the Suicide of Brittany Maynard As a Patient with Mental Illness

My Response to Megyn Kelly's Post on Facebook on the Suicide of Brittany Maynard As a Patient with Mental Illness

Megyn Kelly, host of Fox News Channel's The Kelly File; Named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world for 2014

Post by Megyn Kelly.

From the perspective of a patient with severe bipolar disorder and OCD, I will only state that it has been four years since I last attempted suicide. I suppose I see things a bit differently than some, and I would like to share with you what those are.

The worst of the two evils to bipolar disorder is depression. When I battle this as I am now, life becomes a tale of the absurd. I believe always that I have no sense of purpose nor resolve, that what actions I take and the ideas I express are constantly second guessed as the inane ramblings of a mad man and, worse still, my being met with scorn, derision and constant scrutiny when I cannot possibly explain how I am faring or my mental processes. These days, I simply do not express my issues at all unless they grow too extreme to continue being dammed without a leak. Once that pressure is unbearable, no Dutch boy can possibly be so brave as to plug the hole in the dyke without one day finding the floodgates immersing him in the abysmal sea of despair.

If I were to have spoken to Ms. Maynard, I almost guarantee that she would have demonstrated having suffered from severe depression. If one is well-equipped at the art of deception, this can easily be masked. The fact she retracted her decision twice to first extend her life until it was clear she had no physical capacity to experience the joy of the love of her life indicates this with a very high probability for accuracy. When someone decides suicide is the means to the end of a life no longer worth living, that tends to not at all be true. What Ms. Maynard truly wanted was for the pain to subside, to escape the misery, not to die. She never would have chosen death had she been informed there was a chance she would enter remission or even might be cured. She would not have altered her course to end her life had she not believed life is too precious to simply become the sand in the hourglass' final descent. To fight to live even in the inevitability of death is the finite measure for an always penultimate end. In desperation, she chose the final solution, and there can be no U-Turn towards bearing witness for what might have been.

In grappling my near-nightly prayer that I not again reawaken to bear witness the next morning, I am always pleased in the end that I did not die once I awaken. I consider myself a Christian, but I approach my adherence to The Word of God by reading my online Bible sites based upon a chosen topic and research it accordingly. I am not Catholic, but I have read much of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, and I marvel how Christianity can articulate best what the flaws of science are never absolutisms graduating from theorems and postulations. As I understand, so too do I see practicing medicine as only serving that best possible action - a practice. Medicine is not an absolute truth, just as recently the presence of black holes and the concept of the Big Bang are being redebated by the astrophysics community on if they ever exist(ed). Medicine has achieved great strides since the days of Hippocrates, but to this very day, the world still is mystified what exactly caused the Black Death during the Middle Ages that killed at least 200 million people globally as it is believed the bubonic and pneumonic plagues were actually Ebola, which can spread in the same manners as both. As HIV/AIDS have yet been cured, much less cancer, nothing about medicine will ever lead to the curing of all our ills. Stem cell research is still a phenomena where researchers are learning its vast possibilities, but much remains unclear. As the right to life can never be guaranteed to progress beyond the womb, the last rite, death, is the lone absolute truth for any state of nature to be. Once Ms. Maynard understood this, her decision became too excruciating and unbearable to decide "how" and not "if" and "when". And as she determined the choice to die was for her the best option, it was not God whispering such a monumental action to be taken in her mind, but her own demons she could not overcome which silenced her.

Albert Camus stated this when discussing suicide, and it is a remark though only recently I stumbled upon, I consider most profound, as it will be closing my wistful reflection never finished, of an end with the drama's curtain calls proving most unkind, and to a very lengthy reply to Megyn Kelly's post.

Albert Camus, 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960. Portrait from New York World-Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection, 1957

"But sometimes, it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself."

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Post by Megyn Kelly.