Is Suicide More a 'Spiritual Crisis' Than a Mental Health Problem?
A Concerned Friend Sent Me This Recent Video By His "Punk Rock Shaman" and I reflect On Its Themes As they Relate to my Own struggles.
So I was planning on saving this post for tomorrow - 5 pieces in one day is generally more than I like to hit up our readers with reading. But it’s my birthday today and the truth is I have been so overwhelmingly suicidal and miserable from it that I thought it more appropriate to unleash this one today. Thank you everyone for your forbearance.
One of the strangest aspects of trying to recover and find effective treatments for the PTSD has been seeing old acquaintances, high school classmates, and former co-workers emerge out of the woodwork — people I may not have communicated with in years — to try and help me while members of my own family and seemingly closer friends and longtime colleagues ran for the hills to escape dealing with recognizing the horrible police violence that made me sick and transformed my personality.
One old co-worker I barely worked with at all from over a decade ago has been one of those kind people, I think largely driven by his own struggle with PTSD and just him being a compassionate, decent person in general. He’s given me so much advice about how to deal with PTSD’s symptoms and potential treatments to explore. So when he saw my recent writing just over a week ago about suicidal ideation he sent me the above video by someone he described as “my punk rock shaman” and urged, “You are not alone. The Universe is trying to send you love; open your heart.”
So I’m going to give the video by Christina Lopes, DPT, MPH a closer look and offer a general response to its themes. Lopes describes herself as “the Heart Alchemist.” I have a moderate understanding of alchemy and its symbolic nature from my studies of the mystical and occult traditions. It’s not one of my preferred metaphors from the medieval and Renaissance periods - I prefer the Tarot cards and John Dee-style angelic magic of that time - but whatever; it’s still a legitimate mystical framing for teaching.
The video explores three primary themes: a spiritual perspective on suicide, why suicide is on the rise globally, and what to do to counter suicidal ideation.
First, Lopes claims that suicide does not send a soul to hell or cause any form of punishment, that all souls return to God when they die. As I may have written about a bit on this Substack somewhere, I disagree with this more New Agey theology. Oh yes, it was in this post here:
In my mystical explorations I have experienced what I perceive to be “wandering souls” or “ghosts” who are sometimes tormented by “demonic spirits” in some sort of equivalent to a hell or purgatory. “Hell” simply means separation from God and it is right here on earth. All of us who are alive are technically in “Hell” for much of our waking life.
I don’t think all souls return to God right away - as a universalist I think we all will choose that ultimately in the end - but that it can take awhile before all souls make that free choice. I think some souls - particularly those who die suddenly or unexpectedly before they’re ready - can end up stuck here on earth for some time. While I’m not sure if all suicides fall into this state, I do suspect a good number of them do and that’s among the reasons I’ve been able to resist doing it myself in spite of being plagued by daily suicidal ideation for more than 20 years now. There’s a legitimate fear/hypothesis that suicide won’t relieve one of the pain, but just somehow intensify it for longer, maybe even forever.
Lopes then argues a form of reincarnation theology, claiming that the act of suicide in one life will carry over into a future life and impact it in some way. I am sympathetic to this general position as I am open-minded to the mystical consideration that many of my preoccupations today in some way relate particularly to unresolved problems in what I speculate to be the experiences of my previous two lives, one of which I wrote about here in consideration that my current obsession with militantly opposing gender-based violence and bigotry today may in some way be influenced by being a murder victim of it in the life directly preceding this one:
Lopes claims that suicide is the result of a spiritual crisis, rather than the materialistic, scientific, and medical model of seeing it as an act driven by mental health problems lying in some dysfunction of chemicals in the brain. She suggests that the western health model is inadequate for treating suicide and that a mind-body-soul paradigm is needed instead. She says, “suicidal ideation is a very common feature of a spiritual awakening. Many people around the world are going through a spiritual awakening right now and a lot of them don’t know what is happening to them.” She characterizes this as “the death of the ego” and results in the death of one’s personality and many habits. Thus according to Lopes:
Then Lopes moves into talking about her interpretation of why suicide is on the rise.
She identifies two reasons. First, lack of support, that the western psychiatric, psychological model is inadequate to provide the spiritual support the suicidal really need. Lopes describes this as a “transformational crisis.”
Second she claims there is a “rapid ascension of the planet” and articulates the Pagan theology that the planet is a sentient being one should understand in the feminine context. She claims this creates some “temporary chaos” on the planet as a whole, that the shift in planetary energy provokes wars, protests, government repression, and so forth. She then emphasizes that seeing this degree of chaos can be overwhelming to someone who is “a sensitive.”
I sort of fall into this category of being too deeply disturbed by the world’s chaos and evil acts but see it in a more secular, historic, and Judeo-Christian perspective. This is just the way humans are and always have been. There isn’t seemingly more war and chaos because of anything happening to “Mother Earth” - this is just the nature of humanity. We are flawed, fallen, broken creatures perpetually tempted to be worse by wandering demonic spirits. I regard the earth as just a big rock floating around a star, not some godlike creature with a mind.
In the last third of the video Lopes offers her explanation of what she thinks people struggling with suicidal ideation should do. She offers 4 tips to help “make sense of things.”
First she urges the suicidal to speak spiritual answers and go beyond the western psychological model. She then makes an exception for one form of more spiritual-minded psychology, recommending The Stormy Search for the Self by Stan and Christina Gruff who she names as two “pioneers in the field of transpersonal psychology.”
I agree with her on this principle. Much of my last year’s spiritual and mystical explorations have been important tools in keeping me alive. Seeing the PTSD as a kind of spiritual trial and using religious and mystical metaphors for the experience has helped.
The second tip Lopes names is to seek out spiritual support. That’s been important to me also and has come in some of the hippie-minded friends I’ve made around Joshua Tree who have been very supportive and gained wisdom through going through their own life challenges.
The third tip is to seek spiritual community - which is something I’ve talked with Sally about pursuing when we get back to California. We need to find one spiritual group or another which we can go to for further support. It’s been a pretty isolating year for me - I’ve often avoid socializing or being around people and just tried to retreat into quiet and more controlled spaces.
In a sense, though, the community of writers around this Substack and God of the Desert Books publishing company has been my spiritual community. But I know that an actual physical one is necessary too. Just internet community is not enough, even though Lopes argues that it can be. I am not convinced of that at all. Even if one is sitting on a computer typing words with someone else then one is still alone.
Lopes’ fourth tip is to engage in spiritual practices, which I’ve of course been exploring a variety of, most recently yoga and daily journaling, the latter which often devolves into a form of prayer, since as I explained in last week’s Christian mystical podcast, the traditional Christian models and approaches to prayer have largely been poisoned to me by my time in the Evangelical Fundamentalist wing of Christianity:
While I agree with much of Lopes’ general thesis and sympathize with her support suggestions — much of my disagreements with her are minor and more theological in nature than morals/values-wise — I feel like there’s sort of a central aspect at least of my suicidal experience which she only fleetingly addresses.
First, my still science-driven understanding of suicide is that a range of conditions can fuel it. The suicidal ideation from depression is not the same as what I’m dealing with through PTSD, and it’s not the same as someone who may be suicidal from being hit in the head and having some sort of actual physical brain damage. And then of course those suicidal because of enduring some painful physical or chronic disease are in their own category. So I think some forms of suicidal ideation are going to be more manageable by conventional western psychology and secular medicine than others.
In my PTSD-driven suicidal ideation and the “spiritual awakening” connected to it, I think much of my underlying problem is that the hyperarousal of my senses and emotions, as I explained in the essay below, makes me much more tuned in to the high levels of suffering and cruelty all over the world and across the human experience:
I also noticed in my recent write-up of seeing the film “The Whale” how even fictional emotional experiences simply hit me so much exponentially harder than they used to:
Yes, the hyperarousal from the PTSD and the trauma of the experience itself, and my now putting other lesser traumas throughout my life through this framing of understanding, contribute to my “spiritual awakening.”
But the spiritual reality that I appear to be awakening into is one that I find absolutely fucking terrifying. The reality which I am awakening to which fuels the suicidal ideation is simply perceiving the world and humanity broadly to be much darker, much more malevolent, and even tormented by actual demonic spirits. Some days I really do lean in to the metaphor of suicidal ideation as a form of demonic possession that I practically believe it literally.
And I just keep returning to the Book of Ecclesiastes, which paired with The Book of Job seems to offer the most concise prophetic understanding of the nature of humanity and our lives on this earth:
The words of the Teacher,[a] son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”3 What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
4 Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.….
12 I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! 14 I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
…
17 Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.
18 For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.
The more one knows of this world, the more knowledge one acquires, the deeper one penetrates into the wisdom traditions - now labeled “mystical” and “occult” today - the deeper one’s sadness and misery will become in greater perceiving the sickness of humankind.
It’s only through trying to draw on the spirituality Lopes advocates, the “Goddess of the Desert” range of themes my fiancee will explore in our new publication, and my engagement with the Abrahamic tradition’s more positive mystical traditions that I can compensate for perceiving the deep darkness.
So while I sympathize with Lopes overall and think she’s got some useful tips, I think overall she’s just scratching the surface for the painful realizations and downright revelations one can have during a suicidal ideation-infused “spiritual awakening.”
Happy birthday!
btw, the new Koren translation of the Bible has "vanity" translated as "empty breath" or something similar (Still waiting to buy).
Here is another:
Only vanishing mist, vapor, says Kohelet, evanescence and mere appearance, everything is a vanishing mist.
https://www.sefaria.org.il/Ecclesiastes.1.2?ven=Kohelet_by_Bruce_Heitler&lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en#:~:text=Only%20vanishing%20mist%2C%20vapor%2C%20says%20Kohelet%2C%20evanescence%20and%20mere%20appearance%2C%20everything%20is%20a%20vanishing%20mist.
This is a description of the nature of things, less a moral reprimand. It changes our perception of what follows.