There have been commercials for the betterhelp organization for a while. It is a part of the fresh(er) focus on mental health, and a building step in making online treatment more available.
The most frequent commercials are a man in a gym and a man in a parachute.
The ad with the man in the gym is pretty good. One man sees another lifting weights from a bench (bench pressing?) and he gets stuck, The man hurries over to offer help and the man in need refuses, on grounds of family and pride and all that stuff.
The man offering his help does not walk away saying, "choke then," or abandon the endangered man. While the action shown is not a resolution, it gets the point across that sometimes turning down help can be a passive surrender or suicide. And that the idea is -- strange.
But it is the other commercial that I want to talk about.
The parachute ad takes my breath away.
The person pulls the cord and the parachute doesn't deploy. He says something along the lines of "oh no, what will I do?"
Another skydiver near him says "grab hold of me; we can go down together."
And no-parachute says "Oh no, I dont want to ruin your experience."
Like watching him go splat is going to convey joy to the experience? Knowing that it was preventable?
For quite a while, I dismissed that to the stupid commercial category in my brain, with the cat litter that says try it for yourself, and the man who doesn't want chicken blood in his chicken.
But this is more than that.
It has layers.
Pretty wonderful layers, when you think about it.
That's the insidious things about mental illness.
Often, when you need help, you don't want to ask for it. You want to do it yourself. Not involve others.
Another trick it plays is to limit your vision and close your mind.
In the skydiver's case, he sees jumping, chute opening, landing, is THE WAY it's done. Anything else is wrong. Any other way is wrong. He has already messed up the event for everyone. His chute didn't open and now everyone will know what a klutz (at best) he is, and they'll all hate him for ruining this day.
But the other diver knows that a rescue can be effected, Things will change; the standard rules may have to be adapted, but they can both have a successful landing if they work together.
He refuses, because of 'messing up the experience.'
As I said before, as if a big splat isn't going to do that anyway.
He can't see that, though.
It's just not in his frame of reference. His mind is closed to any other possibility.
There is no solution that allows a standard outcome. Therefore, his reasoning ability stops at: there is no solution. Period.
And that, my friends, is why and how people can and do commit suicide. They can see no other solution. No way out.
Not even when there are others nearby saying this will work, this can be tried, this can help. Let me help.
The man falling cannot think beyond there is no solution, even though he is the one placing the period at the end of the sentence. In reality, there are commas and colons and other punctuation that will carry the thought beyond a full stop in that place.
This is the nature of a mental illness.
This is the illness, in many cases.
This illness can be cured.
There are as many ways to a cure for the mind as there are for the body. Medicines, therapies, training. As the body can be trained, so is the mind. If it wasn't so, we would all remain helpless crying babies, and we would not survive long. There would be no survival, no growth, no adaptation.
And, for me, this commercial, brief as it is, manages to convey some hint of that being the wrong message.
As long as one is capable of seeing beyond the "usual" "expected" "should-bes"
As long as the mind is open.
