Author thought about taking her life 24 hours a day
The 50-year-old writer, who has sold 24m books, has had a well-catalogued battle with the mental illness, but she is set to open up about her lowest moment with the terrifying disease as part of TV3’s Ireland AM’s Time to Talk Mental Health Campaign.
The Watermelon author has told how she asked her husband to make a suicide pact with her during her battle with depression, as she did not want to leave him alone. She eventually went into St John of God’s Psychiatric Hospital for her own protection and is now a firm advocate of keeping suicidal people safe from harming themselves.
“I was thinking of killing myself 24 hours a day, because I couldn’t sleep and I planned it incessantly,” she said. “I am very wary of talking about this because I don’t want to tell people how to do it and I don’t want people to do it.
“There was a time in my life when I thought it was a person’s right to end their life if everything became too much and, funnily enough, having gone through all of this, I would really prefer now if people were given help and kept safe so that they didn’t.”
Marian told how imagining her death was the only thought which calmed her in the aftermath of a nervous breakdown in 2009.
“The only thing really, I mean it sounds counter-intuitive, but the only thing that calmed me was planning how to die because I thought if it gets really, really too awful, there is a way out, I can make this end,” she said. “I was so frightened that I told my husband and I told my mother and I told my sister. I asked my husband, because I didn’t want to leave him, I wanted us to be together, if we could do it together.”
She said she had never been admitted to a psychiatric hospital before the latest onslaught of the illness.
“I mean, I’ve been through rehab a thousand years ago for alcoholism but this was very different,” she said. “I went in [to St John of Gods] as an in-patient. It was a safe place I suppose, in that while I was in there I couldn’t kill myself. It prevented me. I couldn’t leave. I was there for about 10 days and I came out because it wasn’t working for me.
“I subsequently went in four months later out of utter desperation.”
Marian said she kept hoping her new medication would make her feel “normal again”.
DJ Nikki Hayes is one of the sunniest voices on radio but she, too, opened up on the breakfast show yesterday about how she has overcome an attempted suicide during her teenage years.
“I was 17 and I overdosed,” she said. “I remember I was in the box room in my house. I went down to our medicine cupboard which was over the fridge and just took whatever I could.
“I know there was a lot of paracetamol in there. I think there was some of my mother’s blood pressure tablets and I just, very quickly I think, in the space of maybe 20 minutes, half an hour, took as much as I could but then I told my mum.
“I don’t know if it was to try to hurt her or what it was but it was definitely a cry for help. It wasn’t something I obviously wanted to do because as soon as I had taken the medication I let them know what I had done.”
Nikki said her mother immediately called an ambulance and she was rushed to hospital where they pumped her stomach.
She made a subsequent attempt on her life a few years later while she was in college but while her first attempt was a cry for help, Nikki revealed she did believe she wanted to end her life the second time.
“It was a little bit more serious that time,” she said. “I ended up back in hospital but took a little bit longer to recover. At the time, I just wanted out, I was hurting a lot, there was a lot of things I didn’t understand with life.”
She said dealing with her father’s cancer had taken a toll and she had been feeling lonely at college.
Marian Keyes will speak on Ireland AM’s Time to Talk Mental Health Campaign tomorrow. The show airs from 7am on TV3.
* See: tv3.ie/timetotalk
