She's raising money for what?

As Salamu Alaikum,

Yes, I'm asking you for money so I don't have to work for a year so I can recover from a recent suicide attempt and try to address the debilitating cognitive impairment my mental illness is causing that is making it very difficult for me to fulfill work obligations.

$20,000 would be enough to cover my living expenses and help set me up for future self-employment opportunities:

• Counselling (Psychiatrist feels I require weekly counselling sessions with an experienced professional with expertise in childhood trauma, grief, and guilt)
• Transportation (only way currently able to leave house is by taxi)
• Cleaning (Hoarding Issues), Packing and Moving (30 years worth to clear up)
• Website Creation to help me create self-employment work opportunities
• Educational/Training Expenses to help me create self-employment work opportunities
• ALREADY COVERED: Rent for 1 year
• ALREADY COVERED: Hydro, Internet, Cell Phone for 1 year

If you don't want to contribute please do still read my campaign ... although it's long ... because I've designed it to be educational as well, to help people think more deeply about the issue of suicide, and those who survive their suicide attempts, within Muslim communities and society in general.

So What Happened?

My name is Chelby Marie Daigle. I live in Ottawa, Canada, and my last suicide attempt was in July 2017.

I have repeatedly attempted suicide since my mother died by suicide in 2013. Notice how I didn't use the word "commit" suicide, like she committed a crime or something. Language is important and the changing language around how we speak about suicide is important to learn about. Here's a great article from the Australian Psychological Association about how to reframe the words we use when talking about suicide.

I've lived with chronic depression and an anxiety disorder since childhood but needless to say, my mother's death had a profound impact on me and made an already difficult situation even worse by launching me into a major depression.

After my last suicide attempt, I decided to make some drastic changes in my life in order to help me recover. This included leaving my employment of seven years in September 2017 because my illness was making it impossible for me to fulfill work obligations and it really wasn't the best environment for me mental health-wise overall.

As this employment was the main source of my income it has created a huge financial strain. However, the relief I've felt over the last few months since leaving, particularly the reduction in suicidal thoughts, pretty much tells me it was best to leave and that I really need to have time to figure out how to address my cognitive impairment issues so I don't get so triggered in a work situation again.

I'm still working running the Muslim Link website, but that's a very unique work environment as most of my work is more self-directed-I innovated a lot of tasks of this current position-so my deadlines are relatively flexible. My cognitive impairment still significantly impacts my work here though. However, my team is supportive and the joy I get from this work has been really beneficial for my mental well-being. Unfortunately, my earnings from Muslim Link are not enough to cover my major living expenses though.

Despite still being seriously depressed and coping with my anxiety disorder, which has been manifesting itself since my mother's death into agoraphobia, I am at a point right now where I feel, inshallah, that I can start to seriously work on healing from the trauma of my mother's suicide and addressing the debilitating impact that my mental illness is having on my cognitive functioning.

Not worrying about how I will support myself this year will help me be able to focus on getting better.

Why Do People Die By Suicide?

My decision to become Muslim was very much wrapped up in my need to find a way to commit to life after repeated attempts at suicide during my teens and early 20s. I needed a way to find meaning.

But it was only after my mother's death that I fully realized that I was trying to hold on to life in order to take care of her more than anything else.

Since her death, which I was unable to prevent and so see myself as responsible for, I have been reevaluating a lot about my life and my choices...but I've also tried to figure out what is known about why people die by suicide in the first place.

The reality is that not everyone who lives with mental illness ever attempts suicide. The vast majority don't actually. But some of us do. In the book "Why People Die By Suicide", clinical psychologist Thomas Joiner outlines the Interpersonal Theory of Suicidal Behaviour. This theory posits that a lack of a sense of belonging, basically loneliness, and the perception that one is a burden on loved ones or society in general is what leads to the desire for suicide in many people. The majority of people who attempt suicide also have a mental illness, but not everyone who attempts suicide is mentally ill, and not everyone who is mentally ill ever attempts suicide.

Although it makes sense that we focus on youth suicide prevention, the reality is that suicide attempts actually INCREASE in middle age and there is very little programming addressing that.

According to Statistics Canada, people aged 40 to 59 have the highest suicide rates. Unemployment and divorce are often triggers, which makes sense according to Joiner's theory as we often will feel like a burden if we are unemployed and we may even lose a sense of belonging and community that we had from our workplaces. Divorce can also destroy our sense of belonging and can also cause major financial hardships that could lead to feeling like a burden.

The focus of my own recovery this year is going to be addressing my feelings of loneliness and perceived burdensomeness.

Perceived Burdensomeness

The reason I felt so relieved after leaving the employment that was my main source of income was that I felt like a burden there, always frustrating my co-workers with my inability to meet deadlines.

To address the feeling of being a burden, I need to address the serious cognitive impairment problems I am having. The impact that depression and anxiety has on our actual ability to think and do tasks has unfortunately been under-researched but I know for me that the impact has been profound. This academic article explains the type of cognitive dysfunction I live with daily pretty well.

I first learned that I was experiencing mental health issues when my elementary school was trying to figure out what learning disability I had. It ended up I didn't have one but my anxiety and depression, as I was a child they didn't officially want to label it that, was impacting my ability to focus and learn things like how to read! These issues have impacted my education and work my whole life. Unfortunately, because I am perceived to be relatively intelligent, it is often hard for employers or educators to understand why I sometimes can't do "simple" tasks.

How will I address this? I'm going to go back to school! There is an Adult High School in Ottawa where you can take one course at a time, and I plan to enroll there and retake high school math. Why math? Because I have felt that my cognitive impairment has worsened since I wasn't taking math courses or tutoring math to students. There is some evidence that doing math might help based on research coming out of Duke University.

For the same reason, I hope to start talking language courses, including finally learning how to recite Quran with understanding in Arabic, as I have also found that my cognitive impairment was always worse when I wasn't studying languages. I used to have a knack for learning new languages. I won two regional and one provincial German Language contest, beating out students who had actually had more years of German Language education then I did. But I haven’t formally studied languages since my first year of university. I actually think my language studies may have been a big part of why I actually survived my first year and kept my scholarship. When I didn’t take any languages the next year, I didn’t finish more than the first semester. I never managed to finish my post-secondary education. 

So this year, I want to start working towards a dream I’ve had since high school. Completing the Diplôme d’Études en Langue Française (DELF) for French (I can work towards this in Ottawa at the Alliance Francaise), the Goethe-Zertifikat for German (I can do this at Goethe Institut) and the Diplomas de Español como Lengua Extranjera (DELE) for Spanish (I will need to figure out where to study but I can do the exam at the University of Ottawa).

I will probably never be well enough to return to post-secondary education but I really like the idea of going to class to achieve something so language studies focused towards exams like this are something I can achieve inshallah, thus boosting my self-confidence and maybe inshallah helping to address my cognitive impairment in the process.

Of course, I will also be asking for support from the medical and social work team at the hospital where I receive care in order to see what therapies could help with this as possibly some of the therapies used for people coping with Adult ADHD might be helpful for me.

Loneliness

After my mother's death, I felt a crushing loneliness. I lived with my mother so there was someone I saw everyday and who asked after me. After her death, I realized just how isolated I was. I do have a father but he lives in Lagos, Nigeria. I'm blessed that I was able to find him and build a relationship with him starting in my 20s. He was deported from Canada when I was a baby so I never knew him until alhamdulillah, I found him through a series of fortunate events in my 20s. I was able to successfully crowdfund to meet him in Nigeria for the first time in 2012. You can learn more about that story here.

I am blessed to have friends, including friends I've kept since high school, but I don't see them that much as several live in other cities and are busy with their lives and families. Alhamdulillah, my friends have been amazing! But because of my worries about being a burden, I am also very wary about leaning on them too much.

So, I have started to just ask people within my online social network if they want to spend time with me. Including just sitting around watching Netflix. This has actually been working out alhamdulillah. 

I'm an extrovert so I need to interact with people but I have to make sure to avoid situations where I feel like a burden or just can't relate to the people I am interacting with. I would also hate to think people are spending time with me to be "nice". I only want to spend time with people who feel they benefit from spending time with me. 

This is the tricky thing about developing a sense of belonging and overcoming loneliness. It isn't just about being around people. It's about feeling connected and that you are contributing to other's well-being. You want to give as much as you receive, otherwise you will just feel like a burden.

Inshallah, if I keep doing this for a year, I can develop a routine with the people who are interested and able to see me regularly, and so, inshallah, I will feel less disconnected.

What Will Success by 2019 Look Like?

Inshallah, it would look like the following:

• I will be able to leave the house for at least 5 hours a day (currently I often can’t leave the house for more than 30 mins)
• I sleep for just a normal 8 hours a day (Now, I sleep for at least 15 hours a day, usually as a way of coping with my anxiety and pain)
• I can go back to reading a least one book a week (I used to be able to read at least 200 pages a week. Now I am lucky if I can complete a 200 page book a year. I just can’t focus)
• I will be able to write, transcribe, and do work related tasks that I actually enjoy and seem simple and straightforward enough with less overwhelming feelings of anxiety and out and out fear.

This probably seems pretty simple but it’s not. It is going to take a lot of work and a lot of help. But If I could get to this point, I would probably be able to find another job inshallah so I can go back to supporting myself financially.

Talking About Suicide While Muslim

I launched this campaign because I do need to raise money to support myself for a year, but it is also because I know how important it is to just speak plainly about suicide.

I originally shared about my experiences with suicide on Muslim Link in 2016. Since then and through the various forums I have spoken at about living with mental illness, I have connected with many Muslims who have attempted or lost loved ones through suicide. You can view one of the talks I gave at the Islamic Foundation of Toronto on YouTube here.

It's just so hard to talk about suicide openly and candidly. 

Even in mainstream society, you often don't see many people who have attempted suicide speaking openly about it. But we are never really going to successfully fight the stigma around mental illness if people can't be safe in their families, friend circles, communities, schools, and workplaces about being open about their experiences with suicide.

So, yes, it is weird to see a woman crowdfunding to recover from a suicide attempt. Although this is not completely unheard of. GLAMOUR Magazine recently profiled women who were crowdfunding for support to help them cope with mental illness.

Depression and anxiety are serious medical issues, so maybe it shouldn't be seen as that weird for someone to crowdfund for help with their recovery. Also, we need to realize that recovering when you are seriously mentally ill takes time and A LOT OF EFFORT. It's WORK. And we need to support people as they do that work because it's hard and involves so many aspects of life, biochemical, cognitive, emotional, social, etc.

If my campaign helps other people coping with suicidal thoughts or trying to figure out how to move forward after a non-fatal suicide attempt, that's just awesome. So, whether my campaign is successful financially or not, it could still very well be a "success".

My biggest recommendation for Muslims trying to support other Muslims struggling with mental illness is to really work on how we can make ourselves as individuals and our community spaces more welcoming and cultivating of a sense of belonging for those we encounter. This starts with how we speak to each other and definitely what we write online!

It is also incredibly important that we don't make Muslims living with mental illness feel like burdens or just "objects" of our support, but as members of our communities whose contributions we really need and so we will do the best we can to work out how to accommodate them so they can make those contributions, so we can all benefit.

Thank you for taking the time to read my very long campaign.