Roger in Mexico 🇲🇽

[00:00:00] At the depth of my depression, it really hit me that happiness was core. Nothing else mattered. If you don't have happiness, everything else doesn't matter. It's worthless. It's who cares? Hey there, my name is Sean and this is Suicide Noted.

[00:00:36] On this podcast, I talk with suicide attempt survivors so that we can hear their stories. Every year around the world, millions of people try to take their own lives and we almost never talk about it. We certainly don't talk about it enough.

[00:00:48] And when we do talk about it, many of us, including me, we're not very good at it. So one of my goals with this podcast is to have more conversations and hopefully better conversations with attempt survivors. Now, if you are a suicide attempt survivor

[00:01:02] and you'd like to talk, please reach out. Hello at suicidenoted.com on Facebook or Twitter at Suicide Noted. You can also check the show notes to learn more ways to contact us and a whole lot more about the podcast, including our membership.

[00:01:18] If you wanna get involved with that, there's a link, check it out. We would love your support. Hey look, I love any way you support the podcast, including listening, that's more than enough. But if you've got the means and you wanna help us out,

[00:01:30] we would take that too. We need it. And finally, we are talking about suicide on this podcast like we do every week, like the title suggests and we don't hold back. So please take that into account before you listen or as you listen.

[00:01:44] But I do hope you listen because there is a whole lot to learn. Today I am talking with Roger. Roger lives in Mexico and he is a suicide attempt survivor. Hey Roger. So where exactly do you reside? I am in the Yucatan, Mexico. What part?

[00:02:06] A little bit Northwest of Merida. And where are you? You're on the East Coast, where? I'm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Oh, okay, that's cool. It's all right. I'm looking for my exit strategy, but it's financial constraints, but blah, blah, blah.

[00:02:20] Mexico, man, big part of the reason why I'm down here. It's just, it's affordable and everything's available. Lots of gringos down here too. So you don't lose the social, I don't know if you know Spanish very well. Mine's functional. Yeah, mine's decent, not great.

[00:02:40] I mean, we could do it in Spanish if you wanted to this conversation. I heard about it. I realized now I heard about it on the moth. I don't remember what the context was, but they mentioned your podcast. And I thought, oh, cool.

[00:02:51] This is something that I'm familiar with. You listened to the moth radio hour and it came up, so you wanted to share. Now when you saw that it was called Suicide Noted, what did you think? I mean, you have either an attempt

[00:03:06] or a near attempt if I understand right. Yeah, near attempt. Yeah, I mean, they described it pretty well. They said it was, I guess it must've been your interview. They're saying that it was about what people's experience were of attempting suicide. That's it? That's it.

[00:03:21] I went out one day, I decided that this was the end and I decided the most benign way to do it was to put my head down on the railroad tracks and let a train wheel cut off my head. How old were you then?

[00:03:38] It was my last year in college and I took two years off. So I was 24, I think. Where were you in the States? I was at Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, home of University of Illinois. But I believe that's one of the many schools that didn't let me in.

[00:03:57] Now this is a tricky question, but what was happening in your life that led you to the tracks? Well, my experience, I think everybody's experience of depression is different. I think mine was a result of medical malpractice. I'd been given high dose tetracycline

[00:04:15] when I was a teenager, 14 years old, and it had profound effects on my life. I think it even stunted my growth and I stopped filling out, stopped growing at that point. And I fell into depression and it's acknowledged by many people that candida,

[00:04:31] which is an overgrowth of a yeast and it's acknowledged that candidiasis can cause depression. It did in me, along with all the other common symptoms of candidiasis. But my life before that had been fine. I was a perfectly content, high performing, good grades.

[00:04:50] I didn't have an exciting life, but I didn't have a terrible life. My parents were perfectly fine. They didn't beat me. We weren't super close, but there was no animosity, no hardship. And then I just sank into depression

[00:05:04] and I spent the last couple of years of high school in serious depression. And then I got to college, my first year in college, I played pinball. Obviously I didn't make very good grades. When I got out of college, fortunately I had a very intelligent brother

[00:05:20] who turned me on to nutrition. If he hadn't done that, I probably wouldn't be here. I did try the drugs. I was given, I don't know, Pax, whatever the different drugs were at the time for about six months. And I decided, oh, this is horrible. This isn't working.

[00:05:35] So I went back to my brother. I had really bad night vision in high school. It was horrible, I could hardly drive. And he said, well, why don't you try vitamin A? And I go, vitamin A, what the hell is that? How can that help?

[00:05:51] So I took a couple of doses and boom, my night vision returned. I go, oh my God, there's something to this nutrition thing. Of course, this was the 80s when there wasn't no internet. I think I had one book. So I was pretty much experimenting.

[00:06:07] So I experimented on myself and I gradually pulled myself to the point where I could function in life, but it didn't cure the depression. That's sort of my track into depression and a little bit how I got out of it. The tetracycline wipes out your gut microbiome

[00:06:22] to a large extent and candida comes back hard at that point and takes over. And that's what led to the candidiasis, which led to the severe depression. And then I realized that I had to work my way out of it with nutrition as well.

[00:06:39] I wonder how many people out there were given that drug at some point and didn't have a brother who helped them out, understanding and they're just gone. Yeah, exactly. It's just, as I've said before, conventional medicine, I think they play with fire all the time

[00:06:53] and they have no clue of what the long-term effects are of many of their therapeutics, many of their drugs, even simple vaccines. I think the vaccine, I was given, normally people my age had about six vaccines their whole life.

[00:07:06] I was an army brat and I was given 50 vaccines, more than 50. And those all had mercury in those days. And so I think that it had an impact on my life that affected me emotionally. And I think that's why I think the candidiasis

[00:07:23] had a particularly strong effect on me that might not have had on other people. Was it impulsive, the railroad tracks, or were you leading up to that, thinking about it in some way? No, I was thinking about it from the early teens.

[00:07:35] I would always think, I would think about it a lot, yeah. But I never really was gonna do it until that one night when I just decided, hey, this is it. Do you never told anybody about those feelings, I would imagine? Well, I don't know, I don't remember.

[00:07:49] I did go to that psychiatrist who just gave me the drugs and I must have told him. I don't know, I don't remember what. If you say the ideating or suicide word or some iteration of that word, people sometimes freak out, even doctors, right? And certainly parents.

[00:08:04] So I have had 190 something conversations at this point and I would say three people maybe that was their method. Oh yeah? Yeah, it's not a common one. Thought I was being very creative. I thought. So how close did it come to actually happening?

[00:08:22] I just went out to the tracks and I watched this train go by for I don't know how long and then I just said, maybe not. It's a tough way to go. When you leave there, having again, I don't need to keep saying this,

[00:08:35] but having had these conversations for a while now, I know usually things just don't get magically better because you choose not to end your life. You're still living and you still got all the same shit you're dealing with. So what happens after then?

[00:08:46] Well, I just doubled down on my nutritional approach and really just, it was just all intuitive. I really had no one to guide me or anything. So I was just taking stuff that I thought would help. Later, maybe a year later or something,

[00:09:03] I was out in the working world. I had this intuition that I needed vitamin B6. I was taking three to five grams, not milligrams, grams. You can't even get those nowadays because of experiences like mine. So I started taking that

[00:09:17] and I was taking it for like a couple months and I looked in the mirror one day, I was doing tongue analysis. I looked at my tongue and I go, wow, I look really healthy. My tongue looks healthy. I go, hey, maybe this is really working.

[00:09:28] And I said, well, just in case I better keep taking it. And I don't wanna relapse, blah, blah. So then a couple months later, I overdosed on B6 and that really screwed up my immune system. Instead of, I should have just flushed water fast

[00:09:44] and flushed it out of my system. Instead, I took other vitamins and basically really screwed up my immune system. But it's been a learning experience and it's better than being dead. In the decades since, the years since, did you ever come close to trying again?

[00:10:02] No, no, I got functional again and I didn't really have suicidal, serious suicidal thoughts. I might've said once in a while, but basically I pretty much pulled out of it. Then in, let's see, when I was 26, then I fell into Vipassana

[00:10:22] and then at 28, I took my fifth retreat and that cured my depression. In an instant, in an instant, gone. And then I never had it again. How many people in the world know about the train tracks? Well, I mean, I put it on my Medium article,

[00:10:38] so I don't know, however many people read that article and I've told other people about it. Yeah, I'm not ashamed of my past. I did what I did and I learned from it and it's been, like I said, a really good learning experience. So I've come so far.

[00:10:55] Yeah, it sounds like it. Vipassana, tell people what that is because most people probably don't know. Vipassana is an old word. It's a Pali word. They think it was a co-existent language with Sanskrit and Vipassana just means to see in a special way.

[00:11:10] So many people have used that word to describe their particular practice. When I talk about Vipassana, I'm referring to the practice that I learned. It's taught by a lineage of teachers that were taught by Mr. S. N. Goenka and in his practice, in his teaching of Vipassana,

[00:11:29] it's all done in the same format. Everybody learns it the same way you take a 10-day retreat, which is, it's quite rigorous. It can be. I mean, actually, I slept through my first retreat as much as I could because I was so depressed.

[00:11:44] I could barely function through the retreat because the depression brings up your worst shit. That's what it does. It brings it up to the surface and you get to observe it. I tried not to observe it. I spent as much time sleeping as I could,

[00:11:58] but it was still powerful and I knew when I got done with it, it was my path in life. The first three days of the retreat are just observing the breath and that's just to get your mind calm enough that then you can then do Vipassana meditation,

[00:12:12] which is moving your awareness throughout the body and you learn that all of your emotional and mental patterns are all linked to the body sensation. And actually, the body sensations trigger the thoughts and emotions. The body sensations arise first and then the thoughts and emotions

[00:12:32] that are along with it arise later, but not split second later. But by observing the body sensations in an objective way, not reacting to them, you break the habit patterns of reaction. From birth we react. If it's a pleasant sensation, we react, oh, I want more.

[00:12:52] If it's an unpleasant sensation, we go, oh, leave me alone, stay away, stay away. So we're constantly reacting to these sensations, whether we're aware of it or not. But in the retreat, you learn to make them so that you are aware of them

[00:13:05] and by observing them and not reacting. So there's even severe pain, it's just sensation. And you can learn, you can break your habit pattern of observing that as pain. It's just your sensation and you learn to observe it. Like I had a severe fear of pain

[00:13:23] and it took me many retreats to break that fear. Staying very still and just observing, not reacting. You break the habit pattern of reaction, which breaks the habit pattern of the emotional reaction and the emotional pain. And so in my first five retreats,

[00:13:41] the depression came up very, very strong. And the sensations that were along with it were heaviness. I just felt this heaviness. Every time I'd sit down to meditate, I'd feel this heavy, heavy, heavy. I felt like if I was sitting at a scale,

[00:13:54] it'd be 30 pounds heavier than what I was actually weighed. And I felt this heaviness, heaviness, heaviness, having retreat after retreat after retreat. And then in the fifth retreat, the depression had come up again and I was really depressed and I just said,

[00:14:08] I've had it, I gotta get out of here. So I went to talk to the teacher and I was waiting in line. I thought if I looked up, I'd see that cloud that cartoon characters have over their head. I literally thought that cloud was there.

[00:14:22] And I said to myself, well, this meditation has been helping me. I've got to give it a try one more time. And I sat there and I brought my awareness into my body, felt the sensations wherever I was observing. And then like that, boom, it was gone.

[00:14:38] The depression was gone. I was ecstatic, unbelievable. And I never had depression again, never. It might take years. Like some of my patterns like anxiety, taking me decades to break through that reaction pattern of anxiety, feeling that tight, there's this tightness in my chest

[00:14:55] and it'll even start to come back at times, because I don't think I've gotten to the root of that one. I'm tremendously better, but I haven't gotten to the root of it. That's amazing. Certainly, certainly. And as much as you want to share,

[00:15:06] I know you used the word depression. Like what else came up if you can recall? Because I do think that ties into the broader conversation we're having. The severe part of it was the hating myself and wanting to end it all. But there were other aspects to it

[00:15:21] that also resolved over time, maybe took a little bit longer. Like a severe apathy about life. I was bored that I was bored that I was bored. Everything about my life was boredom. And that lifted finally, I don't know when that lifted, but that lifted with retreats.

[00:15:37] An inability to look people in the eye. I lost that when the depression came on. The complete lack of self-confidence, that lifted. This affects me and I imagine other people, but it certainly doesn't affect everyone. And that is when you're starting to heal,

[00:15:54] you look back on a life that wasn't healed. And you could view that in any number of ways. One being, I'm glad I'm healing. But another one is that, man, now I know what shit could have been like. Does that make any sense?

[00:16:08] Yeah, I guess you're trying to get at, do I feel regrets about the 14 years that I wasted depressed? That regret, that's actually one of the things that Vipassana helped me with too, is dealing with these feelings of regret and so forth.

[00:16:24] I don't live so much in the past, my failure. I'm living more in the present. That's one of the things that Vipassana does is it brings you into the present. Over a year, constantly bringing yourself into the present, leaving behind the past,

[00:16:38] not obsessing about the future or the past. Every once in a while I think about, gosh, if I'd had my teens and 20s not depressed, I could have had relationships, I could have made something of my college career, blah, blah, blah. It was a very big learning experience.

[00:16:54] I mean, that's why I got into alternative health and becoming a homeopath, is because I learned so much about the human condition that I wouldn't have learned if I hadn't been depressed and gotten through it. And at the depth of my depression,

[00:17:08] it really hit me that happiness was core. Nothing else mattered. If you don't have happiness, everything else doesn't matter. It's worthless, it's who cares? I wouldn't have had that blinding depth of awareness if I hadn't been depressed. Right, and that was quite a while ago, the first one.

[00:17:31] The first retreat was in 84. The four additional retreats were in 86. And how many have you done in total? That's it or more after? Many more after, yeah, many more after. Yeah, I went to India after the fifth retreat. I went to India, I spent three months in India

[00:17:50] and then I went to Australia and stayed at a Vipassana center. So basically I've been back and forth to India a few times, meditating and also taking courses here in the US and it's all been gravy. So the irony here, not the irony, but we're talking

[00:18:03] and from the conversations I've had here and just in my life, most people I meet, they say it helps to talk about things with the right people, right kind of people, right? Now I'm wondering someone who spent so much time

[00:18:16] more in not talking, more in whatever the word is, meditating, contemplating, reflecting, observing, does that same idea hold for you that talking helps? You know, I haven't followed that path. So I really should not say pro or con, I really shouldn't.

[00:18:33] You know, I've gotten so that I'm really comfortable with being by myself. I don't get lonely. I don't need to talk about my, you know, I can just sit on the cushion and work through whatever's coming up. Do you have friends there?

[00:18:46] A few, you know, I'm kind of isolated. I'm kind of out in the country. I'm 15 minutes from Merida. It's in a tiny Puebla. There aren't many gringos here, you know, and I'm comfortable with that. So yeah, but I do know people in the city

[00:19:01] that I see once in a while, but I wouldn't say I'm a real, I'm not a real, I never was a really gregarious person. I was always an introvert even from the beginning. Like, I mean, I can be very gregarious.

[00:19:11] If I get to a party, I'm fine, you know, I enjoy the people I'm with. I have a good time. I've lost my inhibition. That's one of the things that, you know, Vipassana is, you know, I don't need alcohol. I don't need, you know, distractions.

[00:19:22] I can open up and talk and enjoy myself, but it's not something I seek out or need, or I'm not desperate for a partner right now. You know, I'm single. Doing things in your sizable yard, I saw. You got a big yard, so you do stuff there.

[00:19:35] Yeah, I'm homesteading. You know, I've got the chickens, I've got the gardens, I've got the trees and, you know, providing me with food. And so yeah, I've got a lot of work to do here. And do you ever go back to the States?

[00:19:48] You know, I've sort of lost the travel bug. You know, they've made it so unpleasant traveling now with the TSA and the customs and all that stuff. It really doesn't attract me. Mexico, like every other country in the world, the pharmaceutical industry has them by the balls

[00:20:03] and you can't import anything into Mexico that's of any, you know, pharmaceutical nature. So I tried to import a couple things. One is a homeopathy kit and it got hung up at customs and I found out to ransom it, it would cost me $460.

[00:20:21] About the cost of the item. So I rerouted it to the US and I'm gonna, you know, travel to the US and pick it up physically and carry it back and then I get a chance to see my nephew and his family and everything. So that'll be nice.

[00:20:37] I mean, I'm looking forward to it. I think it'll be great. Zooming out for a moment, a couple of questions I often ask are around myths or misconceptions. So do you have one or two that come to mind that you think are worth dispelling here with me?

[00:20:51] I think that people should really consider the basis of conventional medicine. The founding myth of conventional medicine is that their definition of disease, you know, what they'll do is they'll look at 100 people and they say, oh, you all have this one

[00:21:10] or two or three symptoms, you all have this disease. They go, okay, and then they find some biomarkers for the disease or whatever and then they give some treatment, some drug or something that ameliorates or eliminates those symptoms. And they say, hey, we're done, we've succeeded.

[00:21:28] You know, that's a success. Whereas with homeopathy, they look at all the symptoms someone has. So with the conventional paradigm, you can have multiple diseases and we treat each one as if they're a separate disease, give a drug or whatever for that disease

[00:21:47] and if we get rid of those symptoms, hey, great. But then if we have a bunch of symptoms because of all the combination of drugs, then we'll give you another drug for those, you know? Where, and I think that's a myth, you know?

[00:21:57] The definition of disease as defined by homeopathy is all the symptoms that the person has, mental, emotional, and physical. So all of those symptoms together form that individual's case of disease. And the only way you can judge that you've succeeded

[00:22:16] is if you give something and all those symptoms either improve or completely relieved. That is success. I know my experience with the system is pretty bad, pretty bad, mental health, physical health. Every disease has a mental aspect with rare, rare exceptions. And every medicine has effects

[00:22:37] on mental, emotional, and physical level. You know, the original way we connected is essentially you reached out after hearing such and such and you heard about the podcast and there's the big old suicide word right there. Do you think if we scrapped conventional medicine,

[00:22:54] in most cases, not including like the broken arm you referenced or something where we could say it's just a better approach, and we have instead adopted things like homeopathy on a large scale, if we offered that here, I mean, let's just say North America,

[00:23:11] but it could extend beyond that. I'm wondering if you think more people had an option or everybody had these options, would the suicide attempt rate, which is actually something I'm more interested in, the actual completion rate, would the attempt rate go down?

[00:23:26] Would it have that kind of effect where more people would just, or fewer people would try? You know, just from my experience, my experience with conventional medicine, it led to my depression. So yeah, I think there's definitely a component of medical malpractice in depression.

[00:23:46] Yeah, I don't think there's any way to know that. I just know my experience, that's all I can say. Well, I'm glad we connected and we're talking. And I thank you for sharing everything you did. Take care, thanks a lot. Take care, bye-bye. Bye.

[00:24:04] As always, thanks so much for listening and all of your support. Special thanks to Roger down in the Yucatan, Mexico. Thank you, Roger. If you are a suicide attempt survivor and you'd like to talk, please reach out, hello at suicidenoted.com. On Facebook or Twitter, at Suicide Noted.

[00:24:19] Check the show notes for all kinds of other things, including our membership. Would love to have you aboard on that. We could use the help. Mostly just keep listening. And that is all for episode number 194. Stay strong, do the best you can. I'll talk to you soon.