Tony's Story

"I'd had a situation, a relationship situation, that had been developing for some years in an extremely stressful way. At this particular stage, everything had come to a head. We were separating. My wife was moving away with the children. I'd just become redundant from a job and we were both planning to move house.

Married thirteen years. I realised that I was starting to act slightly differently - I'd be up all night. I'd be out walking until five or six in the morning; I was getting no rest, no sleep. I just couldn't take what was happening. So I decided to go away for a few days down to the south coast. I booked myself a room in a hotel. Didn't quite know what to do.

I made a few phone calls which were thoroughly useless because there was no resolving the situation. It was then I sat down and just thought 'There's no way out of it. I can't go through the amount of upset that the future holds. I could see no way through it.' And that's when I thought I might as well kill myself. It wasn't a dramatic thought at the time; there wasn't screaming or hysteria around me or anything at the time, it's just as simple as that. I thought I might as well finish it. There'd be less pain than I was experiencing then. My whole body was hurting more than it had ever hurt before.

So, I thought, how could I go about it? Obvious ways were tablets and also to cut myself in such a way that I would lose blood out of my body. I thought doing both of those things together would probably render me unconscious quickly. And if I had a few drinks as well, that would also help the situation, where I'd just really go to sleep and not wake up. I'd never cut myself before and I'd never attempted suicide before this. But the fact that I'd actually made those decisions somehow lightened my mood. At least I've made a decision; I'm in control of it. Whereas things were spiraling out of my control in every other area of my life.

I then sat down at that hotel and wrote some letters, one to my daughter and one to my son and one to my wife and also to my parents. Telling them not to really grieve over me particularly.

The way I looked at it, my children were going to be taken away from me anyway. So I was going to lose a large part of their lives. I thought everybody would be better off without me. They would make a fresh life and they wouldn't have the hassles of having me on the scene in any way, also my wife could make a completely fresh life for herself, meet a new partner and hopefully have a happy enough future, which I also felt, I'd found it very hard to let go, that's fair enough, with children of course and the home we built up together, for her to go what would probably have been a few hundred miles away from me. It would have been extremely difficult to continue seeing the children.

I decided to think it through one last time. Is this the right thing to be doing? Again I looked at the situation, saw no way out of it, just could not see a future of any kind. And opened up all the tablets, put them all in one pile together, looked at them again - it seemed like an hour but it was probably a couple of minutes - got a drink and took them all. Once they were inside me, I picked up the knife and cut myself across the arm, very deeply, there was a considerable amount of blood, the bedclothes were actually soaked in blood at this time. And just lay back.

But at this point in my mind everything was racing at an incredible pace. It was almost as if sleep was going to be the last thing possible with the amount of adrenaline that suddenly started pumping - so I took the knife and cut myself a second time. I wanted to lose blood and go to sleep. So I cut deeply again and the blood was spurting out. And lay back. And thought "When am I going to sleep? I should be asleep now." I couldn't quite figure out why I wasn't drifting.

So five or ten minutes had elapsed now and I was lying in a pool of blood, I was soaked, so were the bedclothes. And, for some reason - I hadn't had this thought before - but I thought, if I ‘phone someone, just to talk to, so I can sleep, that should help, it may help me calm down. I now know it was a mechanism in the body to keep you alive. Everything now is racing overtime inside myself to keep me alive. I didn't know that at the time; but I thought, "If I talk to somebody, I'll drift within ten or fifteen minutes of conversation, I'll drift off to sleep and that's all taken care of." So, I rang Samaritans.

I realised in myself that if I didn't talk to somebody at certain points in my life, I would perhaps get back into this situation again.

It was a woman I spoke to and I apologised and I said "I don't want to distress you because I don't mean to distress anybody here, I just can't go to sleep and I want to sleep and rest."

She said, "Why do you want to sleep?"

I said, "I've only got a short while to live because of what I've done. But having done it the way I did I thought I'd be asleep by now, but I'm not. I'm still wide awake and I really need to close my eyes and sleep."

She said, "Oh, what have you done?" I said I'd taken tablets and I'd cut myself to pieces and I still wasn't sleeping, but really the conversation was more me just babbling on with this thought in my mind: to sleep.

So rather than looking at the whole situation, through that talk I actually broke it down to an individual's response rather than the whole thing - I can't cope with everything that's going on. I suddenly broke away and looked at this from a different angle. I don't quite know what it was but I looked at it and thought, something in my head then said: "Well, what if somebody had come to me yesterday and said my daughter was dead? Would I think that was the answer to the problems?" I think I might have been talking this through, babbling on, I suppose, not in a particularly coherent way.

The focus became different: like I was in a tunnel and in that tunnel was my daughter who pretty much always offered her unconditional love. So I saw her and actually pictured her face, receiving and grieving over the news that I was dead. I was talking on this level to the Samaritans’ volunteer.

So I phoned 999 and spoke to an operator and told her I wasn't sure whether I wanted an ambulance or not. And she said, "Well, you've rung the emergency services, what's the matter?"

I said, "Well, I think any moment I may fall asleep or go unconscious, so if I do, that's an end to it in a way because you won't know where I am. You can't trace this call." She then became extremely alarmed in a way I hadn't expected and she said: "Look, we can get someone to you in minutes. Just tell us where you are."

To this day I know I wouldn't have done if I hadn't rung Samaritans. Nothing else would have changed things. It was just the calmness of the conversation with everything that was racing in me, able to talk quietly and I thought 'If I can talk to somebody like this, why can't I do that at home?' I'm talking to someone calmly about dying, how many people can do this? How many people can actually say to someone: "I'm going to die very shortly" and be as calm as you can be when everything else was racing and that's how I was talking, extremely quietly, and saying "Well, I really just want to fall asleep." And there was somebody on the other end being equally calm with me rather than a hysterical response. From most people you couldn't get that stage. And it extended to the operator who could cope with that.

I have spoken to them since. I have rung anonymously on perhaps half a dozen occasions since then, when things were getting to a pretty low ebb and I realised in myself that if I didn't talk to somebody at certain points in my life, I would perhaps get back into this situation again. I'd already done it once."

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