In the year 2000, approximately one million people worldwide died by suicide: a "global" mortality rate of 16 per 100,000, or one death every 40 seconds.
Story 187
My Third (or fourth) Suicide Attempt
I laid in the back of the ambulance,
the snow of too many doses of ativan dissolving on my tongue.
They hadn't even cared enough about me
to put someone in the back with me,
and so, frustrated,
I'd swallowed all the pills I had with me—
not enough to do what I wanted it to right then,
but more than enough to knock me out for a good 14 hours.
I remember very little after that;
benzodiazepines like ativan commonly cause pre- and post-amnesia, says Google helpfully
I wake up in a locked room
a woman manically drawing on the windows with crayons
the colors of light through the glass
diffused into rainbows of joy scattered about the room
as if she were coloring on us all,
all of the tattered remnants of humanity in a psych ward
made into a brittle mosaic, a quilt of many hues, a Technicolor dreamcoat
and I thought
I am so glad to be able to see this.