With mounting cases of long Covid comes a reality not many are willing to recognize: suicide.
The reality is that long Covid sufferers are asking themselves daily the question of what the chronic illness community knows as “the unthinkable.”
Am I just going to be a burden? What’s the point? Is any of this worth staying around for?
Last May, Nick Guthe of California lost his wife, screenwriter Heidi Ferrer, to suicide after the 50-year-old Ferrer fought a 13-month battle with long Covid.
“In my darkest moments, I told my husband that if I didn’t get better, I did not want to live like this,” Ferrer had previously written on her blog. “I wasn’t suicidal, I just couldn’t see any quality of life long term and there was no end in sight.”
After reading Guthe’s account, I scoured the Internet for more discussion, but I didn’t find much. There was the suicide last March of Texas Roadhouse CEO Kent Taylor. Last October, one long Covid sufferer posted to Facebook the extent of her suffering and was immediately contacted by others expressing that they felt the same way: trapped in a body that no longer wants to live.
With ME/CFS, I can speak to the tearfully apologetic conversations I’ve had in my own head with friends and family members in which I explain that I can’t go on and that I must leave. The devastation of these thoughts is beyond imagination. When I was in the most exhausting depths of my illness, I cried every day for the life I felt I’d lost.
“It puts you in a position where you feel like suicide is the only way out,” James Stazza, a musician and ME/CFS patient, told NorthJersey.com on Feb. 6 of this year.
“Every day is the worst day of your life, and the scary part is it can always get worse. Most doctors don’t know anything about ME, and the few who do think it’s a psychological illness. It is unbelievably difficult to find help.”
In Guthe’s story, he recounts the “worst deterioration of a human being” that he’s ever seen.
A 2016 study out of England and Wales suggested that people with ME/CFS are six times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. That same study urged the need for further research on a larger scale.
"Ultimately the best way to prevent suicide in ME/CFS will be to find effective disease modifying treatments or cures for it," said Dr. Lily Chu, an internist from California who studies ME/CFS, in 2016.
It’s unfortunate that a pandemic had to ensue before that larger-scale research came into the spotlight with long Covid. But even now, most long Covid sufferers are echoing what we have been trying to scream for years: that this is a real, biological and possibly lethal disease. Treatments are often ineffective and a cure remains as elusive as ever, leading more and more desperate sufferers down the trapdoor of suicide.
We must stop shying away from this issue. With no real relief for those with ME/CFS or long Covid, suicide is going to continue to shatter lives and devastate families. This will become worse far before we’ll ever be able make it better.
–Bridget O’Shea