When I was in the throes of suicidal depression, I didn’t pray for myself but I did sort of say, “This is so fucking horrible that if I get better from this I really hope that I get the opportunity to help other people through this.” I think there’s a selfishness, not a disgusting, evil-based selfishness, that comes with suicidal thoughts and stuff, but there’s a selfishness that is egotism and you think, “All my problems are so much worse.” It’s like egotism in reverse, so to speak, and you think that you’re so special and important and your problems are so unique, that you’re among the one one-thousandth of a percent of people who should do this. I don’t buy that. I don’t think anybody’s special-good or special-bad, and I think we’re sort of all in it together.
I remember when I was in the halfway house a kid slit his wrists. He didn’t die, but we had to take him to the hospital. They had me go with him because I had been there for a little while and I was kind of his big brother. I remember being in the emergency room with people in the middle of the night in LA, so people come in with crazy gunshots and everything, and just being like, “This is what I feel like inside.” So it was like equilibrium. It was like a normal person slipping into the Dead Sea for a floaty bath.
Life is going to kick your fucking face in and you’re going to get depressed, you’re going to get upset, you’re going to get sad, and that’s okay. When you get to that you can transcend it and be like, “Oh, I don’t have to be miserable.” Horrible things are happening everywhere all the time, and there’s a statistical likelihood that I will die of stomach cancer or in a car accident, let’s enjoy ourselves while we’ve got it. I realized as I said it, this might not sound uplifting, but I believe it. Life is super hard. Once we achieve peace with that knowledge, then happiness can then be possible.
KURT METZGER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
My grandmother killed herself—my mom’s mom—in a pretty fucked-up way. A really fucked-up way.
She cut her own throat. By the way, getting the full story of this, I had to piece it together, because my mom and my aunts will never tell me this shit.
Apparently, my mom’s like twelve, my grandmother cut her own throat in the kitchen. My mom comes home from school. Her mom’s gone. There’s just a pool of blood in the kitchen, which she and her sister had to clean up. Then I think my grandfather just married this other woman and felt like a good guy because he got the kids a new mom or some shit. You know, some miserable fucking 1950s, 1960s shit.
BOB SAGET—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, WRITER
I was at The Comedy Store the night a comic killed himself. Steve Lubetkin. He was a friend of mine, like an actual friend of mine. I don’t like it when I see those kind of things from friends. I become the narcissist. It’s like, what right does he have to upset me by killing himself when I value life? I just, I get really, really angry. I don’t care how nuts they are. Take your goddamned medication, get a family member, and fucking stay alive.
PAUL GILMARTIN—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, TELEVISION HOST
I come from a long line of Irish-Catholic alcoholics that were high functioning. Then one day we try to kill ourselves.
My dad tried to kill himself when he was in his sixties. He was an insurance executive. Literally, had the Don Draper office, you know, with the bar. Didn’t show up for a business meeting, and he had tried to open his wrists in a New York hotel. This was in ’92, and they committed him to Bellevue. The psychiatrist would only let him out of Bellevue if he would check himself directly into rehab. Christmas Eve of ’92, we picked my dad up at O’Hare Airport and drove him to a rehab.
Here’s the degree of denial in my family, there was only a pay phone in the hallway at Bellevue, so we’re trying to get ahold of my dad. You’re basically trying to get other mental patients to pick up the phone and go find somebody they don’t know. After two days, we managed to get ahold of my dad. I said, “Dad, it’s Paul. How are you?” My dad goes, “Oh, fine!”
ALLIE BROSH
On New Year’s Eve, my sister drove her car in front of a train, and that’s how it ended.
Marc
Had she been suicidal before?
Allie
She had. She had made a couple attempts. The way my mom referred to it was, like, practice suicides where she would do something, but it was clear that she wanted to have an out just in case she changed her mind.
We always sort of feared it, but it never felt like it was really gonna happen.
She kept going off of the medication. She had a really hard time accepting that she needed the medication because she didn’t like to see herself as somebody sick.
She had recently tried to change up her medications, and it just wasn’t working. It was a couple months where she was just totally—didn’t have any emotional variation whatsoever, just felt bored and detached all the time. I talked to her on the phone a few times because I’ve also been suicidally depressed. We were able to talk a little bit about it, but I didn’t feel like anything I could’ve said really would’ve helped much at that point.
It just brought up a lot of weird stuff. I was pretty horribly depressed at that time period as well, so I was having a hard time figuring out my emotions around it. It brings up this whole thing where my parents knew that I had been suicidal at some point. Suddenly, there was this weird conversation when I first got home for the funeral. My dad gripped me by my shoulders and looked at me in the face, just crying, saying, “You can’t kill yourself. You can’t do this. You’re all we have left.” There was also this pressure. It’s sort of a fucked-up moment because my immediate thought was, “Well, fuck! Now what am I going to use to comfort myself when things get bad? Now I’m not allowed to! Now there’s this weird thing of my dad’s sobbing face holding me by the shoulders.”
There have only been a few—maybe just the one time where I really, seriously considered doing it. Other times, it’s just comforting to me.
AMAZING JOHNATHAN—COMEDIAN, MAGICIAN
I never think about suicide ever, but I was just kind of contemplating, like when I got divorced, I was sitting there with a gun in my mouth. It wasn’t loaded, but I just wanted to feel the drama.
ALLIE BROSH
The way that I work through things is that I just talk them to death. Like when I’m stuck psychologically at a point where I just kept replaying the scene of what my sister’s last moments must have been like—just over and over and over, obsessively for days and weeks.