Everyone has a private battle, and some people are losing theirs.

It’s a common cliché that a smile is a mask worn to hide pain. Certainly when someone uses that phrase, I can often be seen rolling my eyes at the drama of it, however, unfortunately it is also true. The happiest person in the room can also be the loneliest. The saddest. This was true of my best friend.

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week 2015. According to the Samaritans, the current rate of male suicide is the highest since 2001, and in Wales male suicide increased by 23% between 2012 and 2013. The way I see it, us males are facing a depression and suicide crisis. After all, happy men do not kill themselves.

Secrecy is suicide’s biggest aide. There is a lack of open discussion in our society about people’s experiences of suicide. Often in my experience if you tell someone that you have been affected by suicide, they do not know how to react. It is a conversation killer. It also prevents people affected by suicide from benefiting from others sharing their experiences.

I do not offer this post as an authority on grief, or “a dealing with suicide” manual. I offer it as an account of my experience following the suicide of my best friend. And just that.

I want to see fewer friends grieving their friends’ suicides. And although I have had open discussions with the friends who shared my grief, I would expect some of the contents of this post to be new to them. A lot of what I thought and felt at the time went unsaid.

22^nd July 2015 will mark the fifth anniversary of my friend's suicide. Kannan was a fun-loving guy, who oozed charisma and was frequently centre stage. He was British born to a Tamil Hindu family, who originated from Sri Lanka. He was deep yet fun to be around and a free spirit. He even had a positive mantra for life of “Always walk in the sunlight and your shadows will fall behind you.”

He was not someone who you would ever expect to have depression.

But therein lies the majority of the problem. Us “non-depressed folk” have a preconceived idea of what it is to be depressed and who should or should not be depressed.

Looking back now, I think Kannan’s problem was that he saw the sunlight as an unachievable aspiration. But there I am falling into the category of a non-depressed person attempting to explain the thoughts and feelings of something I cannot comprehend, as I am not experiencing it.

Along with society, I am guilty of questioning what other people have to be depressed about. At the time, I could not understand what Kannan possibly had to be depressed about. But the issue is that we always look at the lives of others through rose-tinted spectacles. In questioning people with depression, I think we not only ignore the entire picture, but we also place our own ideals and life expectations on others. In my experience, this just makes a person feel worse as they themselves cannot understand why they feel the way they do and more often than not, they can also recognise the positive aspects of their life.

I do not write this piece to speak about the right or wrong way to support a person with depression because I do not know what that is. I certainly made plenty of mistakes in the support I offered, and to this day I feel guilty at my own lack of understanding at what my best friend was facing back then. I should remember however that I was only 20 at the time, which is hardly an age to tackle this issue.

Kannan decided to tell me about his depression about 5 months prior to his suicide. He did not tell many others. From that point onwards, I supported him as he accessed counselling services; I was there in the middle of the night when he needed to talk; and I secretly monitored a stash of painkillers that he subconsciously purchased. I never really understood why I had to do any of these things though. They were just things I did because he was my friend.

Despite the knowledge of his depression, the news of his suicide came as a terrible shock. As far as I knew, he was making progress with his counsellor. He seemed happier. I had even been to visit him in his hometown of Luton only two weeks prior to his death, and he was a different person. His mood was lighter, it seemed.

Memory is a funny thing where trauma is concerned. I wish I could describe how I found out about his death and what happened next. But I have no memory of this. I know that I was in a cottage in Yorkshire but that is because I am told I was. There is a photograph taken of me earlier that day on a rope swing. I have no actual memory of that day or the weeks following his death.

I am told that at some point I went to visit his family. At this time, I must also have been asked to speak at his funeral, as I gave a eulogy in front of hundreds of his family members and friends. I am told that so many people came to the funeral that there was a “live-screening” of the service in an adjacent building as not everyone could fit in the crematorium. I wish I could remember the magnificence of this but I can only imagine.

I only have two memories of that period. The first is a sound rather than a memory but it is of a Hindu song or chant that his family must have included within the service. The second memory is the panic I felt when I found myself in a supermarket car park after midnight in an unknown town in Cheshire. I had no recollection of how I had gotten there or why I was there. It was almost as if I had just appeared.

It did not get any easier over the following year. Returning to University was particularly difficult. His empty bedroom remained cleared and unoccupied in our student house in Sheffield. Some days I would sit in that empty room for an hour or so. Not knowing what to do. Or how I should react.

Kannan was a well-loved guy and was well known on campus. Following his death, and the spread of the knowledge that I knew he had depression, I felt unable to face people that knew him. I felt I had let him down quite severely. That I could have prevented his death somehow. My guilt made me feel that others also thought that way. The result of this was that I disassociated myself from people who I did not consider to be close friends and I became unreceptive to new people.

I found my friendships with most people to be strained and harder to maintain. I immersed myself into the third year of my law degree, and spent the majority of my time studying and trying to ignore the fond memories of my time in Sheffield. I was reminded of Kannan everywhere I went, and it hurt.

I lost a great deal of my social confidence in the aftermath of Kannan’s death and it is only in the approach to the fifth anniversary of his death that I feel I am beginning to regain it. There is an aspect of being the friend of someone who committed suicide that stays with you. The feeling that you were not a good enough friend. You dismiss the opportunities of new friendships on the premise that you were not good enough previously. 

I remember that my graduation ceremony fell exactly on the year anniversary of his death. That was an odd day. One of simultaneous celebration and grief. For me, it marked the end of a difficult year. I was more than ready to leave Sheffield and to leave the bad memories behind. To this day, I have not yet returned to the city.

With suicide there are questions that will forever remain unanswered. It has a nasty habit of preventing closure. No-one can ever provide a true explanation. No-one can ever correctly understand why. I know that I will always continue to wonder what would have become of Kannan. What would he have achieved? Where would he be now?

I have found the hardest aspect of his death to be that as each year passes, I am one year further away from the person I was when we were friends. One year older. One year wiser. He will remain forever young and forever caught in time, as life around me continues to trundle on. I find that hard to accept.

Suicide is a permanent solution to an otherwise temporary problem. A mendable problem. It’s like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. As a response to depression, it is completely disproportionate.

I firmly believe that suicide can be prevented. By discussing experience openly and remembering that the faces we see on a daily basis may not truly reflect the way that a person is feeling. Everyone has a private battle they are facing, and some people are losing theirs.

I think whoever first said that “time is a great healer” was incorrect. Time does not heal. It does not alleviate the pain suffered by those left behind by suicide. Perhaps it does help people to learn to live with the pain but I am not ready to accept that the pain lessens over time. Not yet anyway.

 “At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them, even after they're dead and gone.” – A quote from Kannan’s favourite book, Shantaram.