Stigma 6: Suicide and Heart Disease

Fighting for one's life with heart disease is a battle on multiple fronts. There is the purely physical aspect, which is horrible as one's own heart, the source of one's life, is struggling to maintain the body's physical needs. Then, there comes the mental aspect of knowing that this physical problem potentially shortens one's life and the helplessness that comes with it. Another important factor comes from the socio/cultural stigma associated with the disease and the prescribed bleak view of one's future, which is difficult to see through. Combined, this external aspect creates a nagging, ever-growing, picking notion that the physical justifies all other aspects as "natural consequences" of the illness, which serves only to make it so much worse.

All of these factors are difficult to face on a continual, and even daily, basis, and tragically, many lose this battle far too early.

The article, "The Association Between Heart Diseases and Suicide: A Nationwide Cohort Study" by B.D. Peterson, E. Stenager, C.B. Morgensen, and A. Erlangsen acknowledge that, considering the spectrum of heart disease, "several specific disorders were found to be associated with elevated rates of suicide. Additionally, we found temporal associations with higher suicide rate in the first time after diagnoses." Thus, "our results underscore the importance of being an alternative towards psychological distress in individuals with heart disease" (Petersen et al., 2020). These results do not stand alone, and other articles tackle this issue as well to highlight this correlation between heart disease and suicide.

Another article, "Suicide Risk Among Patients With Heart Disease and Heart Failure," by Ben Grobman, Neekarika Kothapalli, Arian Mansur, and Christine Y. Lu, further discusses this issue. As "heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States (US). Suicide is the 12th leading cause of death. However, little is known in the risk of suicide in patients with heart disease and heart failure" (Grobman et al., 2023). As before, when "compared with the general population, patients with heart disease and heart failure had an elevated risk of suicide. This was true across racial and geographic subgroups. There was an elevated risk of suicide in patients with heart disease and heart failiure in the United States."(Grobman et al., 2023). Thus, these two too-common causes of death are often interconnected.

Through personal experience, I have observed and found this deep connection between heart disease and suicidal ideation to be true, not only in myself but in others in the cardiac community; thus, as this is an important and poignant issue, I will write more on this topic in the future.