American mental health advocate Kevin Hines can still vividly recall the very lowest point of his life. It was the day he flung himself off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco in a fit of tortured despair.
“It really was the worst day of my life,” he reflects. “It was the worst action I had ever taken, and the moment that I went over the rail was an absolute instant regret.”
The year was 2000 and Kevin was then just 19-years-old. At that point, he had been struggling with serious mental illness for almost two years.
“I was born to drug-addicted birth parents,” he explains. “I’m adopted, but I was born prematurely on drugs, and that really set the tone for my future mental illness. My biological parents had what was called manic depression – what we today call bipolar disorder – and I would develop bipolar disorder by seventeen-and-a-half. Just like they did, except they used drugs to cope with their mental pain, and my mental pain caused me to go to the Golden Gate Bridge and to attempt to take my life."
He survived. It took him just four seconds to hit the water, but midway through the 67 metre plunge he had an epiphany. “When I went over that rail,” he recalls, “I was shocked into reality from my psychoses, from hearing voices, from seeing things that didn’t exist to anyone but me, from hearing voices saying, ‘You must die, jump now!’ When I went over that rail, that all went away, and I realised that I didn’t really want to die – but I thought it was too late.”
Seconds before he jumped, an oblivious female tourist had asked him to take her photograph. “I was pacing back and forth. I was distraught and a woman approached me and she said: ‘Will you take my picture?’ And so I did. I took her picture five times and she turned her camera off and walked away.”
Her seeming indifference to his distress proved to be the final straw. “She didn’t see the pain I was in, she didn’t see the tears flowing from my face. It wasn’t her fault, something was probably in her eye, who knows? And I thought at that moment,
when she walked away: nobody cares. The reality was everybody cared. But nobody knew where I was or what I was doing, and nobody was trained in suicide intervention – so how could they know what I was about to do? I’m very lucky to be alive.”
Only about one per cent of people who’ve jumped from the Golden Gate – a suicide hotspot – have survived. Miraculously, although he broke his back, Kevin was among them.
“There were three things that came into play that saved my life that day,” he says. “First of all, when I went over the rail, there was a woman driving by in a red car who saw me go over. She had a friend in the Coast Guard and she called that friend immediately and that’s why they arrived to my position in the water before I could get hypothermia and die.
“In the water, as I tried to stay afloat something struggled beneath me, something very alive and very large. And I initially thought, it’s a shark and I’m going to die. I didn’t die of the bridge and now a shark is going to eat me. That was my reaction.”
It turned out not to have been ashark.“When I was on a TV show called Primetime Live with a guy named John Quiñones, I mentioned that I thought there was a shark beneath me. People call the show from all over the world, and so a man called into the show – he was from Ireland actually – and his name was Morgan. And he said, ‘Kevin, I’m so very glad you’re alive’. He said, ‘I was standing less than two feet away from you when you jumped, and your actions have haunted me until this day. Until I called into this show no-one told me if you had lived or died’.
“He said, ‘By the way, Kevin, there was no shark. It was a sea lion and people above, looking down, believed it to be keeping you afloat until the Coast Guard boat arrived behind you’. I don’t know what you call that, but it’s a miracle to me.
“And the third thing to save my life was the doctor who performed my back surgery – literally a surgery that was in a medical journal, because it was the first of this particular kind,” he explains. “I had broken my back. Upon impact I shattered my ‘tetoral’ L1 and L2 lower vertebrae into shards like glass. They lacerated me internally, cut me up inside. He was one of the foremost back surgeons, at least on the west coast of America if not the world. And he happened to be there that day – he wasn’t supposed to be. He was supposed to have been gone on an urgent assignment and happened to stay. And I came into the hospital and he offered to do my surgery–and he saved my ability to walk and run.”
Although he has since made a full physical recovery, Kevin is still battling his mental illness. “I have every symptom I used to have today,” he admits. “There’s no cure. It’s chronic – it’s really a brain disease. I fight it every day, and I beat it every day. I have come to the conclusion that I will never attempt to take my life again, even though I have what are called chronic suicidal thoughts. I think about it often enough. It actually plagues me a lot, but I beat it one day at a time.”
Following his own failed attempt, Kevin became involved in mental health and suicide prevention campaigning. He was encouraged to get involved by a Franciscan Brother and a Catholic priest.
“In the hospital where I recuperated, going from a wheelchair to a walker, and a back-brace to a back-brace and a cane, there was a Franciscan friar. Guys in the brown robes, white robes, rosary in one hand and I always joked because he had the half hair going on on his head, like St Francis.
“Anyway, he had no clue why I was in the hospital. My dad was there, and he came in and he said, ‘Hey kid, what are you in for?’ And I said; ‘I jumped off from Golden Gate Bridge’. He said; ‘Oh yeah, and I’m the Pope!’ He didn’t believe me, he thought I was delusional because of the morphine. I said, ‘No, Brother, that’s what really happened, I’m not making it up’. He said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry’. And he came over to my left side and he put his hand on my forehead and he prayed with me and my dad.
“After the prayer he said, ‘Hey kid, when you get better, you want to talk about this?’ And I looked at him and I said, ‘About what to whom?’ I think what he meant was, there’s power in the spoken word and words can help people heal. But he didn’t say that. Well, every day he’d come in to pray with us and every day he’d say, ‘You should talk about this’, and every day I would ignore him.
“I got out of the hospital and went into a psychiatric hospital after that for a month, I got outta there and my dad and I go to church one day, and the priest comes out, and he goes, ‘Hey Kevin, how would you like to talk to our kids, our 7 and 8 grade class on Good Friday. And I looked at him and said, ‘Father I don’t have a speech, I wouldn’t know what to say’.
“And that’s when my dad, a big half-Irish, half-German guy who adopted me, my father, pushed me forward with his hands, looked to the priest and said, ‘He’ll do it’. And I looked to my dad, like ‘What the hell are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Kevin, we need closure.’ So I said I’d do it.
“Good Friday came around, I read the speech from the page, first time ever giving it. It was 17 pages, it was 45 minutes long. I’m dropping page by page to the floor, I’m crying and I’m shaking. I’m a mess. And I’m thinking; ‘Who the hell is this going to help? What am I doing here?’”
A fortnight later he got his validation. “And two weeks later I get 120 letters from 120 kids about their experience listening to my speech. They were mandated to do that, I know, but several of those kids in their letters were actively suicidal. And because they were minors, their letters were screened and they were given the mental help they needed. Those kids are alive today. And when that happened, I said to my father, ‘We have to do this, however, whenever and wherever possible’.”
Kevin has been actively campaigning ever since. Amongst numerous other accolades, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 for his outstanding work as a suicide prevention advocate and speaker by the National Council of Behavioral Health. His 2013 memoir, Cracked Not Broken, was an international bestseller.
Kevin will be in Dublin on November 1st to take part in a Pieta House charity show in The Olympia. Various seminal Irish acts will be performing on the night, including Blink, The Pale, In Tua Nua, Picturehouse, The Songs in the Key of D Choir and members of The Chieftans, Cactus World News and The Fountainhead.
Kevin will be appearing onstage with The Friends of Emmet, whose single ‘Coming Apart’ was inspired by his story. “I love the song, they shared it with me some time ago,” he enthuses. “I actually used to do my morning run with that song. It was inspiring to me, it was a new thing for me and I really appreciated that they found a vision within the story.”
Ultimately, Kevin Hines’ message is a simple one of hope. “My message is that hope helps heal. What leads people to die by suicide is hopelessness. It’s the idea that there’s nothing that can get better –and that today is the worst day of their lives. The important thing is to recognise that today is not tomorrow and that tomorrow things can change. If you suffer mentally, then with a great deal of hard work, you can have hope – and it can help you heal.”