"Suicide is more than just killing yourself," our new substitute Psychology professor said as she flashed an image of a boy who hung himself on the ceiling on the projector. "Suicide is not some sick disease in the mind. It's not simply you want to get a gun and point it on your head, it's not just getting that blade under your pillow and then cut your already scarred wrist, it's not just about taking out the rope you hid under your bed since you were thirteen then hang yourself on the ceiling of your bedroom, while your parents continued fighting inside their room, unconscious of the fact that their son or daughter had already lost his battle. Suicide is an example of how someone experienced the worst pain to the point that it was easy for him to end the life he never wanted, the life that he didn't choose for himself, the life that made him... him."
It was the third week of November, and we were in the middle of our first meeting with our new substitute Psychology professor. I didn't know what to expect about her, she looked like she was just one of the typical college students you can see in every university. She was wearing a white statement shirt saying Fuck Life and a dark blue rugged jeans. More than that, there was nothing unusual about her, except for the semi-colon tattoo on her wrist, which you would hardly notice unless you look at it clearly. Most of the time, professors bore me, but this one is different. She was just cool, the way she talked was as if she was just talking to her closest friends and not her students. She didn't even introduced herself like what other professors do, instead, she closed the lights and opened up the projector in the function room the moment we got inside. And she looked at us before saying, "Ready to get fucked up?"
"When you hear the word suicide, what's the first thing that comes into your mind? Some of you may answer death, killing oneself, taking his own life, and other answers that will make suicide look like a simple word. Then there was one time I was invited to some Kindergarten school by a friend who was teaching there, and I talked about suicide. Maybe some people will tell me that I was insane for doing such, for opening up a sensitive topic to kids ages four, knowing for a fact that they're just a bunch of kids who are unaware of the fucked up world, and eats dirt. But when I flashed them the same image you can see, they all looked at one student at the back. So I asked them the same question, what's the first thing that comes into their minds, and they all said one thing. That kid's name—Jake. So it made me think out of the blue, wondering what could be with that kid that he was his classmates' first thought after seeing the image on the projector. And it surprised me when I realized why they looked at him. Because Jake was the kid on the image..."
The slide turned to the next after her fingers snapped, and the next image silenced the room.
It was the same kid on the first image, but this time, his wrist had cuts. His face was surrounded with fresh wounds, blood flowed from his bruised lips. His intense black eyes were swollen, one of his hands was bleeding, bruises covered both of his legs, and his face had some three-degree burn that melted his face until he couldn't be recognized anymore. He was standing in front of a playground in a children's mental institution, with a woman in a white lab coat standing behind him with a smile on her face. She was a psychologist, based on the nameplate pinned neatly on her coat. Jane Mason. Her fiery black eyes was surely staring at the camera, as if it was trying to threaten the person behind it. I didn't know why, but this woman will give me some nightmares.
"Jake Mason was a five year old boy diagnosed with anxiety and bipolar disorder, who developed suicidal thoughts at the age of four. He was an orphan, and was taken care of his father's sister who happened to be the psychologist in that picture. After Jake's parents were brutally killed by an unknown murderer, his aunt took care of him. She took him to a children's mental institution in New Jersey, and there, Jake's condition got worse— much worse that his aunt had to lock him up in the basement of that traumatizing place. I studied his case after I met him, I went to that mental institution in New Jersey, and found out that his aunt was a fucked up psychologist who only took him to make an experiment on bipolarity. I saw documentations and recordings inside the basement, pictures and other files showing how she made his own goddamn nephew sit his ass on an electric chair and electrocuted his brain. And every time that Jake tries to fight back to his aunt, she slaps him with a file case, causing bruises or sometimes, even wounds on the kid's face. And she shouts at him, telling him how useless he is and how he was better dead like both of his parents. How he should have just died when she burnt his face. How he never deserved to live, and that he was just a stupid boy who can't even function normally like the other children."
