I believe that suicide is a natural history, a disease process, not an act or a choice, a decision or a wish. It’s a condition he distinguishes from depression, which Antrim calls “a concavity, a sloping downward and a return”:

The book is a memoir of the author’s first brush with suicide. “These days, I think of ECT as clean power, good electricity added to a wet, saline medium in which electrical signaling has become chaotic and mistimed,” Donald Antrim writes in One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival.

In Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” this place is called “Rockland.” The patient will walk back to the ward with the nurse steadying him, eat a breakfast of oatmeal and coffee, and peel the dried green glue off his forehead. He will answer that he is at the General Clinical Research Unit on the fifth floor of the New York State Psychiatric Institute at 1051 Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Afterward he will wake up on a gurney with no memory of the procedure and a nurse will ask him where he is. The convulsions from electroshock will last thirty seconds and will rearrange his brain with the goal of healing. During the procedure the patient will be under general anesthesia and paralyzed, and his twitching toes will be the only sign of the convulsions he’s experiencing. Blood pressure cuffs around his ankles are inflated to block the flow of the paralytic drug succinylcholine to his feet. There is an oxygen mask over his mouth and a needle in his arm. They are glued to his body with a green gel that conducts electricity. There are electrodes on his head, chest, arms, and legs. The patient lies on a table in socks and a hospital gown.

One Friday in April by Donald Antrim