While this post is about suicidal thoughts, it contains no details, no threats and no suicidal acts.

For the past twenty-two years I've used my legal background to maintain a full-time mediation practice in a moderately countrified area of central Florida. For the first twenty years I made a modest living, enough to keep myself and my wife in reasonable comfort, but not much more. Along came the recession and my business started to sink. Until in 2009 there wasn't anything left. It's been twenty-two years since I've practiced law, so my skills there are entirely out of date if I wanted to hang out my shingle. No law firms are hiring attorneys these days, particularly if they're 64, like me. Nor can my wife and I leave for greener pastures, since we're under water on our house and wouldn't even have enough money to rent somewhere. We have no wealthy relatives from whom to borrow. We've used up all our savings, retirement money, assets, etc. I have the germ of an idea for a new kind of mediation business, but it requires startup money for advertising that I don't have.

For a couple of years now I've been fighting off intrusive suicidal pictures and ideas that insinuate themselves into my thinking on all kinds of other subjects. Sometimes I can't think of anything else. I've never thought about suicide before in my life. I've never tried it. I've never assembled the tools to do it. But here the thoughts are now, and I don't know how to get rid of them. I suppose hopelessness and despair are the basis for such thinking. But I don't know how to get rid of the hopelessness and despair.

I see two things as being the problem. (1) Simply money. I'm sure I'd feel fine if I had a constant, secure, adequate income. The suicidal thoughts would just go away. But I can't conjure up money from nothing, and it does no good to fantasize about the lottery. Then there's (2) my relations with other people. That deserves a paragraph of its own.

In my work, I deal with lawyers and their clients. When people are suing each other, my job is to get them to settle their cases. But I'm really a quiet, shy introvert. Which makes it substantially tougher for me to get the settlements that guarantee future work. (The lawyers want very much to get their cases settled; that's why the repeat work.) I even have significant trouble going around to gladhand the lawyers to ensure I get continued work. So when others started entering the profession in droves as the recession deepened, I got flooded out.

Well, this is already much too long. So while I thank anyone brave enough to have read the whole thing, I'll split the rest into several posts.