Kev G. Mor first attempted suicide at age 16, and dealt with suicidal ideations, hallucinations and bouts of homelessness for another 20 years until he finally got a diagnosis.
The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, but left him in a coma for roughly five days after doctors pumped his stomach. Mor was placed in a psychiatric hospital, and tried to kill himself again when he went home.
At 35, the Boston native was finally diagnosed. The doctors said he had bipolar 1 disorder with psychosis and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I just grew up my whole life feeling terminally unique,” said Mor, who had bounced around shelters prior to his diagnosis and was living in a motel with his 5-year-old child and shoplifting to get by at the time.
The diagnosis, which later evolved to schizoaffective disorder, came after Mor, now 49, hit another “bottom,” when the judge in a shoplifting case against him recognized he was mentally unstable and got him placed into a hospital.
Mor said he saw and heard things that weren’t there, but didn’t tell anyone out of fear of the stigma around mental illness. He thought if he shared his symptoms, he would get “locked up.”
While he did get placed into psychiatric care, Mor, who was living in Alaska at the time, said it helped him to become stable. He started taking medication to treat his symptoms, and moved back to Boston to start working on his recovery through therapy, he said.
Today, he’s a mental health peer specialist involved with Tunefoolery Music, a Boston-based community of more than 60 musicians in mental health recovery. The group describes its mission as bringing quality music, as well as an inspiring message of recovery and hope, to others.
Mor lives in veterans housing in Beverly these days, and is the latest survivor to be featured in “My Suicide Story,” a docuseries by Connecticut filmmaker Joe Massa.
Massa released the show’s first episode in July 2018, after a spontaneous conversation with one of his close friends, Kenny Serrano, who shared that he had attempted suicide years ago.
Serrano agreed to share his story with the world, a decision that led to the creation of the series, Massa said. After the first video was posted on YouTube, a lot of survivors started reaching out, some of whom were looking to get their story out there as well.
“They’re all different demographics of people, which is strange to me that it doesn’t discriminate,” Massa said of the suicide survivors featured in his docuseries. “It doesn’t really matter how successful you are or not. It will affect anybody and everybody.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide was the 12th leading cause of death in the United States in 2020, claiming more than 45,900 lives.
There were nearly two times as many suicides (45,979) as there were homicides that year (24,576). The suicide rate was four times higher among males (22 per 100,000) than among females (5.5 per 100,000) in 2020, CDC data show.
Massa describes the interviews as raw, unedited and uncensored, which makes a lot of the material “harsh and very straightforward and detailing.”
While each story is unique, he said, many of the survivors talked about childhood trauma, and said they were driven to attempt suicide because they didn’t want to be a burden to others.
The survivors also described feeling a sense of relief when their suicide attempts were unsuccessful, but some admitted that they didn’t know if they would be compelled to try to take their own lives again in the future, Massa said.
“A lot of times, this is the first time they’ve ever told their story,” he said. “It’s like a weight off their shoulders because they’re able to get it out of them.”
Mor said he aims to keep telling his story in different ways. Massa wanted him to focus on the suicide aspect of his experience, which differs from the recovery approach he usually takes, he said.
“If we can deter people and maybe save a life, that’s the ultimate goal for me,” Massa said.
