Comic Joe Tracini Shares Strategies For Winning The Battle of Suicide Ideation
British comic actor Joe Tracini suffers from borderline personality disorder which includes near-constant suicidal thoughts. In a new book and in videos on social media, he explains what “life is like when you have a brain that is essentially trying to murder you every day.”
Joe Tracini is a walking trigger warning for suicide. As an actor and television celebrity in Britain, he has large followings on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube and has recently appeared on a number of talk shows discussing unrelenting suicidal feelings, which he attributes to borderline personality disorder. It’s a battle he faces daily.
Earlier this year, his best-selling book, Ten Things I Hate About Myself, came out in paperback in the US and other countries. His comments on social media and in the press are not just publicity, though. They are an essential part of his survival strategy.
Slight in build, balding with round glasses, Tracini speaks in a disjointed, high-energy but passionate manner. He uses a variety of mediums to vividly and sometimes humorously describes what it’s like to live with a side of your personality that is relentlessly destructive.
According to the Mayo Clinic, people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) experience symptoms including: intense fear of abandonment, patterns of unstable, intense relationships, rapid changes in self-identity, and paranoia, and episodes of impulsive and risky behavior. People with this mental condition often have a history of suicide attempts and as many as 10 percent die by suicide, according to a 2019 review of research on suicide and BPD.
In a two-character self-dialogue video that is “pinned” – always listed at the top of his Twitter feed – Tracini describes his borderline symptoms while on the second screen, a dual image of Tracini in a t-shirt emblazoned with “BPD” interjects distracting and disparaging comments. “I feel empty inside – all the time. Like a Father Christmas chocolate that’s hollow inside. He looks happy and shiny but inside, he’s hollow,” Tracini explains. “Another symptom is abandonment. I am afraid people will leave me all the time. If I receive a text that says, "I miss you, I am coming back,” he continues before the BPD self interjects: “They are lying to you. They just feel sorry for you because you keep going on about shit like this for attention.”
Tracini, now 34 and married, experienced periods of substance use disorder, including cocaine and alcohol -- and describes several suicide attempts in his book. Fortunately,he has found strategies to help him “live with wanting to die” all the time.
In one YouTube interview, he explains why his public acknowledgments of his near-constant thoughts of suicide are keeping him alive.
“I had to find a way to live with wanting to die. So I basically just decided that I need to tell as many people as I can that I am not alright. Because the more people that I tell, the better chance there is of me being OK without bringing it up. That is just how I live every day now.”
Another strategy he employs is to write notes to himself on why he should stay and “wait it out.”
One of his notes posted on Twitter reads, in part: “Whatever it is, you can just get through today, tonight, and have another go at tomorrow. Even if tomorrow’s not what you need, want or expect, if you’re telling yourself you’re not worth waking up, going to sleep is something to be proud of. I promise you will remember how it feels to feel something else.”
That Twitter post ended with: “I’m ok, and I hope you are too. Please wait xx.”
His book, Ten Things I Hate About Myself, subtitled: How to Stay Alive with a Brain That’s Trying to Kill You, is available in hardback, paperback, and e-book form.
Note: This is a corrected version of the article originally posted. The name of Tracini’s condition was inaccurately described as bipolar disorder.