Mirror for merkx and blue's twitlongers

Merkx, Byron's roommate: https://twitter.com/partylikemerk/status/1279831706128744450

Byron

I wasn’t planning on posting anything besides some pictures of good memories but there’s a lot of confusion surrounding Byron. I’ve talked to friends who thought he was doing well recently and were completely shocked. I see people saying “where were his friends?”. Some thought he was high on mushrooms and that was what caused it. A few thought this was related to his tweets and Becca. There are many friends I do not know at all that might be confused.

I’ve lived with him for about a year now (at our last apartment right below him and in the new one I was his roommate) and I’ve talked to him every day for 4 years. I want to clear the air. None of the above reasoning was the case. Byron was sick — his depression was like cancer and in hindsight this last month was like a stage 4 diagnosis. Almost nothing short of a miracle would have saved him.

Byron has been up and down his whole life. I didn’t know him too well or watch his stream before 4 years ago but I know a lot of people from back then and they all have similar stories. Byron constantly battled with depression and suicide, he attempted it multiple times in high school and in 2016. I remember ~6 months ago we randomly spoke of this incident and him being brought to the mental hospital and how it was one of the worst experiences in his life. It traumatized him and cost him $700 a day to be there for a week. He had taken a bunch of pills and someone called the police on him, the procedure is to take you to the local psych ward until they clear you to leave. He said he wished he could have live streamed that place and exposed it for the scam it is. They would make him play baby-like games and kept him in the same place as legitimately really insane people. They would have a game where there were 3 lights (red green yellow) and pictures of food. One was a picture of cereal and the staff would ask “Which food is cereal? Is it a good food, green, bad red or medium yellow?” Someone would respond “green, cereal is good” and the staff would say “no it has a lot of carbs but it isn’t that bad! So let's put it under yellow”. Imagine going through a week of that in a loony bin (a bit insensitive of a term but think of a place built for people in straight jackets) and you are one of the top minds of our generation, capable of being the top player in multiple ultra competitive games. I wanted to include this because I want to shed light on how fucked our mental health support system is and how expensive it is to receive that poor treatment. Also it is relevant later in my account.

Covid and the 90+ degree Texas summer hit around March and really isolated Byron. He loved food and nature, we couldn’t go to restaurants and we couldn’t walk around and explore. It also stopped friends from visiting and made it near impossible for Byron to try and have a relationship. This was important for his BPD, to have a close romantic relationship. We saw a slow and steady decline in his mental health and were with him almost every day. We tried to include him in any little activity we did and it became almost impossible. He was very lonely and sad. Getting him to go float on tubes on the river, something he would have previously loved, with a group of 6 girls and me took 30 minutes of pleading irl, 4 phone calls, and eventually us pulling up and throwing him in the car. He ended up having a great time and was super thankful we dragged him out. I didn’t have the mental strength to do this for everything, it was exhausting, but we always went above and beyond to include him. It really sucks when people say “where were his friends”. This is my first time losing someone this close and anyone to mental health, I was not prepared to deal with this but I fucking tried.

Fast forward to three weeks ago. We had 2 apartments in our building and we had a few friends overnight that slept in the 2nd apartment and they told me they saw Byron on the balcony for a bit. I did not put it together that they saw him in our other apartment balcony since we were in the main apartment for a bit and I thought he was on the main balcony. The next 2 days I wasn’t around much, I was texting Byron minor things to which he didn’t answer and I stopped by one day to see he wasn’t home. I figured he popped out for a night walk and was too busy to respond to what I had texted and I left for the night. The next day he calls me and tells me he had taken all my prescribed pills, about 80x the regular dose and was trying to die but instead slept for 35 hours. He said he finally was happy for the first time in months because he thought he was going to die and that he was on the balcony the day before because he wanted to jump. I take somewhat of a solace knowing he was happy to think he was ending his pain and suffering but I am devastated here without him.

After this I spent almost every minute with him and even got our 3rd roommate to come back to town. He seemed better, more close friends around and less talk of suicide. Monday I had left for a dental appointment for one hour and our 3rd roommate was still sleeping. I came back and saw Byron trying to climb up over the ledge, I opened the balcony and had a normal conversation with him but I was freaked out. I called his loved ones and reached out to a medical professional and got advice from them that night. We talked through various options, and under which circumstances we should call 911. Given his prior traumatic experience with hospitals, we wanted to formulate a plan that Byron would be a part of. We researched options that may have been good fits for him, like the Menninger Clinic in Houston, which was one of the top 5 psychiatric hospitals in the country. It would cost 70k for 6 weeks of treatment. Byron already was asleep and I needed to speak to him in the morning before doing anything so I slept right by the balcony and intercepted him around 4am and we watched movies all night and passed out in the living room together. I slept maybe 2 hours and had a discussion with him in the morning about his options. I didn’t want to forcefully have him sent to a place that gave him so much trauma and made him worse in the past and to send him to Menninger he would have to agree to the treatment. The problem was that he had investor meetings lined up for Everland, a project that he had sunk almost all his life savings and emotions into. Byron needed the funding for Everland to keep the project alive. He had one meeting Wednesday and another the week after the 4th. If I forced him into the psych hospital he probably would have missed both.

We constructed a plan that Byron agreed to: 1) Email VCs (venture capitalists) 2) Wait until monday to see the response and if there was no interest then 3) Cut non-essential Everland workers and Check him into Menninger hospital so there could be development while he stayed there. They even provide special phones patients can use so we could figure out a way to meet with VCs with him there. The medical professional agreed this was a good option. Tuesday I researched a list of 55 VC companies that all invest in games and we sat and emailed all of them personalized messages on Wednesday. He also had his meeting on Wednesday that went well, they wanted a 3rd meeting and said “we wouldn’t waste your time with a 3rd meeting unless we were very interested”. Things were looking up. I went out Wednesday night and didn’t sleep at home. He spent the night with our 3rd roommate and his friends, they said he had been more talkative and fun than he had been in a while. They spent the night talking, watching movies, eating at one of Byron's favorite restaurants, he had two entrees and a boba tea. The next morning he killed himself. I checked his phone before the police took it, a few VCs responded saying they would like to set up meetings.

He hadn’t done any drugs in months that would have led him to that point (besides my prescribed ones to try to overdose). Everything tells us he was completely sober when he did it.

Poor Becca. I was around them when they dated. They weren’t soulmates and she wasn’t the key to fixing Byron. He had a girl over a couple months ago that he seemed ecstatic about but she lived far away. When she left I asked if he had thought about Becca or missed her during the time, his answer was a firm “no”.

It wasn’t drugs, it wasn’t Becca, and this didn’t happen out of nowhere. His closest friends were with him almost 24/7 watching him and doing their best. He was seriously sick and I wish I knew the signs a year ago to push him to see a psychiatrist to find the right drug/regimen for him. I wish hospitals were better and affordable. I wish Byron were still alive. I will miss him forever, he was my best friend and the closest thing I’ve had to a brother.

If you’re suffering, reach out to someone. If someone reaching out to you is suffering then listen but know you don’t have the full story, only what they decide to tell you and you are not completely qualified to deal with it. Reaching out to a medical professional is a great idea in this case, I wish I had done it sooner. A common issue for depressed people is the idea of burdening close ones but a funeral is the ultimate burden. Byron lived a wild life, he lived 1000 life times in his uptime. Even when he was sad and depressed I preferred hanging out with him over some of my close friends when they are happy. I wanted to hear his insecurities and reasoning, I did not want him to make the decision about his life for me.

Rest easy Byron, I love you.

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Blue, Byron's ex: https://twitter.com/BlueGoesMew/status/1279813014779318273

My thoughts on the final day

I woke up at 5am PST randomly. I’m not a morning person and that never happens. I made a big breakfast, ate, and then laid back down and pulled up Twitter to pass some time. That’s when I saw Byron’s tweet proposal to Becca. At first I thought it was cute. He had been talking to me recently about how much she meant to him and that he missed her. We would talk about strategies to get her back. I know he talked to quite a few people about this. When I saw it I thought that maybe they had worked something out. Then he kept adding tweets. I realized nothing had changed in their situation. They hadn’t talked still. Having dated Byron for nearly three years myself I knew immediately that he was being manic. I’d seen it many times. I got the biggest pit in my stomach. I tried to get ahold of his roommate that I knew. I tried getting ahold of Byron. Something was very wrong. I had been to his new place once back in February when I was in Austin for work. I live in Arizona now. We all played smash, and helped him set up his new desk. I couldn’t remember the name of his building, or his address. I knew roughly where it was though. I thought about calling the cops because no one was responding but I didn’t have enough info.

I hesitated also because once while we were dating years ago he downed a bottle of pills in front of me during a manic episode. I called 911. I was so scared. The police and ambulance came and took him to the emergency room to pump his stomach. After they took him, no one knew what happened to him for a week. The only thing the police told me was that they took him to the emergency room and that several hours later he was released after they pumped his stomach. No other info. We all tried getting ahold of him, his phone was off. We assumed the worst that he had left the hospital on his own and killed himself. I checked his bank statements on his computer. It had been days and he hadn’t used his card once furthering our fears. I called the hospital for a third time and begged them for more info. Finally someone told me because I was frantic (they wouldn’t say anything before because of patient privacy) that he had been taken to a mental hospital but not which one and wouldn’t tell me. There are many in Austin. His roommates and parents and I went to so many but none would tell us anything. We were at a loss. Finally over a week later, and after making a missing persons report, the police found him at a mental hospital way outside the city. We went there, but they wouldn’t release him to us or let me talk to him even though he had listed me as his only contact. A few days later they called us and he was able to go home. It was such an awful experience. One of the worst of my life back then. He always said it was his worst experience after that. They didn’t help him at all. Not a single person tried to work with him on why he tried to kill himself or how to take steps to get prevent it in the future. He said he was forced to go to meetings about how eating vegetables was good for you. BS like that. He was forced to sleep in the room with another patient that just drank her own period blood non-stop. When I called the police all those years ago I was trying to help him. I saved his life but I had no idea our mental health system was so fucked up here.

Back to July 2nd 2020, I didn’t know he was going to kill himself that morning. I didn’t trust our mental healthcare system, and I didn’t want to be the reason he was taken back to the worst experience he ever had in his life. I will say it again, I didn’t know this manic episode was going to lead to suicide. Mostly they just caused anger, or a gambling problem. He had been talking to me about everland recently, it was doing really badly financially and I knew that taking him away from it in the middle of him trying to find investors and keeping it alive was the wrong call. If I had known this was more than just a manic episode of course I wouldn’t have hesitated. But I didn’t know and I did hesitate, and that decision is what is haunting me. I wish I had been in Austin and not 900 miles away, I would have just gone over there the moment I realized he was manic to prevent the self sabotage that is typically what results from it.

The next I know his roommate contacts me and tells me he just got a call from the police and that he’s gone. His roommate wasn’t home when it happened. For awhile I just sat there in tears. No one else knew. His roommate asked me for his mom’s number to let her know. I just sat there alone, in disbelief re-reading his last tweet over and over. My best friends who were also friends with Byron, in fact he introduced me to them, were asleep. It was early morning PST.

I have so much regret that I could have done something, since I, like many others who saw his tweets, realized he was not well and could directly contact him. I wish he called me back. I wish I had saved his address from Feb. We had planned a call to talk the day before but he backed out. I wish I had insisted we talk. I just didn’t know he was in as bad of a place as he was. I’m sorry Byron. I have no idea if it would have helped. Just what if... you know?

What I have realized is that the real issue is our mental health care system in the US. Had they helped him 4 years ago the last time he attempted suicide this might not have happened. He spent 13k for his stay there and got nothing for it. Not a single person checked in on him after he left. Nothing was set up to help him after. Had they done a good job his friends wouldn’t have hesitated to reach out to them again for help this time. Byron wouldn’t have been afraid to check himself in. They failed him. I will spend the rest of my days fighting for mental health reform. All of you who are also grieving, please do the same. We can honor his memory this way. Thank you for reading.