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Thank God I Failed: A Lawyer’s Suicide Attempt and the Case Against Trying
Thank God I Failed by Orlando Da Silva is a deeply personal memoir that traces the making of a life from childhood abuse to professional prominence and a psychiatric ward. Da Silva writes about growing up in an unstable, violent home, learning to disappear emotionally, and carrying that instinct into school, relationships, politics, and a demanding legal career. His outward accomplishments conceal treatment-resistant depression and a conviction that the people he loves would be better off without him. The book’s central event is his 2008 suicide attempt, but its fuller subject is the slow accumulation of experiences that made death seem reasonable to an intelligent, persuasive man.
As a suicide survival memoir, the book is especially strong at showing how professional competence can coexist with severe mental illness. Da Silva builds a successful career as a lawyer, becomes a political candidate, and eventually serves as president of the Ontario Bar Association, yet the habits that help him succeed also let him hide. His lawyerly mind gives the narrative a distinctive tension. He can analyze systems, construct arguments, and perform under pressure, but he can also make a polished case against his own continued existence. The writing is candid, controlled, and frequently darkly funny, with recurring images of weather, buildings, courtrooms, and damaged structures connecting his childhood to his adult life. The chronological structure gives the book room to show how shame becomes a private language and how speaking publicly begins to break its hold.
The psychiatric ward chapters form the emotional and intellectual center of this depression recovery memoir. Recovery arrives through medication, electroconvulsive therapy, professional care, time, and ordinary moments of human presence. There’s no tidy transformation. Da Silva leaves the hospital with the same history and a continuing capacity for depression, but he has begun to question the authority of his darkest thoughts. That distinction matters throughout the book. A nurse asking a sincere question, another patient saving him a chair, or a family member refusing to accept his wish to die becomes evidence that care can interrupt certainty. The practical coda strengthens this theme through journaling, a ten-point safety scale, treatment tracking, and specific ways loved ones can help without pretending they can cure another person.
The memoir ultimately becomes a first-person argument against extending Canada’s medical assistance in dying system to people whose sole underlying condition is mental illness. Da Silva’s case rests on lived experience: depression distorted his judgment, memory, hope, and sense of being a burden while leaving him articulate enough to sound rational. He asks readers to consider what “irremediable” can mean when a recurring illness makes temporary despair feel permanent, and when support is distributed so unevenly. This blend of mental health memoir, law and ethics book, and suicide prevention memoir gives Thank God I Failed its unusual force. It’s the story of a man who survived, found a public voice, and turned that voice toward people still trapped inside silence. Its hope is practical: stay, speak, listen, and create enough time for a suffering mind to discover that it may be wrong.
Pages: 236 | ASIN : B0GX36X5PQ
Thank God I Failed
Thank God I Failed is Orlando Da Silva’s raw, searching memoir about childhood abuse, lifelong depression, a suicide attempt in 2008, and the fragile, unfinished work of choosing to stay alive. It begins in the mud beneath a second-floor balcony, where he is thrown as a toddler and learns silence before language, then moves through the decaying house on Weber Street, the violence of school and family, law school, Bay Street ambition, political campaigns, bankruptcy, hospitalization, and finally his public advocacy as President of the Ontario Bar Association. Woven through all of this is his urgent argument against expanding MAiD to people whose sole underlying condition is mental illness, because he knows exactly how convincing despair can sound when it borrows the voice of reason.
What stayed with me most was the book’s refusal to make suffering tidy. Da Silva doesn’t write trauma as a straight road toward wisdom. He writes it as weather, as architecture, as something that gets into the walls. The scenes from childhood are especially hard to shake: the broken bathroom floor at Weber Street, the rats, the electrified sink, the father smashing plates at dinner, the mother whose cruelty and protection sometimes arrive almost in the same breath. Then there’s Mrs. Forrester and the “Happy Book,” one of the quietest and saddest images in the memoir. A child being asked to record happiness when survival has taken up all the room inside him. I found that devastating because it understands how small mercies can feel bewildering to someone raised on fear.
I admired the writing most when it trusted image and rhythm over explanation. Da Silva can be brutally direct, especially in the account of swallowing pills and alcohol, waking angry to still be alive, and entering the ward he first experiences as betrayal. But he’s also capable of a kind of stern lyricism, particularly when he describes ordinary life after the hospital: Tim Hortons, Blockbuster, dogs, his daughter’s hand in his. Those details matter because they make his central idea more than an argument. I didn’t always find the policy sections as emotionally seamless as the memoir portions, since the legal reasoning occasionally tightens the prose into advocacy, but I also understand why the book needs that spine. His case against MAiD for mental illness alone comes from lived contradiction: at his lowest, he could have argued persuasively for his own death, and he would have been wrong.
By the end, I felt less like I had read a recovery story than a testimony about time, witness, and the moral danger of mistaking certainty for truth. This is a painful book, but it’s not a hopeless one. Its hope is stubborn, unsentimental, and sometimes almost embarrassed by itself, which made it feel more trustworthy to me. I’d recommend Thank God I Failed to readers interested in mental health, suicide prevention, trauma, law, medical ethics, and the hidden lives of high-functioning professionals, especially anyone willing to sit with a book that asks difficult questions.
Pages: 236 | ASIN : B0GX36X5PQ
