Six Things I've Learned About Suicide

This guest post is written by Julie Jakopic
and generously shared with her permission.

My experience with suicide began over half a century ago, when I found my mother on the floor of her bathroom after her first attempt. It has gone on to include my father’s suicide 8 years later and my husbands another 30 years later. It has also included 5 years of running a crisis hotline, and many serving on and chairing the Alexandria Community Services Board.

This week has been difficult with several clients in crisis and several things that have been painful, tearful triggers for me, too. I am grateful that with my family history, while I have suffered depression, I never been suicidal. The more I know, the less expert I feel. But there are a few things I’ve learned that might help us.

1.  If you’ve been close to one suicide, you have been close to one suicide. Every one is different. One does not an expert make. But some things are consistent. Read on.
2. Suicide is messy, part 1. Messy for the person and for those who love them. Lots of people online use a million adjectives to describe what they can’t imagine – selfish, courageous, angry, and so on. That does not make any of these true of any particular death. Support over judgment here is key.
3. Suicide is messy, part 2. Those that survive have three (at least) big emotional traumas to deal with – the loss of a death, the guilt they feel for not preventing it, and the rejection of the loved one who left. It is more traumatic on assessments than death or divorce as it has elements of both. Survivors often feel angry, ashamed, relived, hopeless, and guilty and often have all of these feelings at once. Feelings, whether warranted or not, are real and should not be subject to judgment.
4. Grief and depression can be hard to share, because of shame, and frankly because it takes energy that someone may just not be able to muster. Open doors and hotline numbers matter but sometimes it’s too hard to make the effort. Instead, or in addition to, notice when people are missing. When they don’t return a call or text, when they don’t show up at a gathering, when they seem to drop off social media. Reach out. Repeatedly. Until you connect. Then help them get it together to get out of the house or make that call. It’s been a long time since I fell in the pit of depression, but when I do, the best thing to do for me is patiently help me get out and around people.
5. If you are helping, practice extreme self-care. Take time to do your own healing. Depression is contagious. Take a walk or a bath, create art, cook a meal, dance it out, get hugs, whatever helps you take care of you.
6. Support research and treatment. Most but not all who die by suicide are suffering from depression, substance abuse or both. For the rest, we don’t know what the driver is. For all of these people, we have some treatment but it only works for some people some of the time. We need better. We know if we change brain chemistry, we can take some of the pain away. But we don’t know what the ideal brain chemistry is. We have a lot to learn. We know that medication alone is a poor substitute for medication plus talk therapy to learn to live differently in the world but the cost is often prohibitive even when covered and it is often not covered.

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Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash