S08|21 - Suicide Prevention

 

Suicide has deeply impacted my family circle over the years, as it has so many of you around the world. Today I share some ways we can work on preventing suicide in our homes and communities though talking more openly about mental health in clear and frank ways- and become willing to open ourselves up to potentially awkward (but SO important) conversations.  

Note: be tender with yourself if this episode is triggering for you, come back to it later if you need to... and KNOW that if someone in your circle has passed away due to suicide that it was NEVER your fault, and when we talk about prevention it’s not for situations in the past, but how we can support others in the future. 

Suicide Hotline US & Canada dial 988

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Crystal The Parenting Coach: Hi, I'm Crystal The Parenting Coach. Parenting is the thing that some of us just expected to know how to do. It's not like other areas of your life where you go to school and get taught, get on the job training, or have mentors to help you, but now you can get that help here.

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Suicide has deeply impacted my family circle over the years, as it has so many of you around the world. Today, I share some ways we can work on preventing suicide in our homes and communities through talking more openly about mental health, in clear and frank ways, and becoming willing to open ourselves up to potentially awkward, but so important conversations. 

Just a note before this episode, please be tender with yourself if this episode is triggering for you, come back to it later if you need to. And know that if someone in your circle has passed away due to suicide, that it was never your fault. 

When we talk about prevention, it's not for situations in the past or to bring up shame or guilt, but how we can support others in the future. 

 

Welcome to today's podcast episode, Suicide Prevention. I know this is a little bit off my normal stream vein energy of things, but I feel like it's a really, really important topic; I'm going to talk about why, and it's something that's really necessary. 

And so, I would love for you to listen to this with a tender heart to know that if you're feeling too intensely triggered by this topic, just come back to it another time. You don't have to listen to it now. You don't have to read through the show notes now. You can come back at any time that you want. And if it does, bring up some strong emotions for you, I would invite you to reach out for support to somebody in your community…to me, to whoever you'd like. 

I will have some links in the show notes for suicide hotlines and such that you can reach out to for support as well if you feel like you don't have someone else. 

So, we're going to talk about suicide, what I've learned about it and my own personal experience with it.

 

My family's experience with suicide – My brother-in-law's story

So, I first want to talk a little bit about my own story. Back in August of 2020, my brother-in-Law, during COVID, died by suicide. He had been struggling with his mental health for a long time, on and off. He had had a brother, that maybe two or three years before that, had also died by suicide. This was the closest death to me, to my own personal family, to my own personal life; and it was really hard. 

It was a lot tougher than other ones that have happened in the past to us, in order for us to kind of grieve and to move through and into process – especially just because of everything surrounding it, the difficult mental health that he had, the difficult relationships that he had before then. 

And there was a few things that were cemented in my mind after that. One was just understanding the process of grief a little bit better and feeling a little bit more, I guess, compassion or empathy or understanding for people that go through this. And that it just comes in waves, and it ebbs and flows.

 

How Emotional Intelligence helps to prevent suicide

The other thing that I really felt was what kept coming back to me was emotional intelligence; and in my mind, that's having a healthy relationship with ourselves and with people around us is what really matters most. 

It does not matter how smart you are. It does not matter how many certificates you have, how many degrees you have, how many people like you, how famous you are; you can have literally all of that and not enjoy your life. You can have literally all of that and have the worst mental health…that if our mental and emotional health is not good, it affects so many things in our life – our relationship, our business, how we show up in the world, and that is what matters. 

I would much rather have less – have less followers, have less clients, have less money, have less…I don't know, all of the things that we feel like are success – and enjoy my life day-to-day, and have a healthy, strong, active mind. 

I know that that's not always a choice, that there are mental illnesses that are debilitating, that there's trauma that's so debilitating. But I also see the other side of it, that there is so much help out there – effective help and support. 

There is medications, therapies, trauma therapies, counseling, coaching. And in the sphere that I'm in, I know a lot about it and I see a lot about it, and I see how effective it can be. 

 

How suicide has affected my family – My cousin's story

So, that is my own personal experience with that. Up until this last year and last summer, my cousin who is younger than I am, died by suicide. And it was a really hard funeral, a hard situation for the family – for everybody, and especially for her own immediate family. And we just got back from traveling around the world; and last week, I just came home from the funeral of her sister, who also died by suicide. 

And as I was thinking about it on the way home, I felt so strongly, like this is a topic that we need to talk about more. One of the myths is that if we don't talk about suicide, if we don't bring it up, if we don't mention, it will decrease our family and friends' risk of suicide. 

But from all of the research that I've done, the opposite is true; anything that we shove down and pretend isn't there and don't talk about openly, doesn't get dealt with…doesn't get healed and just festers like a wound that just increases and increases and increases.

And so, as this is not something that I see talked about a lot within my circles, I've just decided that I'm going to-- I'm going to start talking about it more. I'm going to have this be a conversation that's ongoing, starting with this episode, but continuing so that we can make it less awkward to talk about, less awkward, to ask people about and make it more normal. Because I really think that's the only way that we're going to make any changes.

 

Shame resiliency: how to feel shame and move through it

My work is all about shame. Everything that I do has to do with shame. And if we have shame around suicide, if we have shame around mental health, it's going to exacerbate it. Depression, anxiety, all of that is very shame-based also, even the core root of it is. 

And so, if it's something that we don't feel like we can talk about and has this negative stigma around it, it's just going to increase. And so many people that I have heard of that I'm not even personally closely related to or friends with, had really seemingly successful lives on the outside and then died by suicide. 

And I think part of that reason is we have this idea of what success looks like. Success looks like money…it looks like wealth, it looks like certifications or education, it looks like fame; and that's not what success is. 

And so, we often don't check on people that we feel like might be doing good because we just presume they're probably doing well. Or we don't give ourselves, I think, open spaces to have deeper conversations than we might. 

 

Having frank and open conversations may prevent suicide

And what I'm going to offer is the best way to prevent suicide is to have more conversations that are frank, that are open and that are awkward because it can be really awkward to ask somebody, "How are you really feeling? What's really going on? What does that really look like for you? Tell me more about that. Let's dig into it." Right? 

We're so used to just saying, "Oh, things aren't going well. Oh, sorry about that." Or like, "Oh, that? Yeah, me too. It's hard." Right? 

We kind of just stay on the surface with things that feel deep or strong or are emotionally charged, but I just wonder what a difference it would make if we just allowed ourselves to be socially awkward about it. 

Also to get it wrong. A lot of the work that I've done in reading about anti-racism, so much of it, they're like, "You'll get it wrong. You'll say things wrong, you'll do things wrong, and you can apologize and you can grow and you can learn." And that is the path of doing anti-racism work, is going to be just stumbling along and making a lot of mistakes. And you have to be okay with that in order to do anti-racism work. 

 

And I think of suicide prevention work as the same; you have to be uncomfortable, you have to be okay with being awkward and also that you might hurt people's feelings – or it might be like a weird situation, or you might kind of do it wrong, but isn't that better than the alternative? Isn't that better than waking up and knowing that someone that you loved has died by suicide? 

 

My friend's experience with suicide

One last story that I want to share before I get into the prevention side of it is that I read this on my friend's Facebook before, so I know this lady personally, and she said that years ago, she had a youth that showed up at her door, knocked on the door and wanted to talk to her son. 

Her son was out for the night and she said, "I'm really sorry, like, I'll get him to call you back as soon as he's home, but he's not around, and the youth left." And she said she could tell that there was something off. She could tell that he needed to talk about something, that something was going on with him; and she never got the opportunity to. She woke up in the morning with the news that he had died by suicide. 

I read that and it really hit me because then years later, when the same situation happened with the same friend, she welcomed him in and sat down and talked to him, and just asked him, you know, what was going on? And she said, you never know what you're going to prevent by doing those awkward things. Right? 

By saying, "Hey, come sit down, let's talk about this," to somebody you might not even know, or somebody you might not be close with, because they might not feel like they have somebody else in their life to talk to about it. I think so much of suicide prevention is going to be making socially awkward things allowed, us allowed to do those awkward things. 

 

Suicide Prevention techniques

So, the first thing that I'm going to talk about in prevention is-- This was actually my sister's idea. So, if you're listening to this, yay, yay, you. But we were kind of talking about this idea and like, how do we make it more frank conversations? 

And I said, "Oh, I think we're pretty good in our family about talking about suicide and talking about mental health." 

And she was like, 'Yeah, but on the surface.' Right? 

Like you might say like, "Oh, I'm really struggling with my mental health," or I'm really having a hard time, or I'm really having a bad day.

But oftentimes it's like, 'Oh, that's hard.' Or like, what support are you getting? Or like, we talk about it, but it's not deep. 

 

So, the one question that she asked was, what does that look like for you? And as soon as she said that, I was like, yes, yes. The more questions that we ask, then we can really understand what's going on for them, right? 

Then they might say like, "I am struggling with suicidal ideation or suicidality," that's something that, that sometimes people say, they might not use those words. They might be saying something like, "I can't do this anymore, I don't want to be here, this is too hard." And asking questions and being a safe space for them is really what they need. 

You can also direct them to suicide hotlines…direct them to counseling, direct them to therapy. I've had an entire coaching session with someone where all we did was search for a therapist that she could get to that day. We just looked online because she was feeling so overwhelmed and so depressed that she couldn't do that herself. So, I just sat there for an hour with her, and all we did was just search and search and send out emails and contact people and find her somebody that she could meet with asap. That is what suicide prevention can look like sometimes. 

It can also be normalizing things like mental health…like diagnosis, like taking medication, like going to therapy, like going to coaching or counseling or having support, because a lot of people are just like, 'Nope, there's nothing wrong. Nope, we don't talk about it. Nope, we figure this out ourselves as a family.' 

I don't know if it's cultural. I don't know if it's religious. I don't know where this idea comes from…that we're not supposed to talk about things openly with coaches, counselors, therapists; we're supposed to like, struggle our way through life. But I don't believe that to be true at all. So, I think that we can ask the deeper questions, have open conversations about it. 

 

Lessons from Suicide Prevention Training

I took a suicide prevention training; it ended up that it was like a week or two after my brother-in-law had died by suicide. So, it was-- I found it very difficult; and I did have to pause several times – pause the information, and I'd have to kind of come back to it later. 

But I remember a few things from it and I wanted to share those with you just so that you can look for kind of red flags that might not be as obvious or might not be as visible. And I researched a little bit online, and so I'll share that with you as well. 

So, one thing is that often when suicide is being thought of, people don't necessarily speak about it like that. 

They might not be saying things like, "Oh, I've been thinking a lot about suicide lately." Like, that isn't often what they'll say. 

But they might say things like, "I can't do this anymore. I don't want to be here. I can't deal with this again. I am just done with life." 

And those are the times where you can ask them those deeper questions; what do you mean by that? What does that look like for you? 

And you can still empathize, like, "Oh, that is really difficult. That sounds really hard." 

But also, we want to be asking those deeper questions to help them open up even more instead of shutting it down to be like, oh, this is an uncomfortable conversation. Oh, I don't want to go there. Oh, this is really hard. This is really triggering. Like, let's just stop. 

Like, let's ask more questions, not less. 

 

The indicators of suicide

They also shared with us the indicators of it. So, oftentimes, there's indicators that kind of happen before suicide happens. This can be significant mental health challenges; obviously, that's going to be a really big one, right? Like mental illness, severe depression diagnoses, things like that. 

 

But there's other factors as well. If you have a close family member that has died by suicide, you are much more likely to die by suicide as well. I'm just going to read something online at ucl.ac.uk "People bereaved by the sudden death of a friend or family member are 65% more likely to attempt suicide, if the deceased died by suicide, than if they died by natural causes." 

So, this brings up your risk to 1 in 10. 

I also read some studies on familial clustering of suicide risks. So, that means that there can be clusters of suicide and that can come from genetic components, but it also can come from environmental factors. 

So, if you were raised in the same home, there might be some things happening there – trauma or whatever – that both of you experienced, that siblings have experienced. And so, that can increase the risks as well as genetic factors. And also, oftentimes mental illness is genetic as well. So, those things can be passed down and can happen in families. 

So, if somebody has had someone really close to them – a family member, a really close friend – die by suicide, I think the chances of that happening again or being something that they think about is also increased. So, just know that. 

 

Another one is if any significant changes happened in their life recently, and these significant changes can be changes to relationship. So, did they get separated or divorced? Did they break up with their partner? This can be changes in identity, like it can be transgender, LGBQ issues – anything like that that is coming up for them. That can also increase the risk there.

 

Another thing could be-- And I think just LGBQ on its own is also a high-risk group, so I'll mention that as well. Not just relationship changes, but also that would increase the risk.

 

Other things that you can look for are things like really major changes in work or in belief. So, work would be like maybe they lost their job, maybe things aren't going well at work. Maybe they just, all of a sudden, got up one day and quit out of nowhere a job that they've had for a really long time. That's definitely something to look into and check up on. 

 

Another one would be huge changes in beliefs. So, maybe somebody that used to believe in God, doesn't believe in it anymore – or, kind of, one day wakes up, and is like, 'I'm done, I'm done with all of this.'

 

Significant changes to beliefs that they've had for a long time can also be a risk factor to look at. 

 

And I'm not saying that all of these things mean that you are more likely, or your friends or if your family, are more likely to die by suicide, but those are just red flags to look for so that we can further prevent suicide and help talk about it more. 

 

So, for me, I think the two things that I took from my training that were the most significant were one, these, kind of, red flags to be looking for. Because when I looked back at my brother-in-law's life, almost all of these things happened. Like I remember reading through all of the red flags and I was like, yeah, almost every single one he had had, I'm sure that there was more, but those are the ones that stick out to me now.

 

Asking questions may help prevent suicide

And then the other side of the flip side of it is also just asking questions, being more open to asking those questions. You can ask things like-- You know, if they do say that they've had suicidal thoughts, like, do you have a plan? Are you in a safe space? Do you have somebody that you can call for support? Can I be that support person for you? Are you comfortable with me calling a hotline while we're on the phone together – or helping you find a therapist? 

Because again, going back to that mentality of like, if it's not broken, we don't fix it. 

Well, at what point is something broken? Right? 

Do we just wait until it's entirely broken, until somebody's not even here anymore, to fix it? Or like, are we open to finding different therapies and counseling and modalities that are supportive for us?

 

Us working on us – is the most effective tool for suicide prevention

The last thing I just want to mention is that I think the most effective tool for suicide prevention is going to be us working on us. And that might seem totally unrelated. We're like, well, how can we prevent our teen suicide? How could we prevent it in our family members if we're working on us? Like, what does that have to do with anything? 

Well, the more that I've worked on myself, the more space I have to hold other people's emotions. The more that I'm not constantly dealing with my own stuff, I just have more time…more space, more energy, more spirit to be able to help others with theirs. And beyond that, I feel like the more I worked on my relationship with my own self, the more myself I allowed myself to be. The more I could just be me, I didn't have to worry about what other people thought about me.

If I said something too much or too awkward or too weird, I didn't have to worry about fitting in or what I was doing or saying – or second-guessing my decisions because I had a more solid relationship with myself. 

And that the people that I've been around say that what they feel like the shift is within them, is within their energy – within, like, when they're around someone that is so themselves, so fully and wholly and intrinsically themselves, that they feel like it gives them permission to also be themselves. 

And even if that being themselves is saying like, "Hey, I'm really struggling." Right? Maybe that conversation can happen with someone around you because you are doing the work to be more you…to have that shift in how you show up in the world, and having other people kind of feel into that as well. It gives other people that safe space to share. 

 

And again, we're going to-- You know, if you have that solid relationship with yourself, you're going to worry less about, what are they going to say? Are they going to hate me? Are they going to never text me again? Is this going to be the most awkward conversation ever? Yeah, all of those things might be true. 

But when we are working on our own relationship with ourselves, we're going to think less about all of that. And we're going to know like, wait, what really matters most? 

Does it matter most for me to push my beliefs onto somebody else? Does it matter most for me to stop this conversation now so it gets less awkward? 

Like, what matters the most?

And for me, it's relationships; and if relationships matters most, then suicide is part of that, mental illness is part of that. Allowing myself to be a safe space for others to come too as part of that. 

 

So, I hope this helps you in some way. And if you feel like you have a family member that's struggling or maybe you're struggling yourself, please reach out in any of the links in the show notes below to any of the suicide hotlines. 

And also share this episode with a friend; and maybe we can be the beginning of preventing suicide and also just dropping the stigma of even having suicidal thoughts, even having mental illness. I think that there still is. 

We're doing some work, we're getting there. We're talking about mental illness, for sure, at a deeper level than we have before. But I definitely think we can talk about shame more openly…that we can talk about struggles more openly, awkwardness more openly, failures more openly. And as we do that, maybe it'll give somebody else a little space to be a little bit more themselves and a little bit more open and vulnerable with us as well. 

So, thanks for being here today, and we will see you next week.

 

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