September marks Suicide Awareness and Prevention Month
In September 2022, I had my first session with a Suicide Grief Support Group organized by the Crisis Centre of BC in Vancouver, Canada. The year before, on June 3rd, I had lost my partner Alex to suicide before we could even reach our first six months living together. I desperately needed to connect with others who could relate to my experience and I promise to share in a later post how transformational this kind of support was for me. But here I would like to focus on the questions that I had coming in and how hopeful I was to find a pattern among the ones we had loved and lost that could explain the drastic decision to end their lives.
Being an optimistic individual and therefore someone who believes there must be a solution to every problem, I joined the group anticipating finding a common thread, a combination of traits that could help predict the kind of people who were prone to suicide. Because if we could spot them early on, then we could take measures to prevent it, providing them with the right type of support, whatever that meant. My head was full of questions: Could it be the more sensitive, quiet types? Or maybe those with early episodes of trauma? Would I find others like Alex?
Session after session, I fought the impulse to get up and leave while listening to the heartbreaking stories in the room. Our collective sadness was like foul air, making it hard to breathe. It first manifested as an unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach until I was finally able to voice it within the confines of my head, “Oh my god, it could be anyone.” The brutal realization that suicide discriminates no one. There was no common thread, no pattern. It was all over the place: Family members, romantic partners, and friends; overachievers and those who were still trying to figure out their path in life; outgoing and charismatic individuals but also the more quiet and sensitive types; people with a history of mental health issues and people who have never significantly struggled with their mental health; individuals surrounded by loved ones and others who were feeling quite isolated and lonely. None of them felt like Alex. I was unable to draw any similarities between Alex’s situation and the circumstances that led others to make that same decision. Different people, different personalities, different histories, different circumstances, yet the same outcome.
Alex was a complex case. He had a history of trauma and mental illness and had given warning signs in the weeks leading to his death. Sometimes I hear, “You have to be mentally ill to do something like that.” However, the numbers show that not all people who die by suicide have mental health problems at the time they die. We want to believe so badly that people who die by suicide must be different from us in some way. But I learned the opposite during these sessions: They were human just like the rest of us, flawed and weak at times. And the only real difference between them and us was that their inner fire had died down, taking away their capacity to have hope and dreams. You can read more about this last point in this post: Nothing Matters Anymore: A Reflection on the Suicidal Mind.
Here comes the hard truth: If you never thought about taking your own life, then you have never met your breaking point. Because anyone under a specific set of circumstances could choose to die by suicide. I’m not saying this to scare you. On the contrary, this insight is an invitation to empathy and compassion not only towards the ones we have lost to suicide but also to those left behind coping with suicide loss. I’m still met with an uncomfortable silence whenever I explain that my partner took his own life, which leaves me feeling like an outcast. By sharing my story here and in my other posts for Suicide Awareness & Prevention Month, I hope that we can lessen and one day eliminate the stigma around suicide. People struggling with suicidal ideation or grieving a suicide loss should feel embraced and supported by their community instead of shamed, judged, rejected, and isolated. Changing the paradigm starts with us, by being curious about an experience that today might feel foreign to us, by educating ourselves on the topic, by sharing our stories, and by holding space for one another.
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