Suicidality

Not a fun--but a necessary--topic to discuss

Talking about suicide isn’t fun. I don’t blame people for not wanting to discuss it. I have merely broached the subject and often experienced the darty eyes and bodily discomfort of others who hear that I am a survivor. We get awkward to discuss death—how much more when it is death at one’s own hand?

But you know what’s even worse? People choosing to end their lives. And the deep impact and hurt, how it affects the survivors who are left behind…those who are made to grieve and try to make sense of it all, grappling with the mental anguish that your loved ones, your kin, are in such a place to be able to do that.

Therefore, I deeply admire people who prioritize talking about mental health crises, working to de-stigmatize mental health, and advocating for the prevention of suicide who don’t have a personal experience with losing someone.

Because the sobering but unfortunate truth is that many of us don’t prioritize the issue until after it affects us…until someone we know or love has completed suicide. Then it hits differently, deeper.

Perhaps it is the hopeless human condition, that so many of us lack true empathy or compassion, or, perhaps less cynically, since we lack first hand experience, that until something happens TO us and affects us directly, intimately, personally, that we can be bothered to really care and take up a cause.

We see it all the time with celebs championing for a cause dear to them after losing a loved one from a condition, using their fame to promote a cause.

Worthy endeavors, but does it have to happen to us in order for us to be fazed by it?

Unfortunate if that is the case.

Grim. Sobering.

Moreover, aside from the selfish and ego-centric aspect of humanity with that is this—

If we don’t care, until it happens to us, then suicides will continue to happen, again and again and again.

Until eventually we will know someone who completes suicide. Or love someone whose live has been destroyed by suicide.

Mental health crises and mental illnesses are at alarming high rates. It is ever more pressing of an issue than ever before.

We would be naive to think that we are immune from being touched by the effects of suicide.