S1: What Do You Say About Suicide? Part 1(Stories of Suicide & Loss)

You know what people hate talking about? Dreams. Politics. Religion. 

Also: suicide. 

But it’s important that we talk about the hard stuff (and it’s kinda what we do here), so we asked you to talk to us about your experiences with suicidal ideation and suicide loss. 

For resources on suicide and mental health, nami.org has a wealth of great mental health resources. 

Text NAMI to 741741 for immediate support. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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The one misconception about suicide that I hate and I think that they feel like it’s a cop out, it’s the quickest and easiest way. And I feel like that’s such a bad way to think because suicide is a battle.

It’s a war in your brain that you have to fight every day. It’s a struggle to wake up. It’s a struggle to eat.

It’s a struggle to socialize. So the misconception about suicide, people just think it’s just like a, it’s like, oh, that’s what you do. Oh, that’s easy.

But no, when you’re living with all these tormented voices, what would you do?

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Terrible. Thanks for asking. If suicide is hard for you to talk about, you are completely alone.

It is a problem that only affects you. I’m kidding, obviously. It is a hard thing to talk about, suicide is.

I feel like everybody struggles with knowing the right thing to say, even people who shall remain nameless, but whose job it is to talk to people about hard things. I’m referring to Hans and myself. I’m referring to me, okay?

I didn’t know anything about suicide at all until I met my friend Mel, and Moe’s husband Andy had died by suicide a few months before my husband Aaron died of brain cancer. What do people like to ask you?

Lots of stuff about suicide, like how did he do it? Did he leave a letter? Did you see the signs?

Did he get out of bed every day? Was he a good husband? Because immediately they think that it’s some catatonic like.

Or like you saw and you just didn’t.

Yeah.

I mean, I was like, dude, we made, I made, deviled eggs in the morning and he critiqued them and told me how bad they were, because he’s a better cook than me. And then we danced in the kitchen.

And then he walked us to the car and he kicked the grass. He said he was going to mow the lawn and he walked me to the car and he gave me a hug, and he said, I’ll see you later, and I never saw him again. Ever.

Does that sound like someone who’s going to go and kill themselves? No, because we don’t know.

Now that suicide has touched my life, I have embraced my role as the world’s foremost expert. Also kidding, I am just a regular person who is still learning things every day.

And one of the things that I have been learning for the past few years is how to talk about suicide.

And I learned what I know, which is admittedly not much, but I learned it from Moe and from other suicide widows who are in our Hot Young Widows Club. You’re like the only person that I call and FaceTime cry to.

Oh, we are really ugly criers. Andy’s laughing wherever he is. He’s like, dude, you guys are really ugly.

I get so splotchy.

With Moe, I saw first hand just how differently our losses were treated. Like I saw that the things that people say when they’re trying to help can be really hurtful. And I saw that suicide is really hard for people to talk about.

And like most things that are hard to talk about, it really needs to be talked about. Suicide’s hard to talk about partially because when it’s completed, suicide is final. So, the stakes are really high.

There’s this added pressure that makes it feel like if you are not an expert, which most of us are not, then to even say anything about it at all is to walk a very thin tight rope. That makes sense, right?

No one wants to do or say the wrong thing when the risk is offending someone. And so we super duper don’t want to say or do the wrong thing when the risk is a death?

For a long time, the popular thought process was talking about suicide would lead to or encourage it, but the National Alliance on Mental Illness, aka NAMI, says, no, talk about it.

Talking about it is actually key to reducing stigma, and also lets people who are considering it talk about it and consider their options.

We know that there’s never just one answer or one perspective to a complicated issue, and we also know that this episode is not a representative sample of whose suicide effects.

I just thought, let’s just talk about this, this painful, confusing, fragile topic. Let’s just try our best and let’s do it together with other people who have experienced suicide directly.

We are fragile human beings, and we don’t know enough about mental health. We don’t know enough about suicide. I mean, I’ve been on the other side of it.

Me and Andrew had many conversations about suicide. I thought it was really selfish. I was like, they better do it where no one can see them because they just fuck up that person’s life for the rest of their life.

And now I look at it differently.

We do have some numbers to share with you. In 2016, the Center for Disease Control reported that 2.8 million US adults made suicide plans. 1.3 million attempted.

And 45,000 died from suicide. But those are just numbers, and it’s easy to hear those and think like, okay, that sounds bad, right? I don’t know.

That sounds like a lot of people, is it? It is. It’s a lot of people.

But each of those people is also an individual. It’s someone who experienced suicide on a personal level. And each person has their own take on it.

So here we go.

One thing that I wish people understood about suicide, from both my own experience and that of my brothers, and some survivors who I’ve spoken to, is that you don’t actually want to die.

You know, I didn’t really want to die. But I was really serious about trying to not feel the way I was feeling.

You just want the immeasurable and sort of unspeakable and debilitating pain or darkness or numbness to stop. And it might sound irrational, but it feels like the only way for that to happen is to stop living.

I had horse blinders on, you just see the bad stuff. It’s really hard to see the good stuff when you’re really focused on the bad stuff. I remember when I was going through it, and you have regrets.

Things you do different when they tell you about it. Text sent the night before. But I remember that when I was in that space, I couldn’t see all the love, because I was really focused on the not love.

Whatever black hole was sucking me in. I just, you get really myopic sometimes when you’re hurting. Break your arm, you can’t think about anything else, right?

So when your heart hurts, how can you, or head, or whatever that is, soul.

Thoughts of suicide is part of coping for me. It’s a habit that I’ve learned. It’s a coping strategy that I learned as a kid.

While it may not suit me now, I still do it.

Had attempted suicide when I was 14 years old. And, you know, there’s some days that I’m grateful that I was unsuccessful. But then there’s other days where I wish that it would have worked.

Because had I known the pain that I would be feeling at this point in my life, I would have probably tried again. Because I don’t know how to go through and survive most days.

So I think that I deal with more of a passive suicide ideation as opposed to an act of, like, ideation of suicide.

Because most, if not every day for the past, you know, year and three months, you know, I’ve just more or less thought, like, things would be easier if I didn’t exist. I don’t necessarily want to exist anymore.

Not necessarily die, but I just don’t want to exist. Like, life is hard enough as it is, but I just, I don’t know, man.

I don’t know.

There’s thinking of suicide, and there’s attempting suicide. And not everyone who thinks about it attempts it. So how do you get to the point where you actually attempt?

People who had attempted suicide described to us the moment of decision when they knew they were going to, and how a lot of them didn’t experience that tipping point as a choice.

Once your mind has been kind of down spiraling, you know, in that hole for a minute, it kind of like, it’s like a light switch. It’s like falling, it’s, you know, like you’re no longer on that edge anymore.

You just fall.

No one can help you. You can’t even help yourself.

It’s when you feel like you’ve run out of choices. It’s like something happens in your brain, and minute by minute your choices get narrower and narrower until there’s nothing left.

And you keep thinking about death, but you don’t want to think about death. So you think about life, but you can’t think about life. You can’t think.

You just can’t think. And so you lie in your bed crying and paralyzed, and the only thing that you can think of is the pills. And that gives some relief.

When suicide does come up in the national conversation, there’s this immediate connection that’s made to mental health disorders.

I would say most commonly depression, but there are others. Thinking about suicide is something that only happens if you’re severely depressed means that unless a person has this formal diagnosis of severe depression, they aren’t thinking about this.

They wouldn’t do it. And that’s not true.

It didn’t matter that I had a great school to go to, that I had great food, whatever. It didn’t matter because I didn’t want to live. And that goes to say as well with my brother, same situation with him.

I don’t think there was anything any of us could have said to him to help him realize that suicide was not his answer or not the answer. He was convinced that, and he had some delusions, paranoid delusions that there were police coming after him.

And so for him, it seemed the better alternative to commit suicide versus getting caught by the police.

Those were beliefs that were so deep in his head that even though on the outside he probably knew that they weren’t true, something in his head was telling him and making him hold on to these thoughts that weren’t true.

And so there honestly is nothing that you can say that’s going to help somebody.

Because when you have these beliefs that you rehearse to yourself over and over and over again, you can’t just change those with a simple sentence, a simple piece of advice. It doesn’t work that way because these are habits that are formed.

From 1999 through 2016, more than half the people who died by suicide did not have a known mental health condition.

I did see a really interesting report this summer from the CDC that looked at suicide rates and it finally attributed things like joblessness and physical health problems and relationship breakups to suicide. And these are the contributing factors.

I mean, it’s hopelessness. It’s living in a society with great inequality and a lot of people don’t know what the next six months holds for them. They’ve had it rough.

Run out of hope and it’s not irrational to think of suicide.

That CDC study reveals that of all the states in the US, half of them had more than 30% increases in suicide rates between 1999 and 2016. And only one state, Nevada, experienced a decrease in the number of suicides. And it was only a 1% decrease.

And this happened across all genders, all racial and ethnic groups, all urbanization levels. But it’s important to stress that it’s not like there’s a single event that causes suicide.

A job loss, a divorce, bad grades, all those things alone, they’re hard, but they’re almost never the sole reason for suicide. But each of those things can be the tip of an iceberg.

There’s so many different things that could trigger your suicidal thoughts or trigger your depression and anxiety, which trigger your suicidal thoughts.

Like, there’s no handbook, there’s no column chart, nice Excel sheet that explains what are the triggers and what to do. And, you know, your mind just goes there.

The last thing that I remember that was like a trigger for me was looking at a baby picture and thinking how much I wanted my parents to be proud of that little baby, yet what a mess I had made of my life.

I felt like the world was against me and that led to thinking that everyone I had touched would be better off without me.

And I remember that feeling like it was a wholly original thought and it so overwhelmed me that once I went there it was like being at the top of a roller coaster knowing I could only head down without a modicum of control.

And then I passed out for over 24 hours and when I woke I called 911 to report in like the good girl I was raised to be.

So in 2016, 45,000 people died by suicide. What do we say when it happens? An easier place for us to start is what not to say.

People say like, oh, it’s a selfish act.

Suicide was the most selfish thing anyone has ever done.

You know, I don’t understand why she would do this.

She had it all, or she had the best life possible. Or she had the best marriage, she had the best children, she had the best house, etc.

Because of them talking back and me not supporting him, he thought to himself, what the heck? I might as well just kill myself.

Selfish or they don’t understand the pain they would cause other people.

You know, you’re just passing on the pain to other people. How could they do this to us?

Selfish.

But the suicidal person doesn’t think that way. The suicidal person really truly believes that the world is better off without them and that they are doing their loved ones a favor. They’re doing an act of kindness.

They’re relieving their loved ones of pain. They’re relieving their loved ones of their burden. This is a favor.

This is an act of kindness and love towards them.

It feels selfish to the survivors and I understand that. But when you’re in it, you think it’s actually selfless.

Um, I used to think to myself that, yes, you know, the people that care about me will grieve and it will hurt them and, you know, damage my mother and all of those things.

But I also felt like it would be a relief for them so that they wouldn’t have to… so that they wouldn’t have to continue loving someone who was, in every way, a disappointment, and that it would remove the hurt that my existence caused.

My son fought a really good fight for two years, trying to battle severe depression and ideations. We got him all the help we could, and he worked so hard. He was an active participant in his treatment.

He was willing to get help. He wanted help. He tried.

His bravery really amazes me. But I think he reached a point. And what I believe is that he just could no longer imagine having a quality of life that was worth all the fight, that was worth the battle.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever said this part out loud before, but sometimes I think that the only thing selfish about his suicide is me, and wishing that he was still here, and still fighting. I mean, what if he wouldn’t have gotten better?

I hoped and prayed every single day that he would. But what if instead he had lived a long life that was absent of joy, and not being able to receive love? Is that what I would have wanted for him?

Realizing the impact that suicide has, it’s a ripple.

And even though to this day, I still experience suicidal ideation, I know that I can’t do that because I’ve seen firsthand what it does to a family. And maybe that method of guilt doesn’t work on other people, but for me, it’s worked.

We could never do that to the people that we love. And it’s just terrible. You release your own pain.

So my 31 year old cousin killed himself about two months ago.

One of the rabbis at his funeral said, depression is the cancer of the soul, and that’s what it is. It’s an illness.

Depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety. It is so exhausting just to look okay and to look like you have your shit together. It’s not a selfish thing to do.

And it could happen to anyone.

When you’re experiencing suicidal ideation, when you’re so low that the world around you doesn’t seem to have color, that it’s not bright, that you’re just going through the motions, that you’re having a hard time getting out of bed, you’re having a

hard time doing anything for yourself, and the voices in your head are so, so mean. Suicide is a way out.

My husband was not selfish.

No one who knew him would have said that about him.

He was kind.

He was always generous.

He always wanted to do the right thing.

And I battle myself with those thoughts when I’m not feeling suicidal, how it is kind of selfish. And then I stop and I think, no, it’s not selfish. I’m in pain and I don’t know how to get the pain to stop in that moment.

And so I almost feel like it’s selfless to end the pain because then I don’t have to burden other people with my crap.

I wish that they understood it was the most unselfish thing that a person struggling with mental illness could do.

It’s usually the people they’re leaving behind, that they think about most in their final moments and in their final days, that the weight of those that they’re going to leave behind is what’s on their mind. They don’t do it out of selfishness.

It’s done out of pain.

Let’s use this moment to take a little break, and then when we come back, we’ll get back. We’ll get back, we’ll be back.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re a junkie or a father, you are a person that died. It doesn’t, you’re still a person. People just, you’re just not human, when it’s suicide, you’re not human no more.

They don’t do a lot of stuff to see when time of death is. They’re just like, well, it’s suicide. Who cares about him?

Another one, bye. But I did have them do a blood workup, because for me, I was like, my husband must be on secret drugs. There’s no way he could do this.

You know, like, this is not him. I didn’t understand a lot about suicide. And I understand that anyone can be there or do that.

Now I understand more of it. But I mean, I had a full blood workup done on him. They didn’t find anything, nothing, not even beer, like nothing, just he was completely himself, but not really.

What do you understand about suicide now?

Well, I know that anyone can go there.

There’s a lot of blame and anger in the wake of a suicide, and even in the wake of an attempt.

In looking for why, why did this happen? People from the outside, what they’re doing is they’re just grasping for order, for cause, for blame to what happened. Because when you’re in pain, you want a reason, you want something to point to.

And if it’s someone’s fault or something’s fault, then at least you can feel angry instead of feeling devastated.

But aside from this fire hose of blame and anger, which happens after a lot of kinds of deaths and a lot of kinds of tragedies, there’s this especially awful thing that happens around suicide, where the way a person dies becomes a reason to respect

them less, or a way to sort of minimize their death or their attempt at dying. And unsurprisingly and also really crappily, this happens from a religious perspective often.

I was sitting at the cafeteria table with an acquaintance that I didn’t know very well. We went to school together at a very conservative university, a religious school, and I was just making small talk, how was your day?

And he said that he just got back from a family member’s funeral. And I said, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry for your loss. And he said, Oh, don’t be, it’s no big deal.

This person committed suicide. So, you know, and then he gestured with his hand, like down, like pointing down, as though to indicate this person’s in hell in a really lighthearted way.

And it just broke my heart just over the fact that this person was being so nonchalant with me about another person’s life, that he could truly believe this person was in hell and be completely unfazed by it.

And then to believe that his family didn’t deserve sympathy because they had died at their own hand.

When I got older and I told people that I contemplate suicide, they’re like, why? You’re going straight to hell because I grew up around a lot of church people.

One of the most difficult things that I had to hear while I was grieving was from my family and friends who told me that I just needed to get over it.

And another thing was my boyfriend at the time continued to go on and on about how anyone who commits suicide is going to hell because committing suicide is a sin.

Now, traditional interpretations of all five of the major world religions consider most forms of suicide to be a horrific mortal sin that either destroys or damns your eternal soul.

But that is not a helpful thing to bring up to someone who is thinking about or just survived a suicide attempt or their families. And in case you were wondering, what would Jesus do?

The answer is not really, really come down hard on a person who is suffering. Just personally don’t think that’s how he would handle it. But having a religion doesn’t make you immune to suicide.

Suicide seemed to be the only way out of the despair that I was feeling.

And I thought, I love Jesus and I’m suffering. So why would I stay here? And why wouldn’t Jesus dance when I walked through those gates?

No matter how I got there, depression and anxiety and suicidal thoughts and ideation hit people who love Jesus just as hard as people who don’t love Jesus or people who have different beliefs in other ways of living their lives in a religious

capacity. I don’t walk around thinking, you know, Jesus is going to cure my pain. No, it doesn’t. That doesn’t help because in my mind, the only thing I want to do is I want to be in heaven with God.

And the only way to do that is to do it on my own because God apparently has other plans and I’m still here.

Sometimes, having this job makes me feel like people are great, okay? People are at least maybe not great, but doing their best. And then also, sometimes at this job, I hear things and I think people are the worst.

Bring on a comet that kills only humans, and let’s let Shih Tzu’s run the world, okay? Just hand over the planet to small bearded dogs with long torsos. They’ll do a better job.

It happened in high school, and a girl who was in the therapy group I was in tried to jump in front of a train, in front of everybody.

And it was a big school, so we all found out very quickly. And I remember I was in Texas when it happened. I was on a trip with my family, and I found out because, you know, news travels fast with our school.

And I just broke down, and I started crying. And I ran out of the restaurant we were in, and my mom came running after me. She was like, you’re embarrassing us.

Like, how could you act like this? You need to get yourself together. And I sat in the car, and I’m like, you don’t understand.

This girl, I know, just attempted suicide. And she’d known about this girl before, and she knew she had problems. And immediately she was like, well, she’s in that therapy group with you, right?

She’s just a troubled girl. And that was just the last thing I needed to hear, to hear that a friend had tried to kill herself. And I think it got chalked up to the fact that she was a teenage girl, therefore she’s troubled, therefore she’s hormonal.

You know, she’s unstable because she’s 15. And I think if it had been like, oh, I just found out this girl got diagnosed with cancer, or I just found out this girl broke every bone in her body, it would have been a much different reaction.

A few things about this. Everyone has hormones, literally everyone, boys, girls, men, women, everyone in between. We’re all full of hormones.

It’s not like just teenage girls have them. Also, everyone has troubles, everyone has problems. Also, I’ve said this before, but I think you can’t say it enough.

Talking is optional. At any point, you could just not say, oh, this girl had problems, or typical teenage girl, blowing everything out of proportion, stepping in front of a train. Like, it’s, it’s very minimizing.

And I also think, I really have to think that it’s just a way for people to try to put distance between themselves and what happened.

Like, people say things like that, like, oh, she had problems, or oh, she’s probably hormonal, because they just want to believe that the teenage girl in their life, you know, their niece could never do this, their daughter could never do this, they

could never do this. Generally, especially here in the United States of America, people really value optimism and positivity in making lemons out of lemonade, which was a typo, but I kept it, because when you are suicidal, the idea of seeing the

People often say things like, well, at least you have a roof over your head, or at least you don’t have a terminal illness.

Well, at least you don’t have cancer, at least you haven’t lost a child. There’s people in the world that have it worse than you.

Don’t get stressed out about your bills, or don’t get stressed out about this. Don’t get stressed.

These are the worst things to say to someone who suffers from depression. Minimizing how I feel because I’m fortunate, or more fortunate than others, does not negate the fact that I would rather be dead than alive.

I don’t know if it’s my fault for not being open and honest with them about how I feel every day. It doesn’t help when you’re so stressed out that you can barely breathe to hear that, oh, don’t stress out, or don’t be anxious.

Don’t, why are you so sad all the time? It doesn’t, none of that helps.

I recognize now that what people are trying to do is give you perspective and tell you that your life is worth while.

But what it actually does is tell a suicidal person who already feels like their life is not worth living, that they are also ungrateful and selfish. It’s quite a destructive thing and it just makes you feel worse.

It’s like, well, if I’m so ungrateful for what I have, why am I here?

One thing I want people to know about suicide and things about minimizing people who take their own lives like that is they are not the way they die.

But the things I want to remember about my brother are how when he was a kid, he was already obsessed with power tools and was just loud and fun and so loved by everybody else. And was a six foot six, you know, gift ball.

So suicide is a way people die, but it is not what defines them.

Suicide is a way of people dying, but it’s not what defines them. Yes, I mean, do any of us want to be defined by our death? Unless it was extremely heroic, I would say not.

I don’t want my husband Aaron to be his brain cancer any more than Moe wants Andy to be his suicide. But for Moe, it’s especially important that Andy not be defined by his death because of everything you just heard.

Because when people hear that Andy died by suicide, they do think things like, oh, how could he do that to you? Oh, how dare he?

I have seen with my own eyes how differently people react to my husband, who died of brain cancer and Moe’s husband, who died by suicide. But they were both sick, they were both suffering. Neither of them deserved it.

They’re both missed, and they are both so loved. Still, nearly four years later.

I hope he wasn’t in pain when he died. You know what’s the hardest part too about losing your husband to suicide? Is that he’s a wonderful person, but he died thinking he was a loser.

Like, he died thinking he was a loser. And he was the furthest thing away from a loser. Was everything perfect all the time?

No, we fought about stupid crap, like doing the dishes and cleaning the car. And we had our trying times as a couple, but we’re a pretty good team. We were a fabulous team, and mostly because he made us a fabulous team.

I would have given up a long time ago, because I’m a quitter. And he is not, like he’s like, you just need to keep trying, you know? He’s like, I’m gonna be married to you for the rest of my life.

I’m never gonna, you know, we’re gonna be together forever. And he’d always say, you’re gonna die before me because you smoked longer.

And he’s like, and you know, it’s just, it’s hard to think that, like a wonderful human being, who has helped so many people, he’s helped so many people, that he, if he was gonna have to do it this way, this sounds really morbid.

But if he was gonna have, this is how it had to be. I wish I was holding his hand when he did it. It really hurts that he was all by himself, in the woods, thinking he was a loser.

And he did all that, he did it himself. And if you met him, you’d be like, oh my God, I can’t even imagine. I mean, I still say I can’t imagine.

And that if my husband died in a different way, I would want to tell him how much I love him, or like, you know, like, you’re not a loser. You’re amazing. I can’t believe that, you know, like, all these things, you know.

Everyone who dies by suicide leaves someone, or many someones, who hurt.

And those hurt people are left to try to pick up all the pieces and field all the questions. They end up as the spokespeople for their dead loved one who died of something that people are afraid of and something that people don’t understand.

And then they get asked by everyone.

How could the person that was closest to you, how did you not know? How did I not know that he was struggling so badly? And it stuck with me for a very, very long time.

I’m sure he felt like he was protecting me and all of us who loved and cared.

I did lose a friend a few years ago to suicide. And I think one of the things that was hardest for me about it was when someone said to me, well, you know, she had been sick for a long time.

Like you should have been prepared for her to kill herself because she was ill. It just made me feel like they were telling me that I should have seen it coming or I should have had, you know, an expectation. And does it matter if somebody is ill?

Like, are you supposed to be prepared for it? And if you are prepared for it, does that mean it’s supposed to hurt less?

Here’s the thing that question how didn’t you know or so were there signs? I know that it comes from the same place as the other things people say, things like, oh, they were troubled or selfish.

It’s all just a mode of self-preservation, of trying to make something chaotic seem controllable. But when you survive the suicide of someone you love, you already feel bad enough as it is.

You don’t need anyone to help you feel like you didn’t do enough. It doesn’t matter if a million people tell you that it isn’t your fault, because the internal guilt machine that lives inside your brain has already flipped on.

We survivors are constantly asking why, and why haunts us for a very long time. We can’t stop wondering how we might have prevented the loss of our loved one. There are never any clear answers.

What I wish people knew most about suicide is the amount of guilt that is left on the family members that survived them and how it’ll never go away, and we’ll always feel guilty about not trying as hard or as we could have or any of those things.

And there really are people in this world who blame us. I know it’s a very silent blame, but they wish we did more.

We only hear about, you know, the warning signs. How do you prevent suicide? And I think those things are awesome, and I don’t think those things should go away.

And I do think they can save lives. I 100% think we need to keep those things. However, for someone who’s lost someone very close to them to suicide, it can add to that guilt and that shame that you feel.

Because I live every single day of my life thinking about what I could have done. How could I have prevented his suicide? So when I see those things, it just reminds me that I did not prevent his suicide.

This is a very complicated topic, we know.

It’s hard to know what to say or what not to say because the stakes are high and because everyone is an individual.

The one thing we know that we can take away from this is contradiction and that there are as many ways of dealing with and understanding suicide as there are people struggling with it and its effects.

There’s no magic word, there’s no magic thought, there’s no magic therapy technique we just haven’t found yet because magic is real, but we’re all muggles.

Everyone is a delicate flower who needs a response that meets them and their situation where they are.

We make this podcast not because we have all the answers, but because we know that it’s helpful to have things out in the world that people can react to, that they can point to and say, hey, this thing I was having a hard time talking about, it felt

Look, you know, if this is something that you want to do at the end of the day, as much as we try, no one will be able to stop you.

I want people to know that suicide is preventable.

So what can we say about that last part, about preventing suicide?

What are those warning signs? And what has actually helped people in preventing suicide? Next week, we will hear about what people who survived their suicide attempt or are the survivors of a loved one’s suicide felt was actually helpful.

I’m Nora McInerny. This is Terrible, Thanks for Asking. This episode comes with some big thank yous that I hope you will listen to.

First of all, Mo Richardson, I love you, and I hate how we know each other, and I also love you so much, and just thank you for always sharing yourself and Andy with me. Thank you to all of the listeners who participated in this episode.

Britt and Michelle and Lexi and Jackie and Amy and Maya, and another Maya and Heather and Nick and Brianna, or Brianna, you know what, you’re Brianna now.

Crystal and Amanda, Cassie, Jesse, AN., Marsha, Judy, Angelique, Blair, Mary, Libby, Courtney, Julie, Lauren, Tara, Victoria, and Nikita. Thank you. Our senior producer is Hans Butow.

Our producer is Marcel Malekebu. Hannah Meacock-Ross is everything else on our team. Emma and Taylor, they’re interns here, so I really just got the first names.

They helped on this episode and they were both very insightful, and I hope their professors hear this. They got straight A’s on their first day of their internship. Our theme music is by Joffrey Wilson.

We are a production of American Public Media, APM.