S1: What Do You Say About Suicide? Part 2(Stories of Suicide & Loss)

In the last episode, we heard from people who had ideated and/or survived their own suicide attempts, as well as people who had survived a loved one’s suicide. They told us about all the unhelpful and hurtful things that people had said or done. 

But there ARE things that people can do and say that ARE helpful, and in this episode, we dive into it. 

If you’re looking for resources on suicide, here are some good places to start: 

Be The One To – https://www.bethe1to.com

National Alliance on Mental Illness – https://www.nami.org

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline – https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention – afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics  

Center for Disease Control – https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/suicide

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

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I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Terrible.

Thanks for asking. This episode is the second part of a two-part series about suicide, because September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, but every day can be National Suicide Prevention Awareness Day.

So if you’re listening to this episode and it’s not September, good. Great. That’s fine.

Also, why didn’t you listen to it sooner? I find that personally upsetting. That’s okay.

Last week, we heard from people who had ideated and or survived their own suicide attempts and from people who had survived a loved one’s suicide.

And they told us about all of the unhelpful or frankly hurtful things that people had said or done afterward. But, you know, life is about balance and there are things that are helpful. So that’s what we’re focusing on this episode.

Right here, right now. It’s hard to understand things that you haven’t experienced before. I think we all know that.

You can describe love to someone, right? But until you fall in love, you’re like, okay, I guess that sounds nice. You can describe what fire feels like, but until you put your hand in it, you don’t know what it feels like to burn.

And if you haven’t been deeply depressed, if you haven’t been suicidal, you just don’t know. And honestly, that’s okay to say. It’s okay to say that you don’t understand something.

It’s okay to say that you haven’t been there. Sometimes I think that the hidden key to empathy is just humility and curiosity. It’s just saying, hmm, I don’t get that.

Tell me more.

Some people say you make your own happiness in the world, but I honestly think that’s bullshit because you can have the best life and still be consumed with depression and not want to live.

So this episode is a way to help build empathy for something you may not understand or may not have experienced. And it’s a way for people who have experienced these things to say, hey, for me, it felt like this.

Depression is this evil monster that wraps itself around people. And, you know, it makes them, they don’t want to talk about it. It wants to envelope them in this monster that it becomes and it controls them.

And it keeps them sick. It doesn’t want them to communicate. It does not want them to reach out.

This episode is not a BuzzFeed article, like, five things to say to a suicidal person that will 100% work.

Our legal department said no. And also, we didn’t try because we wanted to hear from you, from people who listen to this show and have been there.

And what you told us and then what we’re telling you now is that there is no perfect thing to say, or if there is, it’s so specific to the person and the situation that you’re not going to find it by Googling or listening to a podcast, because they

You, you’re not crazy for having these thoughts.

You’re not insane. You’re not psychotic.

It’s okay to feel this way. It’s okay to be so just fatigued and depressed that you can’t get out of bed every day.

No one else is going to ever love you if you don’t love you.

You’ve been through trauma and it makes sense that you’re having these thoughts. I mean, everything you’ve been through.

You can’t go on like this. It’s okay. It’s okay that you’re not okay.

And for me, I was at first like, are you kidding me?

Like, don’t talk to me about that. Like, but I just knew that I had to get help. I had to get somebody to help me because I wanted to love me.

You know, just just validating that I’m not being dramatic.

So that was one of the biggest things growing up is my parents always called me dramatic or being a drama queen if I showed any kind of emotion.

So being validated for my feelings and reactions was the most helpful thing anyone has really done for me since then. And I’m in a much better place now.

There might not be magic, perfect words to say, but there are things you can do. There’s this great website called bethe1to.com. That’s B-E-T-H-E, numeral one, T-O, .com, easier to read than to hear.

And they have five things that anyone can do if someone is suicidal. Any one can be the one to do, get it? It actually took me a while to get it.

The website is made by experts, and a lot of what they suggest people do fit right into what our listeners were saying.

So we’re going to go through them, and also through the submissions that we got from listeners, knowing that resources are just a starting place, because every situation, every person is so unique.

Hans and I were talking about how, okay, in grade school, here in the US., you learn stop, drop and roll.

Stop, drop and roll.

Those three words that they taught us.

Because people burn too.

It’s very memorable, but I don’t know how helpful it’ll be until I’m actually on fire. Like, I’ll have to remember to do it. I’ll have to hope that it’s not windy outside.

And I’ll have to hope that I don’t roll into, like, a puddle of gasoline. There’s just, there’s always a lot of variables. So it’s just a place to start.

And we have to start somewhere.

Just ask.

And the place to start goes against all of our instincts as people who are afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing. Because what if you say or do the wrong thing? And the result is that this person attempts suicide.

I volunteer as a crisis counselor on a text line.

So rather than waiting for the caller to bring up suicide, we are told to just talk about it. Always ask if someone’s feeling suicidal. Always bring it up.

They had over 75 million messages to analyze. And it became clear that not only is mentioning suicide not a trigger, it actually opens a doorway and normalizes the conversation for someone having suicidal thoughts.

Step one is just ask. Yeah, just opening up that conversation without judgment. It lets a person who might be thinking about suicide answer a yes or no question instead of having to bring the topic up themselves.

Because bringing it up can mean opening yourself up to judgment.

Just because I’m feeling these things and thinking these things doesn’t mean I’m crazy. It doesn’t mean I’m actually going to do it. Because from 12 years old to 26, I wanted to die with every fiber of my being.

And I’m 29 now and I’m still here.

There’s a reason why that’s so important. I mean, why it’s step one. That you be the person to ask.

Just think about not even the worst day of your life. Think about a pretty stressful day. Think about a hard day.

A day when you felt so overwhelmed and you just thought to yourself, like, I don’t even know what to do with myself right now or where to start. And then imagine feeling that times like a billion.

That’s why it’s so important to ask the question, because a person who is suicidal may not even be able to just say those words out loud. Asking the question is important and equally as important is what you do right after, which is listen.

You don’t have to say anything profound. You don’t have to give me cliches and sayings and all that. The most helpful thing is just to listen.

Don’t try and tell me how many people love me or ask me why I feel this way or get mad at me.

Just understand it or pretend to. The most helpful moments for me when I share these things with people are just to listen, not to necessarily try and help me right away. Just say okay and just listen.

Someone who is on the brink of suicide feels like they are not worthy of life.

And so, you know, being in that space is often accompanied by deep shame. And I guess I just want people to know that there is absolutely no shame in asking for help.

And we need to create these shame free spaces probably now more urgently than ever and so this the simple act of something like listening and holding space for someone to show up exactly as they are can be a lifeline.

So, if you’ve asked someone, are you thinking about suicide and they have said yes, I have been thinking about suicide. It’s okay to ask questions, questions like, how would you do it? When do you have a plan?

Have you done anything yet? Because to keep someone safe, you need to know how close they are to action. And if you can, to put some distance between the plan and the action itself.

Someone checking on me at the right time, sometimes it would just like, there would just be for whatever reason, a distraction, an extra moment, a beat, to sort of take that fire out of the moment, just dilute the desperation, just a tiny bit that I

was willing to wait a little bit longer. And then some people, they don’t get that. They don’t get that moment. They don’t get the beat.

They don’t have someone check on them at the right time. And just like that, it’s over. And it wasn’t because they didn’t truly in themselves, the not sick part of themselves want to live enough.

It was just because that sick part got lucky and got what it wanted.

And then what?

Just be there for them.

Just be there? Yeah. Yes.

Yeah.

Think about it this way.

Sometimes, what people need is a person who’s willing to just sit in the dark with them. Someone who won’t run from their pain. And most of us are not mental health professionals or crisis counselors, myself included.

And that is what makes even the word suicide so uncomfortable. The stakes are really high. What will we do to save this person?

Just being there is important because one of our reflexes here in the Midwestern part of America, at least, is to say, let me know how I can help or let me know if you need anything. And just saying those words is not the same as doing something.

Let me know if you need anything.

What can we do to make it better for you? So, if I knew the answer to that, I would surely do it or I ask for help doing it.

I had absolutely no clue what I needed. I had no idea what I needed and I didn’t even know where to go from, where do you go from here?

If I’m sharing my story, it doesn’t mean that I’m your project.

Saying, let me know how I can help or let me know if I can do anything, those are nice things to say. But nice is not always helpful.

Because if a person isn’t able to see themselves or their situation or their future with any sort of clarity, if everything feels dark and heavy and hopeless, how would they possibly know what they need from another person?

And do they really need another thing to add to the to-do list? So number three is not just be there, but like really there. It’s not convincing them of anything.

It’s not talking them out of anything. Again, it’s listening. It’s small things.

Not everything is a big grand gesture. Being there doesn’t mean that you handcuff yourself to this person, and then you never leave them alone, even for a moment, and you always dress alike, and wear matching BFF necklaces, get matching tattoos.

I don’t, can you tell I don’t have a lot of close friends? I’m like, what do people do with one another? What are activities they do?

Tattoos?

That’s it.

Being there can just be being there however you can be there.

After my suicide, my whole family ignored me. And when I wasn’t getting what I needed for my family, I went to my friends and they still didn’t reciprocate what I needed. So I kind of just shut down and closed that part up.

So finally when people expressed to me that they cared, it kind of changed my perspective a little bit.

First and foremost, just be there for them. I was so afraid that if I shared something like this, like I was contemplating suicide, that they would just freak out and call 911. And she didn’t.

She responded calmly and she said, I think it’s important that you know that this doesn’t define you, even though it feels that way. And sometimes we have a bad day and it all becomes too much.

But try not to forget that pain isn’t permanent and the things telling you that cutting is going to fix it or distract you or even make you feel like you can finally control something aren’t stronger than you are.

And that, I honestly, I broke down in tears from that because it was everything that I needed to hear at that moment and it really saved my life.

My friend constantly reassured me that she loves me and she’s here for me day or night and she said you are worth so much more than what you are feeling right now. And she said you’re going to be okay.

And those words meant more to me than anything I have ever heard from anyone else. Depression lies a lot and so no matter what people said you’re okay, you have a good life, it’ll be fine. You know, I couldn’t believe it.

So it was important sometimes to just hear it over and over again.

When you’re in that state of mind, you don’t feel like lots of people love you. And even if you do feel that they do, you feel like a burden on those people who love you. And it’s hard enough to reach out to anyone.

But to have them tell you that lots of people love you and that they’d be disappointed in you, or be sad if you died is the worst possible thing you can hear because it’s like, I can’t satisfy people or make them happy when I’m alive.

I’m nothing but a disappointment when I’m alive and I’m nothing but a disappointment if I’m dead too. So, even now, years later, when I get the occasional suicidal thought, anytime someone says that to me, I’m like, stop.

Don’t do that because you’re making me feel like I can do nothing right and I get the intention, but it doesn’t do anything.

The most hopeful thing I think anyone has foretold me was that they still loved me, which was so astonishingly amazing because I felt that I wasn’t deserving of love after trying to do this.

Hearing things like how much pain people would be in when, if I ever did something like that, definitely doesn’t help because at the moment of feeling like suicide is my only way out of the pain I’m feeling, I don’t give two craps about the pain

anybody else is going to feel if I do it. Hearing how much pain other people are going to be in because of you does not make you want to stop your pain any less.

The thing that helped was that my friend said, you could end up in a wheelchair or having seizures. And then that’s when I realized the seriousness of the situation, how much I didn’t really want to die.

We’ll be back. And we’re back. Connection is about more than just the moment and more than just yourself.

It’s helping a person find those other supports that create a safety net. That could be a mental health professional, a lifeline, a list of people they know that they can turn to if they feel suicidal again.

It’s recognizing that you are not a superhero, no offense, that you are not the only person who can help.

You have to de-stigmatize the getting better journey.

If that means, you know, taking medication, if that means seeing a therapist regularly, if that means cutting toxic people out of your life, all of the hard things that it takes for someone with a mental illness to live a mentally well life, I wish

Hi, so I’m 20 years old now, but when I was 14, I ended up in the hospital because I tried to overdose on a bunch of Tylenol before school.

And it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I got the best advice that anyone had given. And I’m sure I’d gotten it before, but I needed to be ready to hear it.

And that was I read on Twitter somewhere that getting involved was what would save you, was what could pull yourself out of it. And I know it doesn’t work for everyone because being involved in things can still be so isolating. But I got involved.

I joined a bunch of clubs.

I made new friends, which seemed impossible because my graduating class was 60 people, but it turned out that there were these wonderful, amazing people who I’d never thought would even give me the time of day because I never gave myself a chance to

We heard over and over in nearly every submission we received that suicide is not a blip on the radar for most people.

We heard that these thoughts, that feeling is something that can and often does return, which is probably why step five is so important.

Follow up.

Follow up. Doesn’t have to be anything big and fancy. Just remind people that you are there and that you give a crap about them.

It’s a step that is on going because for a lot of people, being suicidal isn’t just a thing that they get over.

We will always be suicidal in some small way deep down. That’s a part of our lives. Like once you think like that, it’s like once I thought that thought the first time, I’ve never not thought about it.

I haven’t always been like, oh, let me go do it. But that was always in the back of my mind, like this is an option, even though I know it’s not. It’s just always there, always hiding.

You’re never really over it.

It’s been a few months before I hurt myself, but I still think about it. I just don’t do it.

I still have horrible days. I still have the worst days. I’m going through a tumultuous of worst days right now.

But I’m choosing to be happy, and I’m choosing to think beyond my pain. Every day, I pull the covers back, and I’m choosing to wake up, and I’m choosing to get out of bed, and I’m choosing to fight.

And I would tell anyone that’s listening, as a woman who is supposed to be emotional, let your emotions happen. Let your tears fall. Be weak, be vulnerable, be sad.

But at the end of the day, if you make it to the moon, if you see it, you’ve done such a good job. And I congratulate you. I’m happy for you that you’re still here.

And just be present and be here. And you never know who you’re impacting by just being here.

Not everything fits into a five steps list. We are people, and a lot of us are just living moment to moment, getting through each day by focusing on small things.

Some things that did help though, when especially when I was in the moment, ready to go take some sort of action, was to remind myself that I don’t need a good reason to not die, I just need a reason.

So, the fact that my divorce isn’t final for another month is a good enough reason. The fact that there’s no one here to feed my pet is a good enough reason.

The fact that it just seems like a hassle today to prepare and make it happen, it’s a reason.

None of these reasons are great, none of these reasons will keep me around forever, but they get me through that moment, that sort of make-or-break moment when I’m ready to take action.

We rescued a little dog who was very abused and neglected, and she became my will to live. She saved me.

The only thing for me to not proceed is that I couldn’t do that to my dog or my mom. Because I know that things are so not very good right now. And sometimes I can’t think of another way to adjust them or fix them or…

To find a way back to the person that I used to be, but I can’t imagine putting my mom through that, or for my poor little dog to just not know what happened to me.

The most helpful thing I’ve ever been told was just in a session with one of my therapists. And I was feeling very down. I had gotten sick physically.

And I told her I was thinking about suicide again. And she said, I’d really miss you. I think that was taboo in the mental health world.

Like, we were talking about a time in which I could be gone and she would be missing me. But she didn’t treat it like a crisis that deserved a police response or an emergency medicine response.

She just dealt with me like a person and said, I’d really miss you if you were gone. And I just thought I’d really miss her too if anything happened to her. And that kept me going.

My best friend since the age of four, she had been like a sister, kind of like the one you fight against.

And, you know, just we grew up together. I’ve actually known her longer than my actual sister. But, you know, she killed herself in late June of 2009.

And that, poof, that’s like a planet destroyer. Because, you know, there’s just so much of my life that, like, no one else really knew. And she was gone, and we had both had some struggles with this previously.

And it got her that scared the crap out of me. So, I have a beautiful toddler named after my best friend. I know that there’s probably some people who hasn’t raised high-prize about that, you know, cursed name or something.

And I just think that my friend was such a lovely human, you know. Hopefully, the curse is that my daughter is just as lovely, and maybe I can do more to help my daughter kind of through some of the stuff that comes.

Maybe going through my experience, you know, I think very consciously about how I talk to her.

There was a girl in one of my group therapy sessions who didn’t come in one week, and then the next week we found out she’d committed suicide.

And I just, I remember panicking, because the whole point of group is that people come in and say, you know, things aren’t going well, and we talk it, we all talk it through.

And I felt like she was supposed to come in and tell us and we could talk it through, but she couldn’t come in because she wasn’t there anymore.

And it made me realize, you know, that as long as you can push through another day, there’s always potential, there’s always the potential that it can be talked through, that things can be worked out.

And with suicide, you know, your suffering will end, but all the potential will be completely gone, the potential for talking it through, the potential for getting better. I am privileged. I have private health care.

I have been able to get the help I need. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve attempted suicide because they sometimes, they blur, but it’s, it’s several.

And if the illness had succeeded, I would have lost the potential for this moment right now to be sitting in my room on a sunny day, my budgies who won’t shut up in the background with my fat cat drooling next to me. And it’s a little moment.

It’s not remarkable, but it’s pleasant. And I would have never had this moment, if not for holding on to the fact that living has potential. And as long as you hold on, there is potential.

That’s it. The word potential.

There’s something that I really want to say, and that weighs on me, that I think about all the time. It is that awareness is so important, compassion, so important.

All five of these steps, the work people do in outreach and research and answering phones, so important.

But all the compassion and awareness in the world, all the de-stigmatizing, is not going to mean a crap if people don’t have access to mental health care.

It means nothing when it costs hundreds of dollars out of your own pocket to go see a therapist or a psychiatrist or a psychologist when they aren’t taking new patients, when it’s out of network or then it’s in network. It’s very complicated.

It doesn’t matter how accepting your friends and family are of your issue, if you don’t have access to the care that could help your issue.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, nearly half of the 60 million adults and children living with mental health conditions in the US go without any treatment.

According to Mental Health America, over 6.3 million adults with a mental illness remain uninsured. See a connection anywhere?

And according to me, a person of pretty sizable privilege who has health insurance and who doesn’t see her therapist as often as she should because, holy crap, it is so much money, even though I’m in network. That’s all totally unacceptable.

And often the way that our system here in America treats people in crisis is also unacceptable.

I’m in my 30s and I have dealt with suicidal thoughts for most of my life. I’ve been hospitalized twice, once when I was 17 and once in my early 20s when I called a crisis hotline.

The person on the other end didn’t think I was okay, so she called the cops. The cops would not take no for an answer and insisted I go to the ER. And they took me to the psych ward.

It was three days but until I could see a doctor just because it was a three day weekend. And I guess things were so bad that I couldn’t leave, but not bad enough that they call somebody to, who was qualified to evaluate my condition.

Ever since then, I’ve had a lot of difficulty talking to mental health professionals at all levels about suicide. And I’m worried that if I ever say I’m feeling suicidal, someone’s just going to call the police again.

And then I’ll have to deal with the hospitals and all the choices that are taken away from you once you’re institutionalized. And you’re just stuck there with a lot of, a lot of worry about just who’s in charge.

I know that there’s a difference between mental health and mental illness, and not all suicides are a result of mental illness. And I also know that everyone can benefit from and deserves access to mental health care.

I don’t know where to wrap this up, except that health insurance is a scam, our health industry is trash. Just, I don’t have enough inflammatory remarks to make. And we all deserve way better than what we have here now.

Actually, I do know how to wrap this up. It’s to repeat something important. We are not superheroes.

Aside from Serena Williams and Chrissy Teigen, the rest of us are just people. We are just people who love and care and feel hurt and scared. People who want to be people with the other people in our lives.

So the best thing any of us can do when we’re faced with this demon of suicide is to just be a person and to remember that you were only a person. You might not be able to save someone. You might not be able to find the right thing to say.

But you should try. I feel strongly that our purpose on this earth is not to try to be perfect. It’s just to try, just to do our best for ourselves and for one another.

Just, just try.

What would have been helpful to me as a team, would having someone say to me, I love you, you matter. I see you and I know how hard you’re fighting. I think that would have made a really big difference.

Thanks for listening.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Terrible, Thanks for Asking. There are a lot of resources with a lot of acronyms that you can go to for help, information, information. You can look up how to pronounce the word information.

Research, we are putting a bunch of links in the show notes for this episode, and also on our website, ttfa.org.

A big thank you to everybody who sent us their story to include in this episode, including Maria, Tara, Amanda, Arden, Brianna, or Brianna, Crystal, Sean, or Cine, I don’t know, Heather, Julie, Michelle, Caitlin, Maya, Tammy, Maya, Jess, Casey,

Blair, AN., Britt, Pigbook, Nick, Lexi, and Jackie. Thank you. The Terrible Thanks For Asking team is Senior Producer Hans Buto, Butil, Butu. Marcel Malekebu, he’s a new addition to our team.

You heard his voice in this episode.

He is great.

So is Hans, but I like to say compliments behind people’s back, and Hans is looking at me. I’ll compliment him at another time when he’s not staring at me. Plus, I have this feeling.

I listen to credits of podcasts. I like it that you do too. I think it’s a cool thing to do.

Hans edits out a lot of my compliments. Oh, goodness. Okay.

Where were we? Our interns are Emma Martins and Taylor Vrainie. Thank you for your help on this episode.

Good job. Hannah Meacock-Ross is our project manager. She’s the best.

Geoffrey Wilson created our theme music, and we are our home, our house. Our little podcast house we live in is APM, American Public Media.