Supporting the Suicidal No Matter What

Holding body autonomy, dignity, and grief all at once.

A view of the moon from Lake Michigan in August of 2023. Image by author.

As an abolitionist, a trans person, and a believer in harm reduction, I support the freedom of all people to do what they wish with their bodies. But in this world, that principle can prove quite unpopular and difficult to uphold. 

Legal and educational institutions regularly deny trans children the freedom to alter their bodies or gendered presentations. They do it to trans adults, too. Virtually every fat person in the world has been blamed at some point for the body they have and then denied medical help, as if choosing to become fat would be a suitable reason to deny someone healthcare. Every abuse survivor and addict has been told they’re hurting because they made the wrong choices, and should not be trusted to make them anymore. 

If you say that you believe people should be free to bang their wrists, gain weight, use methamphetamine, date whom they like, or live in “risky” seeming circumstances, you’ll be accused of encouraging flagrant self-destruction and welcoming the downfall of society. The fear of unfettered bodily freedom is so great that people continue to cling to it despite mountains of evidence showing that harm reductionist approaches work far better than expecting every person to make “healthy choices.” 

Giving intravenous drug users clean needles and a safe place to nod off saves far more lives than instructing them to “just say no.” Offering condoms to teens reduces their risk of STI transmission and pregnancy a whole lot better than sexual shame. And if a person wants to starve themselves, cut themselves, or return to an abusive partner, it’s far more effective to honor their choice and offer them services than it is to try and “save” them by taking their freedom away. 

Why Shame Doesn't Work

Still, harm reduction makes people uncomfortable. Accepting that no matter what we believe is right for them, some people will burn themselves, smoke crack, have unprotected sex, or love people who beat them can make even the most anarchist among us feel ill-at-ease. As a graduate student of mine once confessed to me, harm reduction feels like “giving up on a person.” 

But harm reduction isn’t giving up on a person. It’s giving up on our fantasy of who people should be, and our illusion of controlling their fate. Harm reduction allows us to accept human beings as they truly are so that we might love them more fully. It’s humbling, and it often means sitting with grief. 

Perhaps the most controversial application of hard reductionist principles is to the subject of suicide. There are a variety of legal and professional guidelines in place that are designed to prevent a person from committing suicide no matter what, and there’s very little tolerance in society for the idea that some might still die anyway. 

If a therapist believes a client presents an imminent threat to themselves, they are legally obligated to report the suicidal person and get them institutionalized. Providers in hospitals, shelters, and schools frequently hold the same legal obligations. Calling 911 or a mental health hotline on a friend who is a suicidal will, more often than not, result in a cop arriving to their house to either arrest them, force them into a hospital, or shoot them — because killing a distressed person is somehow better than allowing them to kill themselves. 

Most healthcare institutions will resort to physical force, restraint, drugs, guilt, theft of personal property, forced nudity, and denial of privacy in the pursuit of prolonging a life. This despite the heaps of scientific evidence showing involuntary hospitalization increases distress and the desire for suicide. Being held in a psychiatric institution has been shown to raise a person’s risk of suicide by 100 fold — including among patients who weren’t suicidal before they got locked up. That’s largely because of the trauma of losing one’s freedom.

Suicidal intention is at its root a longing for escape — and you don’t ease that longing by giving a person more to escape from. 

Involuntary Hospitalization Increases Risk of Suicide, Study Finds
New study finds that people who felt they were coerced into being hospitalized were more likely to attempt suicide…www.madinamerica.com

But perhaps the biggest reason that it’s difficult to respect a suicidal person’s autonomy is that it’s fucking terrifying and disturbing to think about death. 

When a loved one shares with us that they want to die, we panic. We tell them there is so much to live for, and that killing themselves will hurt us, and all kinds of oblivious bromides that bring them no comfort. We threaten to call emergency services on them. We infantilize them. We imagine life without them and secretly consider our own deaths. We sob and tear our hair out, making the moment about us instead of the suicidal person. And in doing so, we fail them. 

But there are alternatives. It actually is possible to respect the bodily freedom of a suicidal person while still providing them comfort and aid that could prolong their life. We can make peace with our inability to control another person’s destiny and mourn the potential loss of them while sitting with them in their suffering. 

We don’t have to run away from our own hopelessness and thoughts of suicide while we do this. either. And we may find that frank, accepting, and even mundane discussions of suicide will do both us and our suicidal friends a whole lot of good. 

For this piece, I spoke to dozens of suicidal people, read harm reductionist guides on supporting the suicidal, examined the psychological research literature on the subject, and mined my own life experiences for any wisdom I could find. Based on all these resources, here is my advice for supporting people who are suicidal — no matter what. 

Don’t Make It About Your Feelings

Far too many people respond to a friend’s disclosure of suicidal thoughts by spiraling into panic and grief, imagining how they would feel if their friend were already dead, and making the suicidal person process all of those feelings. 

This will not help anything. Drawing attention toward your feelings and fears will only cause the suicidal person to feel even more alienated and unseen in their pain, and guilty about the ways in which they’re coping. They’ll be less likely to disclose tough emotions to you in the future, which won’t make their life any more bearable. If you’re in an acute state of panic, you might also escalate their distress.

Don’t tell a suicidal person that you wouldn’t be able to go on without them, or that killing themselves would be selfish. In reality, there is nothing more selfish than expecting a suicidal person to continue suffering through a life they do not want simply because their death would make you sad. 

Instead, when a friend shares with you that they are thinking about dying, take a moment to calm yourself before responding. Consider asking a supportive person in your own life to help you offload feelings of fear and grief. Secondary trauma is real, and if you’re going to be a consistent, nonjudgmental figure in a suicidal person’s life for the long haul, you’ll need healing and understanding of your own, too. 

Don’t Act Like You’re Scared of Them

Many people are terrified to ever discuss the subject of suicide because they consider it so taboo. In addition, they may actively fear a suicidal person, regarding them as unstable or potentially violent. Both of these fears lead to suicidal people becoming even more intensely isolated, unable to trust that a disclosure won’t get them locked in a mental institution or harassed by the cops. 

If a loved one trusts you enough to share that they’re feeling suicidal, you can do a world of good by responding with nonchalance and acceptance. It really isn’t that unusual for a person to think about killing themselves. It might be upsetting to think about, but the reality is that suicide is a mundane fact of life. Hundreds of thousands of people in American contemplate suicide every year. Tens of thousands make an attempt. It is one of the leading causes of death worldwide.  

Given how common suicide is, you can regard it as a regular part of human existence and speak to your friend about it frankly. It’s perfectly acceptable to ask them how long they’ve been wanting to die, and what support they need from you in navigating that desire. No harm will come to a suicidal person from you simply allowing their feelings to exist. Mentioning death or suicide explicitly won’t make them any more likely to attempt — if anything, it will serve to destigmatize their feelings. 

An anonymous respondent told me this: “One of the most important things to assure a suicidal person of is that you are not afraid of their feelings. If one is sincerely trying to offer substantive help, demonstrating that one is not going to balk at evidence of self-harm, or “other” the sufferer for the things they are experiencing is paramount.” 

This advice echoes a tip found in the harm reductionist zine Helping Your Friends Who Sometimes Want to Die Maybe Not Die. The zine’s author Carly Boyce, calls this tip Hoffman’s Rule, and it’s simple: Don’t Panic, Do Nothing. That’s it. 

“So your conversation has become about suicide,” Carly writes. “It isn’t radically different than all other conversations you have ever had before with this person.” 

Don’t intervene if intervention is not wanted, don’t act out of the ordinary, don’t freak out on the suicidal person, don’t be disgusted by their scars or the pills they have on hand, and don’t treat them differently than you normally would. The more comfortably and openly that you can speak with them about suicide, the more accepted your friend in crisis will feel. 

In addition to keeping cool, remember that the option of committing suicide always remains on the table. Do your best to be there for your loved one as they weigh that decision. “Be neutral,” advises Lena, who experiences suicide ideation regularly. “If you can, be a sounding board talking about various solutions to their problem, including ways to die, and the various consequences, drawbacks, and potential benefits.” 

The cover of Carly Boyce’s excellent zine on supporting suicidal people. You can read the zine here.

Don’t Call the Cops (or the Psychiatrists!)

No matter how desperately you might want to “save” a suicidal person’s life, you do not have control over what they do with their body, nor should you. Calling outside authorities to prevent your friend from killing themselves will not make anything better. Even mental health hotlines like 988 routinely send police and social workers to the homes of suicidal people to force them into treatment. 

When the police arrive to a mental health related call, even a “wellness check,” they are far more likely to brutalize, aggravate, or kill a person in distress than they are to help them. This problem has become so pronounced that even some police departments have started advising their officers to “tactically retreat” from mental-health-related calls. And as we’ve already discussed, the research is abundant that forcing a suicidal person into a prison or hospital only results in them becoming more suicidal and traumatized. 

The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture has repeatedly called for a ban on the forced institutionalization of suicidal people, correctly deeming it an unlawful act of incarcerating a person who has not committed any crimes. Unfortunately, most therapists and care providers in the United States are still legally required to partake in this form of state-sanctioned torture. 

One therapist that I spoke to, Kennedy, told me that she chooses to quietly subvert the law. “I tell my patients in confidence, look, no matter what you tell me in this office, no matter what you are feeling or planning to do, I will not call the authorities on you. My patients can really be honest, and not worry about saying the ‘wrong thing.’ But it puts my licensure at risk.” 

Whether you are a brave, law-breaking care provider like Kennedy or simply the friend of a person who is in distress, you should resist every temptation to use state and medical violence to restrict a suicidal person’s freedom of movement. The only exception to this is if the suicidal person has already told you directly that they want external support. This bring us to the next tip:

Don’t Treat Crisis Support as One-Size-Fits-All

Every suicidal person is different, and so the clichéd “rules” for providing crisis support that commonly get passed around will not always apply. As Carly Boyce’s zine points out, it’s not always true that a suicidal person with a plan presents a more imminent risk to themselves than a person who doesn’t have one, for instance. 

I’ve had a specific vision of how I might kill myself in my imagination ever since I first wanted to die in my early twenties. I’ve never actually attempted suicide, and it’s highly unlikely I ever will. I just read a book that put that specific suicide “plan” in my mind, and my inner world has a flair for the dramatic. I fall back on this romanticized image of my death sometimes because it brings me comfort. It would be a mistake for anyone to read too much into it. 

Another “rule” of crisis support holds that actively suicidal people will seem more at peace right before an attempt, but this isn’t always the case. Many suicide attempts are impulsive, being committed within thirty minutes to two hours of a person experiencing crisis. It’s impossible to know who will make an attempt and when, or what kinds of support they desire without asking them. Rather than attempting to covertly diagnose the severity of your suicidal friend’s intentions, speak to them directly and with respect.

Even the advice in this article is far from applicable to all suicidal people. For example, I know a few suicidal people who actually do wish to be institutionalized when they’re experiencing a mental health episode. They may appreciate that hospitalization takes them away from an upsetting home environment, for instance, or allows them to get a break from work. Institutionalization is hardly an ideal solution, but in the absence of a safe place to stay, some people do opt for it. The only way to know for certain what a specific suicidal person wants is by asking them. 

Don’t Pity Them

“I hate the sad face people make when I say my life has no meaning,” says Bradley. “People always ask me what’s wrong or what’s causing my depression but that isn’t how it works. Sometimes you’re depressed all the time and it isn’t even about anything.” 

Bradley sees his depression as a chronic illness that he might one day die from. So far, he has chosen to continue to live, because there are still video games on his to-play list and trails he wants to hike. But he does not see his suicidal impulses as a threat. Instead, he sees suicide as a way to assert control over his future, rather than being forced to live in continual pain without relief.  

“I’m very clear-headed about the possibility [of killing myself],” he says. “And I want people to understand that if I do choose to do that, it was my decision and I didn’t take it lightly. I did it because I wanted a solution, and I need them to not see it as an awful thing. I’d like someone to really be there with me while I die.” 

Many suicidal people report being infantilized, talked down to, or pitied when they express their desire to die. But it’s important to recognize that for many suicidal people, the option to die on one’s own terms is a powerful tool that helps them feel more in control of their life and their body. 

Try and follow your loved one’s lead when they discuss their thoughts of suicide. Does the idea bring them comfort? Does reminding themselves that suicide is an option actually make it easier for them to sit with their current pain? Don’t assume that death is a last resort. Instead, try to understand the suicidal person’s perspective, and honor any request they have involving their own death. This will help make your time together more meaningful, no matter the outcome. 

A view of a lake in Boston surrounded by hills and trees. Image by author.

Do Trust Yourself

In addition to Hoffman’s Rule (Don’t Panic, Do Nothing), Carly Boyce offers up a counterpoint, what they call Baker’s Rule: Do Something. In other words, remain engaged with the suicidal person, experimenting with a variety of tactics and potential supports to see what connects with them. Rather than freezing up and creating a distance between yourself and the suicidal person, don’t be afraid to fumble. Just keep trying. 

“Fail more, fail better, fail together,” Carly writes. “…you don’t need to be perfect, just be present.”

One of the reasons that so many people enlist the police or psychiatrists when a loved one is suicidal is because they do not trust themselves to respond correctly. But the truth is, you do not need to be a suicide prevention expert, a social worker, a cop, a doctor, or a person who has never been mentally ill in order to offer support. Your relationship with the suicidal person is far more valuable than any professional’s generic rules of thumb. So trust yourself, and the love that you and the suicidal person share. 

At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, several people in my community became acutely suicidal. My friend Trenton jumped into action with a plan to reduce unwanted attempts: they would create a service to collect razors, pills, and other potential suicide implements from a person’s doorstep, contact-free, and hold them until the suicidal person wanted them back. 

It was an ambitious project that involved coordinating a whole team of volunteers across the city. It was too ambitious, in fact, and never really got off the ground. But in the process, Trenton had numerous heartfelt conversations with suicidal friends, and worked with others in their community to build networks of support. 

It turned out that the suicidal people in Trenton’s life benefited more from regular phone calls, exchanging physical letters, long walks in the park, and virtual gaming sessions than they did from having their ropes and scissors confiscated. But it didn’t matter that Trenton’s first offer of support wasn’t the best. What mattered was that they were trying things, thinking actively about the mindsets of suicidal people, and talking with them. 

Even just talking through Trenton’s project on the phone one random afternoon in March of 2020 helped keep me away from the psychological brink. It made me realize how not-alone I was in my despair — and in my desire to be near others and of use to them. 

Do Keep the Suicidal Person Company

“I think the most useful thing one can do is to simply provide companionship, to let the sufferer know implicitly that they are not alone and they are not being abandoned by the world,” one anonymous suicidal person tells me. “The goal is not to convince someone life is worth living. It is to convince them to wait. In waiting, they may see another way.” 

It’s easy for a suicidal person to find reactions that are invalidating — risk assessment surveys, shaming lectures, incarceration, constant surveillance and judgement. But calm, nonjudgmental companionship is pretty damn hard to come by, which makes it one of the most significant forms of aid you can provide. 

“The biggest harm reduction tool I use is to just avoid being alone when I feel shit getting bad,” another anonymous respondent told me. “If you’re worried about a friend, ask to do homework together, start watching a show together, ask to come over after work and make dinner together. They may or may not be up to saying yes, but at least they know they have that option if they want it.”

You may feel self-conscious sharing a space with a suicidal person, because you aren’t sure what to do or say that might help them. Try to remember that your mere existence in their space is enough. Your actual self — with all your own problems and tangled-up feelings — is what the suicidal person needs by their side, not some idealized or masked version of you. 

It’s okay to say nothing. It’s okay to be awkward. You can do your laundry and stress out about your taxes or repair your busted-down car while the suicidal person chills nearby on your couch. The regular rhythms of daily life may help soothe them, and being honest about your own life and its problems can help them feel less alone. 

A meme of a cat with text that reads: “Can I come over and act weird and be strange.”

Do Cultivate Your Relationship 

For many people, suicide isn’t a momentary desire — it is a chronic visitor always hanging on the margins of life. And so, after you get over that first shock of simply sharing space with a person who is suicidal, you should work on enriching your relationship to them as best you can. 

For nearly a decade, Noah has been a support person for their friend Levi, who experiences psychosis and hallucinations. Levi is primarily at risk of suicide when they’re in the midst of a psychotic episode and unable to separate their delusions from reality. But because Noah has invested so heavily into their relationship, Levi trusts him no matter his mental state. 

“I’ll call Noah and ask him if the men experimenting on my body are really there in the room with me, and if he tells me it’s not real, I can believe him,” Levi says. “I can’t trust my psychiatrist to not lie to me or take advantage of me. They’ve forced me on meds before, they’ve lied to me, so they’re useless when I’m facing a delusion. But if Noah says no, man, it’s really not that bad, you don’t need to kill yourself, it instantly calms me.” 

Noah always shows up for Levi, consistently taking his calls, visiting his apartment with supplies, and not shying away from truly gruesome moments — like the time he walked in on his friend covered in blood. By repeatedly showing that he’s not afraid of Levi and will not abandon him, Noah has been able to develop enough trust to prevent numerous suicide attempts. 

“I wouldn’t be here if someone hadn’t proven, really proven, that they were there for me and weren’t going to leave,” Levi says. 

Suicidal people have good reason to fear opening up to others. But this means that every vulnerable moment they share with you is a precious opportunity to build a level of trust they might not have ever experienced before. Pick up the phone. Listen to them rant and sob. Hear about their sexual assault experiences and then don’t treat them as if they are tainted. Sit outside the bathroom while they vomit. If you can stomach it, help them tend to their wounds. 

You don’t have to meet a suicidal person’s every need in order to be a vitally important person in their life, of course. I have a blood phobia, which means I can’t be there for anyone who is actively cutting. That doesn’t make me any less genuine of a friend. In fact, by being open about my own issues, I can help foster more intimacy in the relationship. 

Do Help Meet Their Material Needs

Everyone, it seems, wants to prevent a suicidal person from making an attempt in the short term — but relatively few people take steps to address the life circumstances that contribute to an ongoing desire to die. Though some people experience suicide ideation for no clear reason, most suicidal people do face exacerbating factors such as poverty, abuse, neglect, loneliness, disability, chronic pain, debt, academic and professional struggles, or social stigma that need to be addressed just as much as their feelings do. 

If you find that you’re not the best at providing emotional support, you can still show up for your suicidal loved ones by looking after their basic needs. In fact, that kind of reliable material support can mean just as much as offering a shoulder to cry on. 

“Showering and cleaning and eating vegetables all make me feel better but can also be incredibly daunting,” one suicidal person told me. “Having a buddy helps. You can bring your friend some good leftovers, offer to pick up their room together while you chat, or call them before you plan to shower to remind them to shower, too.” 

Another respondent, Nourah, echoed this advice, saying that even small check-ins and reminders to look after themselves helps a great deal. “My sister will text me and be like, brush your teeth, bitch! And if I can’t do it or I don’t even react to the text then she knows I’m basically catatonic, and then she’ll come over and make me at least swish around a little mouthwash.”

Whatever resources you do have to spare, present them to your suicidal loved one as an offering of support. Clean clothes fresh from your dryer, spare vitamins and menstrual products, granola and yogurt that can be eaten mindlessly in front of the TV — every little bit helps, and expresses to the suicidal person that they’re not a lazy burden, and are cared for. If you don’t have money to spare, you can still offer your time — calling the welfare office, babysitting kids or pets, and helping the suicidal person to manage their affairs. 

By reducing the life burdens a suicidal person faces, you make it far less daunting for them to stay alive. 

Do Offer Them Distractions

Remaining alive means active agony for many severely depressed people, which is part of why so many of them sleep for as long as possible, or reach for self-harm and drugs. If you want to help relieve the pain of a suicidal person, then, one of the best things you can do is present them with a distraction, no matter how silly or fleeting. 

I still vividly remember the last time I was acutely suicidal. I was about twenty-two years old, alone in a studio department, and nursing the wounds of a terrible breakup with an abusive partner. I couldn’t focus on school or work, never had the energy to prepare food, and just dragged myself listlessly around campus all day. I sobbed myself to sleep begging God for death every night. 

After weeks of what seemed to be unending misery, I opened up an illegal streaming website to watch Twilight: Eclipse. 

A promotional image for Twilight: Eclipse.

The film was so laughably bad that it transported me away from all of my problems. Watching Kristen Stewart’s Bella dissociate in front of her bedroom window for months made me cackle with embarrassed self-recognition. Taylor Launter goofily morphing out of his wolf form and sauntering around without a shirt on made me cringe so heavily I couldn’t think about the boy who’d been lying to me for the past year and a half. 

For two hours and four glorious minutes, I didn’t have a single thought of wanting to die. I didn’t think about myself and my problems at all. Over the next few years, the release of each Twilight film filled me with reassurance. No matter what was going on in my life, I knew those melodramatic, self-indulgent works of straight camp would briefly take all my pain away. 

During her most suicidal moments, my friend Rebecca only ever wanted to talk about a fictional man who ate, drank, and bathed exclusively in mayo. The idea of him sitting down to a frozen mayonnaise “pizza,” covered in mayonnaise toppings, with cool glass of mayonnaise on the side brought her absolute glee. It was such an absurd and disgusting picture that it shocked her right out of her thoughts of death. I never knew how to make Rebecca feel any better, but I could ask her to tell me about how the mayonnaise man brushed his teeth. 

You can’t make your suicidal friends not want to die, but you can try to give them brief, distracting oases of peace. Bring over a video game, put on your favorite record, or drop off a thick stack of Sudoku puzzles at the suicidal person’s house. The ideal distraction will be relatively easy to process, but engaging enough to keep their most self-destructive thoughts at bay. And the lower the barrier to entry, the better. 

“Getting a hey, how are you doing? text when I’m really in the thick of it? Awful,” one suicidal person tells me. “Way too much pressure to respond. Getting one that says I made a new playlist if you wanna listen? Huge! Just sending a meme or texting about a show you both like is a great way to remind a friend you’re thinking of them, without making it all intense.” 

Do Support All Harm Reductionist Alternatives

“Don’t make a big deal out of someone self-harming, and never fucking shame them for it,” says Georgina. “When I self-harm, it’s a way to divert my overwhelming negative feelings into something that isn’t killing myself.”

Suicidal people often have messy, unpleasant-seeming methods of coping with their desire to die. Many drink heavily or use drugs, not just to blunt the pain of living, but also to render themselves physically incapable of carrying out an attempt. Others engage in risky behaviors or self-harm as a way to bring themselves closer to death without having to fully commit to the act. 

We Need A Harm Reductionist Approach to Eating Disorders

One of the core principles of harm reduction is that from the outside, we can never determine what course of action is best for another person. Each individual is weighing their own personal profile of risks and benefits, and will have to decide for themselves which costs they are willing to endure. If we truly support their body autonomy, all we can do is lessen the potential consequences of the choices they make — by helping them sterilize their self-harm wounds, for example, or offering them KN95 masks when they go out to socialize. 

Your suicidal loved ones will make sub-optimal decisions in their fight to stay alive. They might get fired from jobs, piss off friends, sleep with married women, wipe out on their motorcycles, adopt pets they can’t afford, and so much more. If you can show up to help them pick up the pieces afterward, you’ll communicate that their life truly is worth saving, no matter what state it is in. 

Do Look After Yourself

Thinking and talking about suicide all the time is traumatizing. If you want to be a supportive figure in a suicidal person’s life for an extended period, then, you need to make sure to pay close attention to your own trauma triggers, and tap out whenever you’re in need of a break. It’s easier to do this when you remind yourself that you are not the suicidal person’s savior, and they’re a fully realized human with agency who can access other forms of aid if they want it. 

“If you promise more than you can give, or extend yourself beyond your capacity, you’re not helping anybody,” says Dylan, a social worker. “Committing to always be there when you quite literally can’t always be there will only distress a suicidal person more. It’s lying to that person and to yourself and fostering a false dependence.”

Instead, Dylan suggests being up front about the obligations you can handle. “You wanna take them out to see a movie every week? Great, do that. Sit with them at night when their ideation is the worst. Be the first person on their emergency call list. But make sure there is a second and a third and a fourth person.” 

In their zine, Carly Boyce echoes this advice. “My number one flag is resentment,” they write. “If I notice myself resenting someone… that means I am over capacity and need to find a way to get more support.” They also refuse to be a suicidal person’s only source of assistance. “I need to know that if I am unreachable…the person needing support has someone else they can (and would!) reach out to.” That ‘someone else,’ they say, can include a trusted suicide hotline. 

Listen to Resentment

Suicide support can be particularly perilous for those of us who experience depression and ideation of our own. However, having personal brushes with suicide does not preclude us from being of service to others. In fact, it can provide us with opportunities for incredible vulnerability and connection. That brings us to the final tip in this piece:

Do Share About Your Own Suicidal Feelings (If You Want)

Every spring, when the weather is first breaking, Drew calls up his friend Kay and asks him, “Are you thinking of killing yourself right now, too?”

Drew and Kay both have a long history of suicide ideation. Each of them grew up in neglectful households; both still live in poverty and carry trauma from the abusive relationships they endured as young adults. They commiserate about the suicidal feelings that so frequently accompany Shit Life Syndrome, and it brings them comfort in a way little else can. 

“We are all busted up and broken and capable of connection and full of possibility,” writes Carly Boyce. It’s a damaging myth that only non-suicidal people can fully support the suicidal. Often it takes someone who is comfortable plunging the darkest reaches of the psyche to fully understand the experience, and find the gallows humor in it. 

Drew and Kay text one another a daily “skull ranking,” using between one and five skeleton emojis to signal how much they want to off themselves. Speaking so casually about suicide relieves the pressure to make everything in their life seem okay. Their friends who have never been suicidal find such conversations to be too “sad.” But Kay and Drew accept one another and their “shit lives” exactly as they are. So far it’s kept them from actually needing to die. 

I sometimes wonder whether the people who call suicide “selfish” aren’t revealing their own latent desire to die. There’s a sick envy that seems to lurk behind the claim that suicide is the “easy way out.” Why would a person ever say such a thing if they haven’t longed for their own life to end? 

Wanting to die isn’t really all that unusual. An old mentor once told me they wished they’d died in the natural disaster that had killed their dad. Throughout history, soldiers have been indoctrinated to dream of a valiant death on the battlefield. Scientists embrace possible death when they approach active volcanos or exit the earth’s atmosphere. One of the most common Christian prayers is an evocation for God to take a person’s spirit away while they sleep. 

Photo by David Billings on Unsplash

Death is a violent leap into the abyss, but it’s also a gentle return to the connectedness of all things. Virtually everyone thinks about what it might be like to die, and some people carry thoughts of suicide inside themselves for decades while still leading basically decent lives that they experience as generally worthwhile. And so we do actively suicidal people a disservice by pretending that we don’t understand their feelings.

Instead of batting away the statements of a suicidal person as if they were the most unspeakable and “selfish” of taboos, we could choose to really sit with them in their despair, and share that we have felt that way too. When we confront the inevitability of death, we can better appreciate life as a finite resource to be spent however we like. 

There is no harm in broaching the subject of suicide. Death doesn’t visit because we have spoken of it. Praying for God to end our lives does not make him arrive to kill us. I should know — I used to cry out in the night for my life to end. 

I’m still here, but some people I cared about are not anymore. I did everything I could for the ones I knew were hurting. I exchanged emails that were thousands of words long, took frantic phone calls, watched hours of bad TV, promised I wouldn’t call 911, let them drink beside me until they passed out. I cried and told them that I loved them, I backed up all their text messages, and when I couldn’t bear the grief, I stepped away. 

All the love that I have poured into suicidal people is not made forfeit because some of them died. And the love that was given to me in my darkest hours isn’t only worthwhile because I’ve survived. It was the sharing of love itself that held meaning. We only get to choose how we love someone while they are around — not how long we get to love them, or when they will decide to leave. 

What does it matter that some of our dearest loves select their own departure time? We can still stand with them on the platform as long as they’ll have us, cherishing every second before they go. 

…

If you enjoyed this piece, I strongly recommend reading Carly Boyce’s zine on suicide intervention!