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Suicide Prevention Is Never Over

Lisette Rimer

Updated: Oct 5, 2024




The month of September is over, but the suicide awareness that it stands for is an ongoing national crisis. Suicide is the eleventh leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In 2022, 49,476 Americans died by suicide, nearly double the number who died by homicide. The saddest part of that statistic is the devastation to young people. Suicide was the second leading cause of death for ages 10–14 and 25–34.

 

We focus on violent crimes against others, as we should. But maybe the real question is why suicide has twice as many victims as homicide. Maybe the real crisis is why people are turning on themselves.

 

Suicide was a distant notion for me until my son killed himself at twenty-three years old. Patrick was, so I thought, the least likely person to die by his own hand. He attended Pomfret School on a full scholarship, attained perfect SAT scores, and graduated as valedictorian in 2001. The Norwich Bulletin noted his years of piano study at Tanglewood and his love of math, history, and foreign languages in a 2001 “Profile of a Newsmaker” article. He graduated from Stanford with honors in 2005 and was a programmer at Siemens in Berlin when he died in 2006.

 

Patrick’s death made me confront the signs I had missed—the isolating sadness, the misery over rejection. It made me confront my ignorance about depression as a disease. I had to learn that depression is not normal sadness. It damages our brains, and worst of all, it affects our ability to make decisions. Depression attacks the very part of our being that decides whether or not we should kill ourselves. It is a physical as well as a mental illness.


If you look at the brains of suicide victims, they are different. According to the National Institute of Health, suicide victims have smaller gray matter volume in the hippocampus as well as part of the prefrontal cortex. It’s concrete proof depression is a disease like any other physical disease. It reminds me of a photo of a suicide victim's brain my doctor showed me after Pat died. The hippocampus looked like wilted spinach compared to the robust, normal brain beside it. Yes, there are external reasons why people kill themselves. But I stress the internal because we have to legitimize depression. It needs to be taken seriously without stigma.

 

Suicide Prevention Month in September makes us aware of that legitimacy. It emphasizes that the disease of depression is involved in most suicides, and if it’s not treated, it can allow suicide to creep in as a solution. Most importantly, it helps us know what to do if someone is suicidal. That someone may talk about suicide as a solution. They may feel like a burden on others, have a plan, and have access to means. I learned the hard way to take those signs seriously, to ask if they are thinking of suicide. If they are, don’t panic. Try to listen without judgment. Encourage them to get help. If they don’t, ask if you can do it for them. Consider a safety plan to identify suicidal thoughts and distractions that will help. If they are in crisis, do not leave them alone. Most importantly, remove access to lethal means.

 

Suicide prevention might have helped me know what to say when Patrick told me he had thoughts of suicide. Instead, I was speechless, and after a long pause, Patrick said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything.” Almost a year to the day afterward, he died alone in his Berlin apartment from carbon monoxide poisoning. I spent the next eighteen years learning why he killed himself and what I should have said. Instead of silence, I should have asked him point blank: “Are you thinking of killing yourself?” And then I should have listened.

 

I spent eighteen years writing about that mistake and many others in Back from Suicide: Before and after the Essential Patrick. I had supported Pat’s identity, but I had much to learn about the difficulty of coming out. Young gay people are at an extremely high risk of suicide. In 2020, LGBTQ+ young people were more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers. In writing Patrick’s story, I learned how being gay contributes to depression and how depression can lead to death if it’s not treated. I learned that even a person, who seemed to have it all, can plummet. I wanted to share my journey so that parents would know that their children’s chronic sadness might be a medical issue, that their high-achieving, gay children might be over-compensating for their differences. I wanted parents to learn the signs that I learned after it was too late.

 

Suicide Prevention Month teaches those signs and the words to say, the safety plans, and the self-care while there’s still time for treatment. It teaches how to be on our children’s level. It teaches year-round lessons that I wish I knew, and from the most recent statistics, it looks like a lot of other parents wish they knew as well. As one therapist counseled his suicidal patients, if you give yourself time, you give yourself options. Time gives you freedom. Suicide takes that away.   

 

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© 2024 MARIE LISETTE RIMER

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