Content warning: This article mentions suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
I dread it every year: National Suicide Prevention Month.
For those who’ve lost a loved one to suicide, every day of September can feel like a slap in the face. They are reminded that they didn’t prevent the suicide death of their child, spouse, parent or best friend.
A friend who lost her sister told me: “We have (World) AIDS Awareness Month and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but for suicide we have ‘prevention month’? It’s a disease, so why are you making me feel responsible?”
My friend is one of many struggling with the messaging that comes from the important effort to reduce suicide deaths, which have been on the rise the last few years.
“Suicide loss survivors,” as we are called, support prevention efforts but language is critical to the message.
For example, there’s a movement to stop the use of “commit” or “committed” suicide because those words are commonly associated with crimes and sins. My 17-year-old daughter, Jocelyn, didn’t commit a crime or a sin. She “died by suicide” or “killed herself.”
A couple of years ago I watched a live televised panel discussion and was appalled when a North Carolina mental health expert on the panel said succinctly and without qualifiers: “Suicide is preventable.”
I had invited hundreds of suicide loss survivors to watch a film and discussion virtually. To these grieving individuals, the state official’s words were likely heard as “suicide is preventable and YOU failed.”
As a suicide loss support group facilitator, I felt I’d inadvertently facilitated additional pain for my group members by suggesting they tune in. Their responses were painful:
“To say to survivors of suicide loss that suicide is preventable is to invalidate our loss, to cheapen it as though we didn’t try hard enough,” one said.
Another said: “(The phrase) fills me with guilt, more guilt on top of that I already feel as a mother losing her child to suicide.”
I asked two psychologists why the phrase “suicide is preventable” is used so frequently. From an academic, clinical and suicide prevention campaign approach, they said that perspective may be true. “From an individual perspective, that’s where you get into trouble,” said the clinical psychologist.
The other psychologist added: “If you take away the concept that you can prevent suicide, you lose funding for mental health services at the national, state and even community level.”
We agreed that the phrase “suicide is preventable” is aspirational rather than factual. Even the state official who made the statement on live TV later agreed saying, “In no way did I mean to assign blame or imply that suicide is always preventable.”
If mental health professionals can admit this, those of us living daily with suicide as a fact should recognize our inability to prevent it.
If we’d known more, we would have done more. If love could have kept them here, they’d still be here. These are the facts I share with people in my support groups.
When speaking with loss survivors, I often make this comparison to cancer: A doctor may treat an individual using several different modalities and they still die from cancer. The same may be true with suicide.
Identifying September as National Suicide Awareness Month would be one way to change the stigma. Treating the disease with the same language we use for all other diseases, like breast cancer awareness, normalizes it and removes a sense of shame — for the person who died and their friends and family.
We all want to end suicide and end the stigma around mental health. Let’s promote awareness without promoting guilt or blame.
Jaletta Albright Desmond is a general grief support specialist and a peer group facilitator for Hope After Suicide Loss based in Winston-Salem and Davidson. Email hopeafterws@gmail.com
