The Emergency & Recovery Resources has a new Suicide Prevention Resource. The article is explanatory and offers further resources for teachers, parents, friends, students, and other professionals on how to identify suicide symptoms and hopefully intervene to prevent it.
This resource was brought to me by the mother of a young girl who recently lost a friend to suicide. She quoted a phrase I have heard way tooo many times, “she was young and beautiful,” another phrase is “she/he had everything to live for.” What we on the outside see is a facade, there is no way we can ever see what is on the inside. More goes on behind closed doors than you or I can ever realize.
I have worked for years with addicts, alcoholics, and the criminally addicted. Learning to identify the signs and symptoms to suicide is one that takes time. Until you educate yourself, you could not know, nor conceive what it is like in those closed, dark rooms within another.
It was not until my own brush with suicide planning that I grasped the depth despair can take. You don’t have everything to live for, there is nothing left, no answer, no hope, no one understands, and a thousand other phrases repeat themselves. We keep it as secret as possible.
Keeping secrets is the greatest enemy of anyone in or out of recovery. Those secrets eat away at you, fear is always a companion, telling you someone is going to find out, then wait and see. “They” won’t like you, will punish you, abandon you, and despise you. It erodes your strength and self-will.
This article posted at Morningside Recovery’s website, Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Resources offers a list of signs to watch for, ideas for intervening and more resouces at the end. I hope you take the time to read, save the resources, and share them. It would make a young girl who lost her friend very happy to know we listened to her.
Bless you and may you never need to use the skills.