How to Help Someone Who Is Suicidal

November 8th, 2021

By Kelly Brogan, M.D.

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

We have been conditioned to look upon the tender topic of suicide with horror. Perhaps because it represents a failure of our varied systems of control. Perhaps because we are, collectively, far from being at peace with the complexities of death as a part of the human experience. Perhaps because we have to pretend that we have never personally felt anything like suicidality in order to maintain the illusion that the experience of suicidality is pathological.

Suicidality is not one thing. It is not a symptom of genetic illness. It is not rare. And it is not simply a desire to end one’s life.

In college at MIT, I worked a volunteer suicide hotline called Nightline, and spent many nights on the phone with people on the brink.

I learned that suicidal thoughts can be a desire to disappear. To not be instead of being. They can be a crisis of faith and a perception that everything is terminally wrong. They can be a deep grappling with whether the universe is fundamentally a benevolent or a hostile place. They can be the stuck belief that things will always be exactly as they are now.

I believe suicidality to be a nearly requisite expression of urgency for change that must be met with the promise of such change being possible. These feelings express the need for deep transformation that feels like a rebirth, replete with the labor pains and expressions of anguish and overwhelm. They are a scream that says, “This way of being, of living, cannot go on one second longer!!!”

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