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(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert
This is one of those years when I can’t talk myself into seeing the happy endings—or at least the unhappy endings that lead to deeper understanding and long-term happier endings. No matter what I said about wanting to be done with talking about unhappy topics, I am not. I can’t will myself to come up with the neat and happy moral of the story that will tie up a less-than-hope-filled post.
Although I’m feeling a bit like George Bailey on the bridge, I’m not looking to jump into the river. No, I just want to take that suitcase I bought with happy travels in mind—and run—anywhere that isn’t where I’ve been.
You see, I know God is hearing my prayers, but I’m having a hard time saying them. The good thing about God is He hears the prayers that have sunk so deep within us that we can’t even use our voices to speak them—they become so much a part of us that they rise from our very pores.
If nothing else, perhaps He’ll send me a bumbling Clarence to show me a better path than the one I am on.
Sometimes no amount of research or any continued pursuit for new solutions can fix a problem. And you especially can’t make someone else choose to see the hope in their situation if they prefer to see only loss.
You’re probably thinking I must be talking about myself, right? See, that’s the irony, isn’t it? So easy to see how to solve someone else’s problem, but then you look in the mirror and realize that maybe you’re so busy trying to solve someone else’s problem because it makes it easy not to be responsible for solving your own problems.
The years of trying to help others with celiac disease, dementia, depression, and ADD have taken their toll on me. I’m fresh out of perky solutions that are always met with a big “but”—because after all I have no idea how bad it is for someone else.
Well, the truth is they don’t know how bad it has been for me to watch them suffer. If I could, I would wave a magic wand and remove the problem. Would be much better than searching for other possible solutions that will never be good enough because the only solution the person really wants is to wake up completely healed.
They also don’t know how much I’ve suffered watching them refuse to consider anything but Plan A when I would fight to find them Plan B through Plan Infinity to aid in their movements forward. This week I realize I’m done being the pep squad. All that energy spent helping those who at this point won’t help themselves is making me feel like a failure. I know I am not—I tried, as God is my witness, I tried. Maybe I tried so hard that they didn’t think they needed to do so. But in the end all any of us really can do is help ourselves.
And during all those times of caregiving, I did not help myself. In some ways it’s just not possible to take care of yourself in the midst of others’ crises, but in other ways you have to be careful not to see any results as the only proof that what you did mattered. Some problems can’t be fixed despite anyone’s best efforts.
And so, I need a Clarence to come show me how I helped even if I could not beat back the demons of the diseases. I need to know that without me this place would have become a Potterville. Maybe I have a bit of a savior complex, but, by God, I’d like to know that sacrificing my potential trips around the world made some difference to others.
But short of that, the only thing I can control is the direction of my own footsteps in the future. A future where I stop trying to find solutions for everyone else and start looking for my own regardless of who is coming along with me on the trip.
Clarence, are you ready to earn your wings? Then help me climb down from this bridge so I can pack my suitcase for the trip of my lifetime.
(c) 2011 Christiana Lambert
My grandfather was a man’s man. From my youngest days he used words in everyday conversations that I was never allowed to say, kept his refrigerator stocked with beer, and played pool almost daily with his cronies at the Elks where he tended the “gentlemen’s” bar into his 80s. But every winter when the light turned low in Nebraska, he got restless. I think he had what we call Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD.
Well, I’ve said it before, but I will probably declare it each and every year once Black Friday arrives: I am an Advent person. Advent is the church season preceding the Light coming into this world at Christmas. Advent is all about waiting with expectation and hope for the light that will brighten our days—and our nights. But we are not a world much into waiting these days.
In an era when our culture seems to be experiencing an extended period of SAD—global economic uncertainties, financial difficulties in our own homes and neighborhoods, political stalemates and hostilities, and a real absence of long-term feelings of hope—shortening our Thanksgiving celebrations to jostle in lines to get those shiny new big screen TVs and other devices that run on light is not going to provide long-term light therapy.
No, what we need in these darkest of days is to turn to the true light from true light.
Advent—not this too early, too long, and too lacking in Christ-centered way of celebrating Christmas—is what is lacking in our collective focus.
Even though I am also tempted to forget to seek that true light, my own personal needs have again brought me to my knees. While my grandfather experienced winter blues, most likely my grandmother suffered depression during even the sunniest of days, just as my daughter does. These seasonal changes hit us all, but are often darker for those who struggle with darkness year round.
So I ask for prayers from friends both close and far away, as well as try to pray without ceasing myself. I pray for her, but also I pray for discernment and ideas, as well as for those people, professional and otherwise, who can help her.
What can we do besides pray to reduce the darkness? For one, we got her a light therapy box. Crazy, but the blue lights remind me of Advent and its liturgical color of blue.
We sent her back to college with that box, so our own access to that type of light therapy will have to wait, but for me, light therapy also comes in the lyrics I’ve learned from my choir songs. When darkness overwhelms me so much that I can’t even rest in the peace of sleep, those words arrive unbidden to voice the hope I do not always feel.
I like to think God is telling me to look to Him for the light, while pointing us to resources and support. And, so, in this quiet Advent period (well, in our house anyway) I ask Him to help me to wait, knowing He will in His time dispel the night—and SADness will flee away.
(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert
Now that we know how a family can be changed by major depression, there’s no question we need God’s guidance as well as prayers—I don’t debate about lighting candles anymore.
While acting to ignite a wick is a choice, I don’t always have such a choice over which songs pop up unbidden in my head. As I’ve mentioned before, songs stick with me easily—whether or not I want them to do so. Maybe it’s the years of running, when a good rhythm can help keep me on pace or when I’ve even used the time to memorize songs. More likely it’s just one of the quirks of my brain—with a mother like mine, no doubt I began hearing music while still in the womb—before I ever saw this world, let alone walked or ran a step.
Raised on music, but fascinated by words, how can I help but be drawn to the combination?
Though memorization isn’t my strong point, words and notes start to sink into my brain when heard in tandem. Even then, I’m more likely to paraphrase than to store everything just as heard or read.
Seeing all those candles lighted by people who also must know mental illness too well stirred up songs and lyrics again for me. I wonder, how many, like my daughter and me, get hung up in the wrong part of The Fray’s “You Found Me” lyrics?
Where were you when everything was falling apart, all my days were spent by a telephone that never rang and all I needed was a call that never came . . .
Still, much of the music in my head comes from hymns and songs absorbed over years singing in church. Since I don’t have many bible verses memorized, often the biblical words I do access come from those songs. Now that I’m back in a choir, I have added more songs and words available to me in random moments.
My favorite bible verse—which I mostly have memorized—is Micah 6:8b: and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? And yet, I had never really paid attention to the previous verses until singing them—or not singing them, as it often turns out when my throat stops my song mid-note. Micah 6:7b asks: Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
I know that verse 8 declares no child nor living being must be sacrificed, but then why must my daughter be set upon with feeling so abandoned by my God—the God she felt so clearly as a child yet now wonders where He is. While she questions how He can be her God, I often fall to anger, asking how He could do this to my child, my firstborn, to whom he has given many gifts yet seemingly not the gift of believing that who she is matters to Him and to so many others in this world. Once again, I am stuck on the wrong section of the lyrics.
Just as Micah’s words tell me that God has shown me what is good, The Fray also sings:
You found me lying on the floor, surrounded . . .
I only have to look at all those candles to know that God has surrounded me with others lifting up my family. When we ask where God is, we need to look around us. Just because the healing we want doesn’t happen as we want doesn’t mean God has abandoned us. If we can’t hear Him calling on the telephone, maybe we’re looking for the wrong Caller ID. Everyone walking humbly with us is walking humbly with God. In the end, God doesn’t have to find us because He is always with us—and in all those who walk beside us in our darkest days.
(c) 2011 Christiana Lambert
Major depression, however, seems closer to not believing in that someday.
And as much as I don’t know what that’s like for me, I do know what it sounds like in my daughter. When someone you love has fallen into the abyss of major depression, you just can’t give them platitudes such as “just deal with it” or let them experience every natural consequence of their actions.
To each person who tells me to relax and let her get herself through this blue period, there is this gut response that tells me we can’t afford to see if that will work—the potential cost is just too high—and Sherman agrees.
Until we’d walked with her on this path before, I would have thought they—especially the experts—were right.
This time she didn’t cry for help as early. You see, she’s older and wiser, which may actually mean she is deeper into depression this bout because of the coping skills she has gained over the past few years.
So why, during this period in her life, is this the semester she is studying The Bell Jar? What is purely literary or a treatise on various aspects of society in a time and place long past becomes something more to those who identify too well with the narrator’s thoughts. I’m an English major, for goodness’ sake, but this book has long since moved from the academic to the personal for me—and I still don’t really “get” what Plath is saying in the same way my daughter does.
While I did what I could to get her connected with help within the university, I cannot assume it is enough, even if we’ve been really blessed to encounter caring, knowledgeable professionals—and believe me, after our previous experiences with her depression, we do not trust someone just because of a title or supposed experience. Still, at a time when I do not live where my daughter does, it helps me to have these contacts who can reach out to her if she stops reaching out to them or those closest to her.
Constant vigilance—despite the cost for me. Yes, this is supposed to be my time—to either move on to what’s next or at least to mourn my losses—but I no longer feel this discord with our daughter is something personal or natural to this age in her life.
No, I believe major depression is talking for her, drowning out the sounds of possibility and hope that do exist in the midst of all that seems so hard right now. The good she minimizes while amplifying the bad.
I must fight for the someday of her feeling better while her defenses are down, even as I and others direct her to believe that she can fight for herself. Someday can’t come soon enough—especially for her.
And so, I also pray without ceasing all the day long.
(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert
Just Monday our foster dachshund crossed over that Rainbow Bridge. We don’t know how old he was, but when the rescue group found him emaciated and wandering the streets three years ago, they thought he was twelve. Despite his sketchy background and his pronounced health problems, he lived a full lifespan.
We weren’t being totally altruistic when we let him come to our house—in fact, Christiana was convinced having a small dog, specifically a dachshund, was an anecdote to the sadness she felt late at night when Fordham, our love sponge of an English Springer Spaniel, had retired to his cushion for a long night’s sleep. And though Sherman and I weren’t looking for another dog—especially a small dog—we were in favor of anything positive that would help her through the night.
Besides, he wasn’t supposed to be our forever dog. According to the rescue group, we were just supposed to have him for a week or two. But the economy hit dogs and rescue groups hard—our contacts with the group became fewer and fewer, until we knew we must be his forever family—how could we break a heart again that had already been so broken?.
(c) 2010
Although he never won over the jealous Fordham, he did worm his way into the rest of our hearts, even if he could only give so much love before he seemed to need to retreat. Christiana was disappointed in that, but she understood brokenness enough to love him still.
I would not have chosen to bring home a dog with a small dog bladder or an enlarged heart. I had dealt with hypothyroidism in dogs before, but not in this era of constant expensive blood tests and not with a dog with such a resistant thyroid function—he ended up taking almost as much thyroid medication as I do even though his weight was about 90% lower than mine. And, I had never even heard of the dog lice that apparently arrived with him and required expensive treatments for both him and Fordham.
And, yet, there was something about how jaunty his short-legged run was every time we returned home. He liked us; he really did, just in a very different manner than a spaniel does.
(c) 2010
Though Fordham’s possessive behavior and big dog klutzy ways made Abel nervous, he never stopped wanting to share his company. When Fordham’s final illness became evident, even Abel seemed stressed.
For about six weeks after Fordham was gone, when Abel’s thyroid level was ideal, he seemed just a little younger and a little more relaxed. If Christiana had not brought him into our home a couple years earlier, we would have really felt the emptiness of our arms after losing my mother and Fordham one after the other. Abel settled into the stillness that was that time and took care of us.
We are essentially people who crave the chaos and over-the-top love that comes from English Springer Spaniels, but we will always be grateful to Abel for helping us through our dark spring.
When I returned from my puppy fever road trip, I saw how much Abel had aged and just how late it was for him. I prayed he would not be too stressed by the newest family members and that we still had a few more months with him.
(c) 2011
In the end, Abel was a guy who rolled with life, accepting Furgus and Sam into what was now his home—and even acting a little envious of their young limbs and ability to play together. I’m so glad that Furgus calmed down enough in Abel’s last few weeks to begin napping and sleeping with Abel, giving him a closeness he had craved with Fordham but never experienced.
(c) 2011 Sherman Lambert
Abel required a lot of care in these past four months or so, but what I want to remember is his joy on car rides as he got to sit on my lap while the big dogs were confined, the excitement he showed on our mountain camping trip, or how happy he looked when he accompanied the boys on their walks—from the seat of a converted baby umbrella stroller. He longed to be part of a pack and to the end, he was.
Crossing over was hard work for him, but he did it here—in his forever home—with us all under the same roof.
In a year of so much loss, I know who rescued whom, even though loving him also added to my losses.
Today’s my birthday and I’m getting a pretty big present: my daughter.
What a difference a year makes. We took both kids to college—six and a half hours away—in late August. The distance is just a little too far away for many weekend visits and when they do come home during the school year, they really aren’t in town for much longer than 36 hours. Their physical absence from home was pretty complete.
And yet, kids today communicate differently than we did. It’s hard to cut the apron strings when you can be in constant contact through texting, chat, and e-mail.
Those first weeks, Christiana found herself in a less than warm dorm situation while Jackson was having the social time of his life. Although she had plenty of time to call us, I knew she needed to be connecting with her life there and that I wasn’t supposed to be trying to solve all her problems from a distance.
Most of us find it hard to let go of our kids these days, but even agreeing to have her go to school so far away was difficult for me after her dance with depression.
I tried to set up her medical care through the college’s counseling center, but they bungled the care enough that neither she nor we trusted them to come through for her. Continuing to work with longtime trusted providers so far away from where she was living was only slightly better than having no providers at all.
Just when things seemed darkest for her, Christiana figured out—on her own—what she needed to do to integrate better into college. She found a roommate who was living in her brother’s dorm building. Won’t go in to the whole long story, but that place became home.
Which—unfortunately for us—meant she, like her brother, stopped talking with us much.
I know our kids are supposed to separate from us at this point in life, but here’s where I go back to sounding like that really old-timer again. Really, kids today do communicate differently. Because they can contact you at all hours, they don’t contact you regularly. I know from talking with parents that I’m not the only parent who has this problem with their college-aged kids.
Despite being able to talk almost at will thanks to today’s technology, we just don’t. Or at least our kids can’t slow down enough to talk with us during the normal waking hours for middle-aged parents. I think my kids were more disconnected from me than I was from my parents for my three months studying in Spain. We talked once for five minutes, but wrote very detailed letters.
When you only hear from your kids when they are in crisis, you don’t know if they are in a constant state of crisis or if they are only having a bad moment. You lose the connection with what’s going right in their lives and you can’t say whether your perspective on what’s going wrong is very accurate.
Christiana interviewed for and was offered a full-time summer job at school. Although we wanted her to come home, earning for four solid months seemed a pretty good opportunity during these times of high unemployment for young people.
Despite the fact we helped her get set up for staying the summer and then moved her to her new apartment, we just felt distant from her. Without a whole lot of communication or time together, she seemed to be someone we didn’t know anymore.
Meanwhile Jackson came home. He’s been here for almost two months. Even though he rarely called us while away at college, being around him in person has been a joy.
Something just didn’t feel right about Christiana’s being gone still—maybe it’s too soon for this separation, maybe the situation wasn’t right—but when she explained why she’d like to come home, things finally felt right. After working another couple weeks, today’s the day we welcome her back into our home.
Although we haven’t been empty nesters since Jackson returned, it’s still going to be a big adjustment to have everyone in one house. All I know is though I was ready for her to go away to college, I wasn’t ready to feel so far removed from her life.
Welcome back, dear one! Time to create a new normal in our changing relationship.
Happy birthday to me.
(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert
The trick is to notice we are only experiencing an emotion in the present, not really going back in time. Of course, PTSD is a recognized mental disorder, so sometimes we can’t just will away our responses, even when we understand why we feel so anxious. However, with a whole lot of work and some more time on our travels, maybe we can lose that baggage in transit—or, if nothing else, reduce the size of the luggage.
Nonetheless, it was hard to pack away that luggage enough to let our daughter go so far away to college. Despite our daughter’s improved mental health, we were concerned about the distance between her and us, as well as from the providers who knew her and had helped her get back on track. Freshman year is complicated for almost all—even for those who have no record of mental illness difficulties. Dorms are poor places for good health practices, mental or physical. Yet, we figured her breaks would allow her access to her providers and we could re-assess treatment after her first year away.
Good plan except Sherman’s work switched insurance options in July—which left off her providers from our list of those covered. So I began trying to find providers where she would attend college—or through the college counseling center. After several conversations with the director of the center, she and I decided her needs could be handled through the center.
Well, turns out the center isn’t really funded well enough to keep up with the campus needs. After she had a few bungled encounters with different people at both the counseling center and the health center, we no longer felt we could trust those providers with our daughter’s needs. Since time had passed getting to that conclusion, we needed to find providers ASAP.
Finally, we realized we could pay her former providers out of pocket for now and decide later.
Which meant she and I got to visit them in their location twice this week now that she’s home from break.
Yesterday, as we waited an additional half an hour for her scheduled appointment, she said, “I don’t know if it’s me or not, but I always feel sick when I come here.”
Me, too, baby. Just returning to that building brings on multiple emotions and responses from me.
First of all, I don’t want to be reminded of all those hard times our family experienced together in our own home and otherwise. And then, I’m also trying to forget the people within the system who were harmful to us rather than helpful. Additionally, every trip there requires all patients and their families to go through multiple frustrations: difficult highway traffic, constantly changing parking situations, security systems that delay appointment arrival once in the building, lines at the check-in desk, having to wait for providers even though a patient’s late arrival can mean a charge and re-scheduling, etc. Plus, there is always an underlying worry the illness will return and the location will become too familiar once more.
Amazing that all these feelings are stirred up by this place where a few people did bring about great healing—which is why we return despite all the reasons not to.
Thankfully, the providers we saw this week have been helpful. Coming back was the right decision for now. But I think she and I both ought to recognize there’s nothing odd about our mixed emotions when we enter that building. The few neutral emotions we have about the place cannot quite hold up against other intense feelings and responses.
We’ve just got to keep working through what got us there and doing what we can to make sure this is no Hotel California for us—we do get to “check out” even if after each visit it takes some time before we lose sight of the place–and how we were at an earlier date in that place–in our rearview mirrors.
So the best I can do is to turn the car onto the road home and get us away from there as fast as I can. It’s like that Stan Ridgway song “Drive, She Said”—only the baggage she and I carry isn’t stolen from some bank, but something we’re hoping to dump off at the first chance. Yup, I’m driving getaway straight to that pier.
(c) 2008 Christiana Lambert
We all have anniversaries of the heart—some declared and some secret. A certain kind of weather, a date on the calendar, or anything else that brings back difficult memories can give us pause and remind us how much we miss certain people or how close we came to losing others. Often memory grabs us in ways that don’t even make sense.
Why do I frequently think of losing my neighbor Jenne when I type? Is it simply because she was good at typing and I wasn’t? Maybe, but it’s really because she is just that irreplaceable—she mattered to me. The years stretch out, almost 26 later this month, and yet from time to time she appears in my thinking unbidden, especially when I’m confronted with milestones she never met.
Of course, by now, she’s one of many who are gone who can’t be replaced in my heart—some connected by blood and love, and others by love alone as she was.
However, Decembers no longer just point to saying goodbye to Jenne anymore, but now they also remind me how someone I love felt so replaceable to some that it didn’t seem to be enough to her at that time to know she was irreplaceable to so many more, including me. While I cannot forget those dark days, I also do not fail to remember how grateful I am that light did return for her.
In any reasonably functional family, none of our family members is replaceable, not a single one—no matter if others beyond our homes act as if it is so.
I cannot shield those I love from the cruelties of the outside world any more than I can from the cruelties of mental illness, but for the rest of my days, in both good times and bad, I will declare that you are all irreplaceable.
Never stop believing you matter—there is only one of each of you. Your names are written on the only heart I have, just as Jenne’s name is.
(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert
My days are much calmer than they’ve been in years—and my nights, too. The kids are away at college and my mom’s health has been relatively stable. Sherman and I have been doing projects that have been put off since my mom fell and moved to Denver almost three years ago—and since her rapid decline into dementia became evident and required so many extra tasks—and brought on a whole lot of worry and loss.
Truth is I couldn’t really even give Mom the attention and love she deserved during much of that journey because my life was divided between concern for her and concern for helping my daughter to find a way out of depression.
For so long I lived one day at a time—and for a while there, it seemed I could only focus on more like one hour at a time.
When stuck in caregiving mode, “everyone” tells you to take care of yourself. You do what you can—I exercised and blogged as much as I could. But so much was left undone. And, as I’ve noted before, when I’m upset, I’m less efficient (thanks to those darn emotions!) than usual.
Since I’ve never really been efficient, the “to do” lists were even more overwhelming during our hard times. To retain sanity, I had to pull in and focus on caring for my loved ones and myself. The larger community of this world was going to have to wait for my time and efforts.
Even after a few months of the slower pace of the empty nest, I’m still saying “no” to many requests. I have the time on the calendar—I do—but I just feel pulled to spend time here in my home where, thanks to some of our recent work, the chaos is no longer overwhelming. It’s as if the adrenaline has not quite left my system and I have to take my pace down to a crawl to relearn that not everything requires a “fight or flight” response. I’ve had to be so flexible and reactive for so long that I find it especially hard to give up planned down time—even when people really need help. I also know that there will likely be more surprises on Mom’s final journey.
This is where the little angel and devil begin fighting over my shoulders about what I do and don’t deserve. I can’t tell if this is a moral dilemma or a health dilemma—or both. Part of me feels as if I am acting selfishly right now, but another part is not sure I am recovered enough yet from all the twists in my own journey to reach out to others very often.
As it turns out, lately, thanks to the little physical ironies of aging, I’ve found myself awake when I would prefer to be asleep. Since my usual get-to-sleep techniques don’t seem to be working, I’ve figured out I might as well spend the extra time praying. If I can’t put my hands to work doing for others, maybe I can put them together in prayer.
All my life I have been much better at giving through actions versus with contemplative offerings. My everyday actions were my prayers. I pray that, in the near future, I will have worked through the scar tissue enough to return to living more as the spontaneous, giving person I used to try to be.
In the meanwhile, just give me Jesus . . . and a little more time.
(c) 2010 Sherman Lambert
This week in Denver it seems it’s been the week to talk about suicide—which is not something our society likes to talk about until forced to do so. I’ll consider myself forced to jump on the bandwagon—or at least compelled to do so.
Last Sunday Sherman and I walked with a group from Bethany Lutheran Church in the Second Wind Run. As I mentioned before the event, the Second Wind organization seeks to prevent teenage suicides by providing mental health resources for students who may not have access to the care they need. And as much as it might have seemed that I was just enjoying a warm day exercising and connecting with people I know, trust me, the tears came later.
That the event was followed by the suicide of a young Denver Bronco, Kenny McKinley, kept those tears fresh as the topic continued to be discussed throughout the week.
One of the bravest pieces I read was not informational as much as confessional. Long-time Denver Post columnist Woody Paige shared his brush with the suicide dance—and gave just another example of a person considering taking his life when the world would say that he should have had plenty to live for.
That’s the thing, it’s just not that easy to look around and know who is harboring those feelings. We’ve got to do a better job of really hearing what people are saying—and making it OK for people to express those feelings so we can do our best to help them before it’s too late.
And when it comes to young people, it’s even trickier to figure out who is in trouble and who isn’t—even for the professionals.
First of all, what doesn’t always get presented in informational checklists about depression or suicide risk in youths is that the young don’t always look the same as more mature people do when depressed or suicidal. Life in adolescence is lived in the moment—and the swings from high to low can be immense.
A student can keep up the grades, activities, appearance, and achievement levels, in general believing that life is worth living, but one or two bad events can turn his/her life view upside down. They don’t always have the life experience to know that the good events will come again.
And their peers, who are also still growing, may range from less than helpful to outright harmful. My own kids talked about how during Suicide Prevention Week some people roamed the school halls who felt nothing of making jokes about people who felt suicidal—as if there’s something funny about someone feeling hopeless.
The other thing I truly believe is that we have to be the advocates for our loved ones, even if the professionals think we are somehow too jumpy to see the good changes. But when you live around the depression, you see a whole lot more than a professional can see in one hour once a week. You have to trust your own gut, too. You might agree that 90% of the time your loved one is OK, but you know that for 10% of the time, it’s anybody’s guess what will happen. You see what happens when the mask comes off . . . and often what you see frightens you.
I wish there were more answers for how to help people before it’s too late. The good news is that we are finally talking about this word that used to be whispered and hidden in shame. More of us are paying attention—which is good because we just can’t stand losing them—any of them.
P.S. I should add something more than talking about suicide as something we can do to help those in need. We can also direct them to call the national suicide hotline, 1-800-273-TALK, which is available 24 hours a day.
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