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Key points
- We don't know what to say when someone attempts suicide.
- And there isn't a "one right thing" to say.
- Offering a supportive presence can be better than saying a thing.
Mental Health Awareness Month in 2022 strikes me as a total understatement. If you have survived the past two-plus years, you can’t not be aware of mental health. Folks who had never before experienced mental health challenges have been pushed to their absolute limits between March 2020 and the present. For anyone who had existing vulnerabilities, even just a touch of anxiety or a passing glance at depression, the time we are in is so hard.
Mental Health Awareness Month in 2022 means a barrage of mental health awareness posts on social media, articles in both mainstream and more fringe publications, and a lot of people being very open in public spaces about their personal experiences with mental health struggles. We are solidly in the time of “it’s okay not to be okay,” and it’s hard not to notice.
When a friend asked me if I’d read writer Sonia Weiser’s op-ed in the Washington Post on her experience of sharing her suicide attempt, I asked, with honesty, “Should I?”
What slowed me down from reading the article was the headline in the print edition of the paper: “Don’t know what to say about my suicide attempt? That’s okay.”
It felt like a punch, like someone intentionally tripping me, something very jarring. I didn’t read the piece right away.
Later, I went to find it online and noticed the headline was remarkably different: “No one knows what to say when I share I tried to kill myself. That’s okay.”
This one I read.
The print headline felt so personal, but the online version felt authentic. Yes, this is something about which no one knows what to say. Tell me more.
“With a suicide attempt, there’s no script,” Weiser writes. “There’s not even an outline.”
When she shared her attempt, the responses she received ranged from “glad you’re still alive” to people sharing their own suicidal ideation or attempt experiences.
She didn’t know what to say to people who shared that they too thought about killing themselves. The “you shared yours, now I’ll share mine” situation was complicated. When people shared their attempt experiences with her, she sometimes felt like it diminished her situation.
She, as someone who had just experienced suicidal ideation, went on to attempt suicide, and as she said, “then gone right back to where you started,” didn’t know what to say. How would others know what to say?
The “That’s okay” in the headline is the heart of Weiser’s piece. She ends by stating, “But perhaps the reason there is no response rulebook for a suicide attempt is there’s no good response, other than maybe to sit and listen and admit when you don’t know what to say at all.”
When someone is in so much pain that they want to end their life, perhaps the best thing to do is what therapists call “holding space.” It is that pause of quiet, not needing to fill the gaping silence with words. It is allowing for feelings that are so hard to bear. It is listening, taking in, not needing to fix. Not dismissing. Not pushing away. Not trying to make better.
Sometimes permission to just be in a very broken space is what is needed. Acceptance, it is not wrong to be in a place of such pain. Awareness that it must be awful to feel that way.
Weiser’s right. There isn’t a right thing to say. There is instead an essential being with, a willingness to bear witness to pain, an admitting that sometimes there is nothing to say at all.
Copyright 2022 Elana Premack Sandler, All Rights Reserved
