Thank you for writing this, John. Suicide awareness/prevention is a topic I write about from time to time. My most comprehensive piece to date, https://medium.com/illumination/dizain-of-suicide-72bcde4dc8d8, which I wrote almost two years ago, starts with this poem I created for the essay:
Title: We Are Only As Sick As Our Secrets
"Suicide provides no relief at all
On ledge imagining end to my pain
Pavement streaming toward me will not end fall
Just before break solution becomes plain
My penance to help others to refrain
Thought my loved ones better off without me
Truth’s too likely they’ll header into sea
Had I known that death cannot be cheated
Baring deep secrets would cure malady
Death would not have left loved ones defeated"
Much of the poem stems from channeled conversations I had with my friend Andrew's soul several years after he suicided. Conversations which, as I discuss in my essay, helped me the following year get through my own deep episodic depression and suicidal thoughts without them becoming ideations and acting on them. I have had the thought that "My penance to help others refrain" not only applies to work Andrew's soul does in "heaven" but may also apply to me--perhaps working out some past life karma has part of my dharma in this life to write about suicide with an eye toward awareness/prevention.
I highlighted these words from your essay here because I heard the same thought a few months ago when I heard Clancy Martin interviewed on NPR. He wrote a book "How Not to Kill Yourself." He's a philosopher who has attempted suicide many times. I purchased it but have not yet read it. I purchased it because he said in the interview how important it is to tell people who have suicidal thoughts that it is ok to have them because when it is discussed in the open then one can say to the patient, it's ok to have the thoughts but you don't have to act on them today. He says that getting the patient to the place of it's ok to have the thoughts takes away the guilt and shame over having the thoughts--guilt and shame which can hasten the attempts. I think that ties into your thoughts expressed about it's ridiculous not to be able to talk about it because of the flawed belief that talking about it might make it more likely to happen. I expect that after I read his book I will find many more pearls of wisdom, and I will write about them.
If you or anyone else reading this comment is inclined to read my work but if the above 17-minute essay is too long (it happens to be my most read and engaged with post on all metrics (claps, clappers, comments, internal views, reads and reading time), here is a shorter one. I also used the MASH song but I titled the piece, Suicide Is Not Painless. https://medium.com/p/ac4c0c999e81 It hits most of the points of my longer essay but without the details of Andrew's and my friendship and it also doesn't go into the details behind my episodic depression, largely caused by my toxic relationship with a borderline. The shorter piece also doesn't delve into the work of Viktor Frankl, which I believe is very helpful toward suicide prevention. I know having read Man's Search for Meaning before my depression helped me through it. Here is one quote from Frankl's book that I use in my longer essay--it also connects to the words I highlighted in your piece:
“It turned out there was a solution to their problem, an answer to their question, a meaning to their life.
Even if things only take such a good turn in one of a thousand cases, who can guarantee that in your case it will not happen one day, sooner or later? But in the first place, you have to live to see the day on which it may happen, so you have to survive in order to see that day dawn, and from now on the responsibility for survival does not leave you."
John, I'm publishing this comment to my profile and will be sending it to my subscribers and I hope they hit the link to your story that Medium auto boxes at the top of the comment when read in my profile and that it leads to people reading your important and vulnerably written essay.
