Content warning: Suicide is mentioned in this issue.
If you or someone you know is in crisis or at risk for suicide, call or text 988 or chat online at 988lifeline.org. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline provides free and confidential emotional support to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in the United States.
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In a survivor’s group, Sherry heard the word prevention for the first time. “All we knew how to do was react after a suicide happens,” she remembers. “Everybody assumed that you couldn’t prevent something like suicide and that we should not raise the subject with someone at risk because that might put ideas in their head.”
Over a long life, each of us will hit a rough patch at some point. When isolation and hopelessness follow, the small connections are all the more important: a simple greeting, a check-in phone call, a knock at the door.
“The person who will save your life is not your doctor or therapist, but your neighbor, friend, spouse—someone you live with, someone who is part of your natural network and who you feel comfortable talking to,” Sherry says. We are trying to bring the issue of suicide out of the darkness and end silence and stigma around it.”
This message is an excerpt from “Out of the darkness” by Anne Basye in the September 2017 issue of Gather magazine.
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