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  • A Jail Increased Extreme Isolation to Stop Suicides. More People Killed Themselves

    A Jail Increased Extreme Isolation to Stop Suicides. More People Killed Themselves

    The “lonely cell,” as she called it, broke her in less than a day. She apologized. She told deputies she’d learned her lesson. More importantly, Taylor said, “I was just being quiet.”

    ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

    BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — Shackled at the wrists and ankles, Christine Taylor followed a red line on the basement floor directing her to the elevator at Kern County’s central jail. She heard groans and cries from among the hundred people locked above, a wail echoing through the shaft.

    It was minutes before daybreak on a Monday morning in May 2017 as the elevator lifted her toward the voices. Jail staff had assigned Taylor to something called “suicide watch,” a block of single cells where she’d be alone 24 hours a day. The sound of other people would soon become a luxury.

    What a stupid mistake, Taylor fumed.

    Earlier, she had argued with jail staff during her booking at the downtown jail. Have you ever attempted suicide, a deputy asked. Taylor glared back, her hands trembling. She had never been in serious trouble with law enforcement, and she considered her arrest that night a gross misunderstanding.

    “Do you think I’m going to try to kill myself with my shirt?” Taylor responded, flippantly. “Maybe.”

    Her answer got her a glimpse of how the jail handles people it perceives as suicide risks.

    Within minutes, deputies moved Taylor into a changing room on the third floor and had her strip naked. They handed her just two items: paper-thin clothes that come apart under pressure and a blue yoga mat.

    Exhausted and scared, she followed orders, walked down a hall and stepped into a bathroom-sized isolation cell. The door slammed behind her. The floors felt colder inside, and a mold smell came up from the toilet-sink fixture. A bed was mounted to the brick wall. Hazy fluorescent lights reflected off the ash-white paint. And, as Taylor soon learned, jail staff never turned them off.

    To shield herself, she crawled under the bed and put the yoga mat over her torso like a blanket.

    She pressed her eyelids shut but couldn’t block the glare or the rush of tears.

    “Cruel and Unusual” Punishment; No Limits

    Each year, the Kern County Sheriff’s Office sends hundreds of people into this kind of suicide watch isolation. Inmates awaiting trial spend weeks and sometimes months in solitary, according to state and county records. When those cells fill up, deputies place people into “overflow” areas, rooms with nothing more than four rubberized walls and a grate in the floor for bodily fluids. They receive no mental health treatment, only a yoga mat to rest on.

    Kern County sheriff’s officials say they turned to isolation rooms to help prevent deaths after a spate of jail suicides that started in 2011.

    This wasn’t what state lawmakers envisioned when they undertook a sweeping criminal justice overhaul nearly a decade ago to alleviate what the U.S. Supreme Court deemed the “cruel and unusual” conditions for people in overcrowded state prisons. Those prisoners, the court found, would languish for months, even years, in “telephone-booth-sized cages” without treatment, resulting in “needless suffering and death.”

    California’s reforms, dubbed “realignment,” diverted thousands of offenders to county jails so, among other things, the corrections system could see to basic health needs and meet minimum constitutional requirements. That shift also transferred billions of dollars to local sheriffs to better run jails.

    Some, like Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood, have rejected warnings from the state to improve the outdated and often brutal forms of isolation that helped trigger the state’s prison crisis.

    The state can’t do much about it, a McClatchy and ProPublica investigation found. The California Board of State and Community Corrections, which is supposed to maintain minimum jail standards and inspect local facilities, has no legal authority to force local lockups to meet those standards or ensure inmates are physically safe and mentally sound.

    Last year, for instance, a state board inspector called out the Kern County Sheriff’s Office for 27 violations, a majority of them for using yoga mats instead of mattresses in suicide watch cells. But his letter read more like an invitation than a warning. “If you choose to address the noncompliant issues,” he wrote, “please provide your corrective plan to the BSCC for documentation in your inspection file.”

    The sheriff’s office disregarded the findings and bought more than 100 additional mats this year, agency records show.

    “It’s completely unethical, and counter to clinical evidence for what people need,” Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer of New York City jails, said of Kern County’s suicide watch. “For any human, that represents punishment and humiliation.”

    Isolation practices save lives, Kern County officials argue. But records show the strategy didn’t work; inmates continued to kill themselves.

    In one case, an inmate hanged himself in a suicide watch cell, after grabbing an extension cord that guards left within reach. Since 2011, 11 others have taken their lives in other parts of the jail. During the past four years, Kern County had the highest suicide rate of the state’s 10 largest jail systems, with 5.61 deaths per 100,000 bookings, close to twice the statewide rate, an analysis by ProPublica and McClatchy found. Overall, inmate suicides declined slightly in California county jails over that period.

    The state’s board has no authority to investigate deaths in local lockups. The agency answers to the Legislature, which has not held a single hearing about jail inspections or the dozens of gruesome deaths in facilities across the state in the past eight years.

    Texas and New Jersey, meanwhile, have boards that regularly examine such deaths.

    “California is flying blind without a state regulatory agency that has meaningful enforcement authority. It’s time to correct this institutional failure,” said Ross Mirkarimi, the former San Francisco sheriff who is now a jail consultant. “It is a perfect opportunity for the governor to arc from the era of realignment into a new period of reform for California jails.”

    Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, chairs the California Senate Public Safety Committee. She voted in support of realignment in 2011, when she was in the Assembly. Skinner said “there’s a lot of frustration” about how passive the state board has been in overseeing county jails.

    “The sheriffs do have the authority here, and they could do the right thing,” Skinner said in an interview. “We as the state definitely have to improve our oversight.”

    Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, in a written statement, said Kern County’s jail practices are unacceptable, and local officials should reform their policies.

    “County jails should not hold people in their custody in isolation indefinitely, no matter what the situation is,” the governor’s statement reads. “This is troubling, and it is this Administration’s hope that the findings in the reports issued by the Board of State and Community Corrections will catalyze change and reforms at the local level, where authority to make those changes ultimately resides.”

    Many local jails across the country use variations of suicide watch to remove hazards and increase monitoring of vulnerable inmates. But Kern County uses isolation far more aggressively, and often exclusively, to prevent suicide deaths. “In my career, this is how suicide watch is done,” said Chief Deputy Tyson Davis, the jails’ top administrator. “They go into a cell by themselves with as few points to hurt themselves on as possible.”

    That runs counter to best practices advocated by mental health experts, who are increasingly critical of isolating and stripping people considering suicide. A growing body of research shows the practice can harm a person’s mental health and actually increase their suicide risk once they are released from watch.

    Youngblood, the sheriff, declined multiple interview requests, and his office declined to discuss specific cases, including Taylor’s.

    After McClatchy and ProPublica asked questions about Kern County’s isolation practices and its use of yoga mats, the sheriff’s office replaced the mats with blankets that are resistant to rips. And Davis said in September that he is working to add mental health specialists to inmate screening, which deputies alone have long conducted. The new clinical positions are not funded yet.

    Bill Walker, Kern County’s behavioral health director, is in charge of mental health care in the jails. When asked in August if isolation without clinical treatment is harmful, Walker replied, “I would be the first to agree with you.” However, he continued, Kern County’s suicide watch is better than the indifference institutions inflicted decades ago on the people they detained.

    “We used to bury people in the state hospitals in unmarked graves,” Walker said. “The humanity of safety is to keep them alive.”

    This account is based on interviews with Kern County’s top jail administrators and deputies, county behavioral health directors, former inmates and families of the deceased. The sheriff’s office took reporters on tours of its jail facilities and to see the suicide watch cells. McClatchy and ProPublica also reviewed and analyzed state inspection documents, autopsy reports, court filings, jail purchasing records and state data on in-custody deaths.

    An Uptick in Suicides, Then Yoga Mats

    In 2011, Lorena Diaz tried to end her life by jumping off a highway bridge. She survived, and a county mental health clinic released her, apparently no more stable than before.

    Desperate, her mother called Diaz’s parole agent to ask for help, to find a place where her daughter would be safe. The agent alerted local police, who promptly arrested and booked Diaz into the downtown Bakersfield jail, according to sheriff’s office records. But within two days of her arrival, staff found the 29-year-old mother hanging from a bed sheet tied to a wall vent.

    The death was the first in a string of suicides over the next year: A 42-year-old man charged with crashing into a sheriff’s patrol car cut his wrist with a razor and bled out while his cellmates slept. A 20-year-old murder defendant who told deputies he heard voices hanged himself in an isolation cell.

    In response to the suicides, Youngblood and his jail staff began sending far more people to suicide watch cells, records show. The practice continues to this day.

    “The tripwire to get on suicide watch is fairly light,” said Lt. Ian Silva, who oversees many of the jails’ day-to-day operations. “We don’t want to take any chances.”

    The sheriff’s office also added a new feature to its suicide protocol. In March 2012, the agency purchased 25 blue yoga mats, finance records show, and ordered 109 more in July of that year. The mats are a half-inch of foam designed to cushion people doing floor exercises.

    They became the only thing Kern County’s suicidal inmates got to sleep on, besides the cement floor or metal bunk. They were also a signal that isolation was no longer a fleeting experience. People began spending longer periods of time on suicide watch.

    In state prisons, at-risk inmates receive mattresses. Silva said the sheriff’s office chose to give yoga mats instead to ensure inmates cannot impede deputies from entering cells. “Our big concern with full mattresses is barricading,” Silva said.

    Because people with suicidal thoughts often spend their time searching for methods to end their lives, jail experts say suicide watch cells should not contain anything a person can use to asphyxiate or cut themselves.

    Kern County deputies violated that rule in August 2013, after deputies booked Luis Campos on a stack of domestic violence charges. Campos had tried to kill himself before, so deputies put him in the watch cell closest to their desk.

    The aging facility’s air-conditioning system regularly faltered in the summer, internal investigation records show. So deputies rigged up a portable fan with an extension cord and duct tape to blow air at their watch station as the afternoon heat topped 90 degrees.

    They found Campos dead during morning rounds two days later, dangling from the cell bars, an extension cord noosed around his neck.

    Until last year, the sheriff’s office had only 11 specialized suicide watch cells across its three jail facilities, and they were always full. So deputies began using what are called safety cells as suicide watch overflow.

    Safety cells are closet-sized rooms with nothing but four walls and a grate in the floor. No bed. No water fountain or toilet. They’re temporary storage boxes for people who’ve lost control.

    California jail standards say safety cells should only hold inmates who are damaging the building or showing an active intent to hurt themselves or others. Medical staff members are required to evaluate each inmate within 12 hours, and a jail administrator needs to reapprove holding them in the safety cell every 24 hours thereafter.

    By early 2015, Kern County’s jail deputies were sending nearly three dozen people a week to suicide watch, a 29% increase from a year earlier. Some were removed from watch in hours. Others stayed for days.

    Still, elsewhere in the jails, the suicides continued. That January, a 31-year-old man hanged himself. He’d first tried to kill himself days earlier, a nearby inmate later told detectives. The following September, a 25-year-old man with a history of depression died the same way in a group cell after telling his parents he would kill himself if they did not bail him out.

    Deputies said they were unaware that either posed a suicide risk, according to autopsy records.

    Meanwhile, state inspectors from the corrections board made their routine tours of Kern County’s jails and reviewed their internal records every two years. By the time an inspector arrived in June 2016, 10 inmates had taken their lives in 5 1/2 years. The inspector did not mention the deaths in the reports. And in evaluating safety cells, one of the reports simply noted “documentation for the use of those cells were good.”

    Two more men hanged themselves in January and February 2017, as deputies sent upward of 36 inmates a week to isolation cells.

    Christine Taylor was soon among those on suicide watch.

    “When Am I Going to Get Out?”

    Keys banging on the door woke her that first morning.

    “Taylor!” the deputy making the morning rounds shouted. She crawled from underneath the cell bed, where she had been hiding from the lights, and moved toward the metal door. She looked out the smudged plexiglass window. It was like peering through a porthole on a space shuttle, she said.

    The person on the other side wouldn’t open the door. Kern County jail staff almost never do during these routine cell checks and brief behavioral health evaluations. So Taylor crouched on her knees and spoke to the specialist through the food-tray slot in the door. She said she was not suicidal. She was only on suicide watch, she pleaded, because she hadn’t cooperated with deputies during intake.

    “When am I going to get out?” Taylor asked as the staffer walked away.

    “Well,” she heard, “we’ll see.”

    Police had arrested her on suspicion of elder abuse. Her father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, claimed that she attacked him during a middle-of-the-night disagreement. But Taylor, then 47, had video showing the opposite; in fact, officers had responded to similar calls at their home before, for offenses imagined or badly misunderstood. This time, deputies refused to watch the tape.

    Now Taylor was alone, a dozen yards from the deputy desk. She tried to sleep. It was the only thing to do — inmates on suicide watch in Kern County don’t get books to read or recreation time to interact with other inmates because even that could be too dangerous, sheriff’s officials said.

    So she covered her eyes from the light with her clothes and rolled up her yoga mat to use as a pillow. About four hours crawled by after she entered the jail when staff returned to the door and said they were moving her.

    For a moment, Taylor felt a rush of excitement. She thought about all the things this might mean: a pillow, a toothbrush, a shower, maybe even a cellmate, someone to talk to.

    Deputies instead led her around the corner to another suicide watch cell, next to a deputy’s desk. The furnishings were the same: bed, toilet and yoga mat. But the move shortened the distance the deputies had to walk as they signed off on the required twice-every-30-minutes checks. And she could see staff and inmates walking out of the elevators past the window. There were people around, Taylor thought, people to hear about how she’d been wronged.

    “Innocent until proven guilty!” she screamed, calling out to other inmates to join her protest. No one did. “I didn’t get my phone call! I didn’t get my phone call!” Taylor chanted.

    Her confusion had given way to resentment. There was nothing the jailers could do to her that would be worse than being in that cell, she thought, so Taylor vowed to make everybody in earshot hear her outrage. She’d become part of the collective wail that greeted her just hours earlier.

    Jail staff ignored her.

    Taylor tried another tactic: She ripped a piece of material from her paper-thin shirt and fashioned it into a small nooselike loop. She said she dangled it in the porthole window. (Jail staff wrote that she put it around her neck, sheriff’s office records show.) Deputies stormed the cell and restrained her, Taylor said, and records show staff replaced the clothes with a hunter green, tear-resistant suicide smock.

    The following day, around noon on Tuesday, jail records show deputies transferred her to a punishment cell, known as administrative segregation.

    “If They’re Committed, It’s Hard to Stop Them”

    Kern County’s behavioral health department doesn’t provide treatment to inmates on suicide watch, aside from dispensing medication for previously diagnosed conditions, said Walker, the department’s director. Last year, the county agency doubled its jail staff, which now employs about 40 caregivers.

    Counties usually have a written agreement with the behavioral health provider working in the jails. The contract — among the most foundational parts of jail-medical operations — dictates what the provider will do, as well as the consequences for failing to deliver services. But in Kern County, the jail has had no such agreement for “several years,” Walker said. That means there’s no written accountability for when things go wrong. County officials maintain a contract isn’t necessary.

    The behavioral health department does not reliably track how many people have attempted suicide in the cells, why people were placed in isolation or how long they stayed, he said. It also does not keep data on inmates sent to outside hospitals because of mental illness.

    After every death of a mentally ill inmate, behavioral health and jail staff meet to review the case and determine if there are ways to prevent similar fatalities in the future. However, officials have not examined the jails’ suicide deaths as a whole at any point since 2011, Silva and Walker confirmed.

    During an interview in August, the county’s top behavioral health officials demurred when asked why Kern County’s jail suicide deaths had increased dramatically.

    “I don’t think I have an answer I could give you at the moment,” Walker said. Deputies don’t send all suicidal inmates to behavioral health staff. Greg Gonzales, head of correctional care, said suicide prevention cannot keep all inmates safe. “If they’re committed, it’s hard to stop them,” he said.

    At the sheriff’s office, Silva partly attributed the increased deaths to “bad luck.”

    The behavioral health department provides inmates the best care it can afford, Gonzales said.

    Over the past two decades, researchers have examined suicides in local jails, where death rates are often higher than among the general public and in prisons. They’ve consistently opposed the use of isolation, saying it increases the likelihood that inmates will attempt to hurt themselves. A guide from the World Health Organization states, “Prisoners at risk should not be left alone, but observation and companionship should be provided.”

    The key to keeping people safe in local jails is paying attention, said Sheriff Tom Dart from Cook County, Illinois, whose Chicago-area jails are increasingly a model for humane practices. Dart said he eliminated isolation as punishment when his department’s data showed the practice actually led to more rule violations and security problems.

    “If you value something as a society, you study it,” Dart said. “You analyze it. You spend money on the data. If you don’t care about something, you don’t study it.”

    A 2014 statistical analysis of New York City’s jail inmates found serious mental illness and solitary confinement were the strongest factors in suicide attempts.

    Lindsay Hayes, a national expert on correctional suicide prevention, said jails use isolation with good intentions. “I truly believe that correctional officials and mental health and medical officials and leadership are not intentionally trying to punish people, to create tortuous types of environments,” Hayes said. “They’re just being extremely careful and, in many ways, over-protective and over-reactive.”

    A “Lonely Cell” and Endless Daylight

    Taylor felt worlds away from another human being. In the punishment cell, around the corner from suicide watch, no one walked by. She couldn’t hear voices or the clatter of activity. Distance muted everything.

    “It was the loneliest feeling I’ve ever had,” she said. “That feeling is what made me decide that I wanted to be good and go back to the cell behind the deputies.”

    The “lonely cell,” as she called it, broke her in less than a day. She apologized. She told deputies she’d learned her lesson. More importantly, Taylor said, “I was just being quiet.”

    Deputies moved her back to the suicide watch cell by the desk that Wednesday morning, two days after being booked into the facility, according to jail records.

    She tried to measure the hour by watching how much sunlight streamed onto the jail hallway floor. Peering through the window, she learned to tell time by making mental notes about when one deputy’s shift ended and another person’s began.

    She marked the hours with scraps of food and shreds of a paper plate, but it was all guesswork. The constant light triggered sleep deprivation and confusion. Taylor had lost track of just how long she’d been in Kern County’s jail.

    Bedbugs, Yoga Mats and a Shrug

    In California, this kind of isolation is entirely permissible.

    To bolster oversight of county jails and distribute funds in the realignment era, state lawmakers created the corrections board. Every two years, it sends an inspector to each facility to make sure sheriffs and their officers are following the rules.

    Steven Wicklander, an inspector for the state board, arrived at the Kern County jails in June 2018, a year after Taylor’s arrest. The central receiving jail was in the midst of a bedbug infestation. The sheriff’s staff was not regularly cleaning cell mattresses, Wicklander wrote in his notes. They handed out dirty beds and only washed them when the mattresses were “contaminated.”

    Conditions weren’t much better in the newest jail, opened last year and built with $100 million in state funds to cope with an influx of inmates serving longer sentences in county facilities under realignment. Its expansive infirmary is primarily for suicide prevention, and its 14 isolation cells were constantly full.

    Over three days, Wicklander toured the suicide watch halls at each jail facility. He saw maxed-out cells and deputies putting suicide watch inmates in safety cells for more than a week straight.

    “The safety cell cannot be used as a substitution for treatment,” Wicklander wrote in his final report in August 2018.

    There were violations at every stop. Kern County jails are so understaffed the sheriff’s office requires deputies to work overtime to cover the shifts, causing deputies to fall behind on safety and security checks. Suicide watch and safety cell practices, particularly the yoga mats, were against the rules.

    Agency officials do not have authority to make county leaders change and generally see themselves as partners, not regulators, said Allison Ganter, deputy director overseeing the inspection team.

    “We are not enforcement,” she said.

    Youngblood and his staff waited eight months to respond to Wicklander’s report.

    They wrote back this April and rejected the board’s findings that yoga mats violated the standards. The sheriff’s office spent $4,500 to buy 60 more mats the same month, finance records show.

    Yoga mats, they wrote, provide people on suicide watch “the comfort of padding, albeit minimal, in an environment which is uncomfortable by design.”

    A New Caregiver, and a Long Walk Home

    As the week went on, Taylor tried to talk to anyone who walked by her cell. Once, a woman sat near her window, and they chatted briefly about being arrested and their legal cases. “She was telling me her story, which was almost like my story,” Taylor recalled.

    She tried to get the staff talking. Taylor said she noticed a picture of a puppy on a deputy’s monitor and complimented the pet’s cuteness. The deputy scolded her and turned the screen away.

    “The most exciting part of the day was when they would give me my food because there was actually somebody there,” Taylor said.

    Saturday marked her sixth day in the jail. That morning, a different behavioral health specialist met with Taylor and decided that her suicide risk — however deputies calculated it initially — was gone. She moved to a space with the rest of the inmates in the jail’s general population ward, where she was thrilled to receive a toothbrush, soap, clothes and a mattress.

    Deputies also gave her access to a phone for the first time since she’d been put on suicide watch early Monday morning. Taylor called her mom, who helped arrange for her to post the $35,000 bond. (Two weeks later, prosecutors dropped the charges. Taylor sued the county for wrongful detention, but the suit was dismissed.)

    The sheriff’s office said it is not permitted to discuss her case under state law and would not answer reporters’ questions about her time in jail.

    It can take hours to be formally released from custody, and oftentimes inmates are released in the middle of the night without reliable transportation. Late Sunday, the doors of the downtown Bakersfield jail swung open for Taylor. A 4-mile walk in the dark awaited her.

    She had been in sweats when police arrested her and didn’t have a bra to wear for the trek home. Taylor asked if she could borrow one of the jail-issued ones.

    “It’s bad luck to take anything home from here,” a deputy replied.

    “Good advice,” she said.
     

    If you or someone you know needs help, here are a few resources:

    • Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255

    • Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741

    This originally appeared at ProPublica

     

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Over-The-Counter Meds Increasingly Used By Young People For Self-Poisoning

    Over-The-Counter Meds Increasingly Used By Young People For Self-Poisoning

    Over an 18-year period, U.S. poison control centers reported more than 1.5 million self-poisoning suicide attempts by people 10-25 years old.

    Young people are increasingly using easily accessible over-the-counter drugs to attempt suicide, according to a new analysis.

    In May, it was reported in the journal Pediatrics that over the last decade, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of suicide attempts by self-poisoning. From 2000 to 2018, U.S. poison control centers reported 1,677,435 self-poisoning suicide attempts by people 10-25 years old. Young women and girls made up the majority of cases.

    The OTC Drugs Involved In The Attempts

    A new study from the same team, published in Clinical Toxicology, examined the substances used in these attempts.

    The most common substances included over-the-counter (OTC) analgesics (pain relievers) such as Tylenol or Advil, and antihistamines. The study authors noted that these drugs are “widely available over-the-counter with no restrictions regarding access.”

    Of the 1,677,435 suicide attempts with poison, 27.5% of them involved OTC analgesics. (Opioids, however, were involved in far fewer cases.)

    Vox noted, “But when the researchers looked at just ‘serious outcomes’—this includes needing medical treatment, or symptoms that don’t resolve quickly, or death—over the counter pain medicines were involved in 37.3% of the cases.” This highlights the potential harm that easily accessible drugs can cause.

    Serious Outcomes

    Vox noted that while suicide attempts by poisoning are fatal less than 5% of the time, they are still traumatic and can still cause serious damage.

    “Some of the more commonly accessible medicines were able to produce some of the most serious outcomes among young people,” said John Ackerman, study co-author and Suicide Prevention Coordinator at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

    Ackerman said that parents and caregivers should talk to their children about their mental and emotional health.

    Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death among American teenagers. Between 2009 and 2017, the number of high schoolers considering suicide increased by 25%. The number of high schoolers’ suicide deaths increased by 33% during this same time period.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Let’s Talk About Suicide

    Let’s Talk About Suicide

    Changing misconceptions and long-held stereotypes won’t happen overnight, but making the conscious decision to talk openly and honestly about suicide is a strong start.

    Suicide is everywhere. We hear about it on the news, we see the headlines, we read the sad statistics. But here’s the thing: We don’t talk about suicide. We’re not having the kind of open, honest conversations that will start breaking down harmful prejudice and stigma – about people who die from suicide and also the people left behind.

    We know the facts and figures, but that’s only part of the story. We don’t know how to actually communicate about suicide to learn what’s behind the statistics. We can’t fill in the blanks because we’re afraid: We worry that we’ll say the wrong thing, or unintentionally offend someone. So instead we say nothing at all. But staying silent is far more damaging; it further stigmatizes suicide, which is already misunderstood and has so much judgment attached to it in the first place.

    Start a Conversation

    September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month – a time the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) describes as a time to share stories and resources in an effort to start meaningful conversations on the taboo of suicide.

    “We use this month to reach out to those affected by suicide, raise awareness and connect individuals with suicidal ideation to treatment services,” reads NAMI’s website. “It is also important to ensure that individuals, friends and families have access to the resources they need to discuss suicide prevention.”

    Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States overall, but it’s the second leading cause of death in people ages 10-34. In 2017, there were twice as many suicides (47,173) in the U.S. as there were homicides (19,510).

    How Can We Help Prevent a Leading Cause of Death if We Can’t Talk About It?

    There’s a catch-22 when it comes to suicide: People are reluctant to talk about it because it’s a sensitive and deeply personal topic, but it remains a sensitive topic because people don’t talk about it. So we find ourselves tip-toeing around suicide altogether, which doesn’t help anyone. For years, I’d find myself at a loss for words whenever someone would mention suicide, so I’ve been there.

    And yet, I also found myself desperate to talk about it after my father died from suicide in 2003. In the months and years following his death, I began to see up close just how much people are unwilling to talk about suicide. I never realized just how uncomfortable the topic makes people, whether they’d personally lost someone to suicide or they’d seen one of the many headlines about celebrities who die by suicide. It really is a taboo topic. 

    How can we help prevent a leading cause of death if we can’t even talk about it? And how can we help people who have been left behind if we can’t acknowledge the cause of their pain?

    That’s why I’ve been trying to change suicide’s shameful stigma. For the last 16 years, I’ve been vocal, unafraid to talk about the very things people don’t want to talk about. In the beginning, I talked about my father as a way to process my grief. I saw it as a way to keep my father’s memory alive, but as the years went on, I began to realize that my talking about his suicide wasn’t just for me. Sure, it may have started out that way, but the more statistics I read and the more stories I heard, the more I learned how many people are affected by suicide. I began to feel a responsibility to share my story.

    I Want People to Know They’re Not Alone

    Today, I talk about suicide because I want people to know they’re not alone. I talk about suicide because I want people who have lost a loved one and people who suffer from suicidal ideation to know that they shouldn’t feel ashamed or like there’s something wrong with them. And not talking about it? That silence only reinforces harmful stigmas and can even be a significant barrier to someone seeking help.

    Instead of silence, we need to start regularly engaging in an open and honest dialogue, including debunking common myths associated with suicide. For example, misconceptions like the belief that most suicides happen without warning, and that people who die from suicide are selfish and “taking the easy way out” are false and incredibly damaging.

    So where do we go from here? Perhaps the best place to start is to realize that we all have a responsibility to create a safe space, says Forbes contributor Margie Warrell, who lost her brother to suicide.

    “While we may not all suffer from mental illness, we each have a role to play in ensuring that those who do suffer feel less afraid to reach out and get the support they need in the moments when they need it most,” she wrote in 2018. “If people felt as comfortable talking about their PTSD, bipolar or anxiety as they did talking about their eczema or tennis elbow, it would markedly reduce the suffering of those with mental illness and the ability of those around them to support them.”

    The stigma of suicide is far too strong, and any chance you get to talk about it is another opportunity to break down those walls of stereotypes. Don’t say the word suicide in a hushed tone, as if you’re talking about something you shouldn’t; the statistics show that most people have been impacted by suicide in some way. And try not to lie about how your loved one died because you think it will be easier than dealing with the looks and questions from people. When you lie, you’re sending the message that what your loved one did was shameful, and that further contributes to the misconceptions and prejudice people have about suicide. It might be difficult to be open about this, but it’s also freeing (and it gets easier each time you do it). 

    Mental Illness Is Physical Illness

    I’ll never understand why people don’t treat mental health the same as physical health. Why is someone “heroic” for battling cancer, but “weak” for dying from suicide? At its core, mental illness is a physical illness, so we can’t separate the two. The more we start talking about mental illness in the same way we talk about physical illnesses like cancer or diabetes, the more we lessen the stigma surrounding suicide. Changing misconceptions and long-held stereotypes won’t happen overnight, but making the conscious decision to talk openly and honestly about suicide is a strong starting point. 

    If you are in crisis or are experiencing difficult or suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273 TALK (8255).

    If you’re uncomfortable talking on the phone, you can also text NAMI to 741-741 to be connected to a free, trained crisis counselor on the Crisis Text Line.

    For more information about suicide prevention, or to get involved and learn how to help someone in crisis, visit #BeThe1To.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Magic and the Tragic: Falling in Love in Recovery

    The Magic and the Tragic: Falling in Love in Recovery

    I wondered if the bitter taste of the endings would overpower all the other memories of my first sober loves.

    I met C at the most inopportune moment imaginable: I was a full-blown heroin addict. He was not. We met on a video chat website called ChatRoulette, both of us drunk with our respective friends; he lived in California, I in New York. After a few months of daily phone calls and video chats I was head-over-heels in love and flew out to San Diego to meet him, doing my best to appear healthy and normal. I hadn’t told him and didn’t plan to.

    C was less a boyfriend than a hostage, an innocent pulled onto a rollercoaster he didn’t yet realize was brakeless. The only reason I was able to hide my addiction from him for a while was because he was so impossibly normal—he surfed, played guitar, had a tight-knit group of equally normal friends. What he saw in me, tattooed and cynical, I still don’t know; perhaps, like me, he needed something different. He’d never known any heroin addicts in his idyllic suburban life, so he missed all the tell-tale signs. Naturally he would think the marks on my arms were inflamed mosquito bites and not track marks, because who would lie about something like that?

    I’ll never forget the look on his face when he finally caught me. I get why using heroin would be unfathomable to someone who has never tried it. It must be near impossible to understand the kind of pain and self-loathing that makes heroin seem like a viable solution. By the time he’d caught me I had been making half-assed attempts to get clean for months, but the look on his face was the final push I needed. I left New York and moved in with him in California and despite some false starts, despite the odds, I got better.

    In the cold hard light of my fledgling sobriety, the fantasy guy I’d created in my mind began to crumble the way real-estate euphemisms do when you see the actual apartment. You really want to believe that they actually meant cozy and not suffocatingly claustrophobic, but they never do. Never. In my heroin haze I’d romanticized all his flaws: instead of being emotionally repressed with awful communication skills, he was pensive and mysterious. He wasn’t living at home to save money, he was too cheap and emotionally enmeshed with his mother to move out. I loved him even so, tenaciously, holding onto him with white knuckles as the relationship unraveled over the next few years.

    The night it finally ended, I felt like I’d been thrown off a cliff. I’d gone straight from drugs to love and for the first time it was just me, unadulterated, crying alone in my car in an empty parking lot. For the first time, I was really, truly sober.

    After the breakup, I decided to move back east to go back to school to study film, or writing. A few days before Christmas I stopped by a college in Brooklyn to figure out admissions, and, smushed into a packed rush-hour train on my way back, happened to look up and lock eyes with a guy a few rows away.

    An electric current pulsed through me. He looked tired and messy—two days of beard, deep circles under his eyes, terrible posture, dark-blonde hair stuffed into an awful neon orange ski hat. But there was something about him.

    I took my notebook out of my bag and started writing about him, unfiltered stream-of-consciousness, private thoughts I’d typically never share with a stranger, especially one I was so attracted to. I filled over a page and then decided to give it to him. Why not? What’s the worst that could happen? With this burst of confidence, I wrote my number at the bottom of the page but even before I’d finished folding it up, I lost my resolve. The note was still in my palm when the train slowed and he walked towards me, mumbling something unintelligible and thrusting out his hand: he had written something for me. I handed him my note and he looked down at it, then back up at me. We grinned at each other. Just like that, I’d somehow stumbled into a cute first-meeting worthy of Nora Ephron herself.

    At dinner a few nights later, he spoke slowly, deliberately, eyes crinkling when he smiled. He told me his name—E—and that my note had made him laugh. He was a musician, and like most musicians I’d known he was a bit of a disaster. Maybe more than a bit: a self-diagnosed narcoleptic, a diabetic who struggled to stay on top of his blood sugar, an ex-cocaine addict. (He didn’t specify how long. Weeks? Days? Hours?) As he told me all this, I knew the sensible thing was to make up some excuse and book it the hell out of there, yet there I was, moody and self-absorbed, a writer (enough said), an ex-junkie. I was an insecurity-ridden raw nerve fresh out of a spectacularly painful breakup, far from the picture of perfect mental health. So I didn’t book it; I stayed put.

    After that first date we saw each other constantly. We listened to records, played Scrabble (I always won), talked late into the night, laughed, made out in his driveway. I met his friends; he sent me albums he thought I would like. One night I sat on his kitchen counter eating a yogurt and he stood there with the refrigerator door open, staring at me with a big, dumb smile.

    “What?” I said.

    He shook his head and closed the refrigerator door, still smiling. I’ve never felt more beautiful than I did right then.

    “What are you scared of?” he asked me once after we’d had sex.

    “Failure. Success. Mediocrity. Rejection. You?”

    “Well, everything, I guess,” he replied. “I’m afraid of everything.”

    We both had piles of baggage, but there was a major difference—I was in recovery, depressed but going to therapy, an addict but a clean one who went to meetings, afraid of everything but doing it anyway. In his bed when he thought I’d fallen asleep I felt him pull away, back into a dark part of himself he didn’t want me to see. I couldn’t help but remember the way C did the very same thing.

    After I returned to California we continued to talk, but over time he stopped answering my calls, calling back days later at odd hours sounding distracted and paranoid. He would tell me he didn’t believe I was actually moving back to New York and I’d repeatedly reassure him that my return ticket was already booked. Eventually he stopped calling back at all, and though I was angry, I also felt something else, unmistakable and undeniable: dread. After a month of radio silence, I Googled his name.

    “Tappan Zee Jump: man’s family ‘blindsided’ by death.”

    He must’ve been so cold, I remember thinking. It was the beginning of April—temperate in San Diego, but miserably wet and chilly in New York. Over the next few weeks I jumped from denial to anger and back again, unable to comprehend the amount of pain he must have felt to justify jumping off a bridge. I thought about what my mom’s face would look like if someone told her I’d killed myself, or the way she’d feel if she found out I had died of an overdose. I realized it wasn’t all that different.

    That summer, I was compelled to google another name: C’s. We hadn’t spoken since the breakup and I’d thought up all kinds of reasons as to why he had never reached out. Interestingly enough, none of these reasons included him having a pregnant new girlfriend. I didn’t feel all that different looking at C’s baby registry than I did when I saw E’s obituary. Both felt devastating and permanent; both had nothing to do with me. I wondered if the bitter taste of the endings would overpower all the other memories of my first sober loves.

    In AA they often talk about “selective memory”: Play the tape through, they say. Instead of just remembering that one perfect drunk night, play the tape through to how you felt the next morning, to the shame and panic of waking up after a blackout. Instead of just remembering little moments of a relationship, look at the whole thing, the magic and the tragic. I knew the tragic parts by heart, but as the years passed I began to see the magic, too: C and I on motorcycle trips together, holding hands in the dark, recording songs in his bathroom (the acoustics were better). Then, the magic of learning how to love someone; the way I felt on the train on that cold winter day when I met E; the way he looked at me in his kitchen, his big smile illuminated by the white light of an open refrigerator. The note he gave me: “to me you’re perfect and I LOVE your hair” in a loopy script on the back of an old business card. I still have it, somewhere.

    Those are the things I remember now, not because I’ve forgotten the endings or the sad bits, but because at almost eight years sober, I’m beginning to finally see the big picture: the sad parts are gifts, too, maybe more precious than anything else. I play the tape through, and all I feel is grateful.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Please Don’t Tell Me How to Grieve

    Please Don’t Tell Me How to Grieve

    We are not taught how to grieve. Acknowledging that death is inevitable means that we have to come face-to-face with our own mortality and the mortality of everyone we love in this world. It’s incredibly scary.

    “Get over it.”
    “I’ve moved on. You need to move on too.”
    “Don’t talk about that.”
    “What’s wrong with you?”

    When it comes to grief, everyone seems to be an expert. We may not have life or death figured out, but life after death? People know how to do that. Or at least they think they do. According to them, there’s only one right way to grieve:

    Their way.

    Grief is universal. The way we experience it and process it, however, is not. To approach grief as if curing it were as easy as taking a pill is both irresponsible and insensitive.

    And yet, there are still people who take it upon themselves to try and tell you how, where, and when you should grieve. Now, in the age of social media, the shoulds and should nots have only gotten stricter. Grieving online is perhaps the biggest no-no. Experts have even coined the term “grief police” to describe the trend of policing just how people grieve — telling them they’re grieving too much or not enough.

    And in the last six months, we’ve even seen this grief-shaming play out in the headlines. First, people criticized The View co-host Meghan McCain for talking too much about her late father Senator John McCain following his death. Then, following actor Luke Perry’s sudden death, online trolls criticized his daughter Sophie for seemingly doing too well and not grieving enough.

    We get it: No matter how we grieve, people will have opinions about it. But it’s important to remember there is no “right” way to grieve, says Lauren Consul, a California-based licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in grief. Grief can be difficult to navigate because it’s not something our society is open about.

    “We are not taught how to grieve. Acknowledging that death is inevitable means that we have to come face-to-face with our own mortality and the mortality of everyone we love in this world. It’s incredibly scary,” said Consul. “Seeing someone who is grieving is a stark reminder that one day that will be us too. It’s painful to think about, so people tend to avoid and downplay other people’s grief. It can give a sense of control; if they can manage that person’s grief, they don’t have to think about their own.”

    This grief policing is especially true when the death is unexpected, as was the case when my father died from suicide in 2003. I learned pretty quickly that talking about death on places like Facebook makes some people uncomfortable. We may be a society that lives our life online, but for all the sharing we do on social media, there’s still this stigma associated with posting about our grief and the loved ones we’ve lost. It feels like an unspoken rule of sorts: grieve in silence. Don’t talk about it. And, if you do talk about it, make sure you find just the right balance – not too much and not too little.

    But here’s the thing about grieving: You’re never going to please everyone. You’re never going to grieve the “right” way because there is no right way to grieve. That’s something that took me a while to learn and understand. At first, I was afraid of what people would think or how they would view my grieving process, which included writing about my father’s suicide regularly on my blog. I even began to feel as though I needed to hold myself back and not talk about it, but you know what? That wasn’t good for me. In fact, it stalled my grieving process, and that wasn’t healthy.

    Maybe that’s why I’m always thinking of what I’d like to say to the “grief police.” If I had the chance to sit down with them and have an honest conversation about the realities of figuring out your life after losing a loved one, here are four things I’d tell them:

    My grief is not your grief. And your grief is not my grief.

    Grief is perhaps one of the most intense and most confusing emotions we’ll ever feel. And even though a plethora of grief books line the self-help sections of bookstores and libraries, how we actually go through our grief is a very personal journey. The strategies and coping skills that work for some may not work for others. Grief is as individual as the person going through it. For every loss, there are a hundred more ways to grieve. There is no right way, no one size fits all. Grief is an individual journey and no one can tell us how to do it. We must find the way that works for us and not judge others because they may grieve differently.

    Grieving is a journey – not a destination.

    That sounds cliché, but it’s true. Grief has no timetable, no script, and definitely no shortcuts. It’s not as easy as getting from Point A to Point B because the grieving road is far from linear. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross may have outlined the five stages of grief, but it’s not uncommon to vacillate back and forth sometimes. Even 16 years after my father’s death, I find myself returning to emotions like anger every so often. It doesn’t mean that I’m still in the throes of deep grief, though; it just reminds me that the work of grief is never really done.

    Sometimes, we just want people to listen.

    Grief demands that we feel, think, process, reflect – over and over. And there are times that we need to give voice to those feelings as we process. To put words to our emotions. To try and make sense of everything that’s happened to us. Maybe that’s why my writing has been such a healing part of my grief. I’ve been able to put the unimaginable into words, even at times when those words were hard to come by.

    Being there for someone during this time is a powerful thing. You don’t necessarily have to say anything. Trust me, your presence means more than you’ll ever know.

    Not everyone wants to be “cured” from their grief.

    People might be surprised to learn that I don’t want to “get over” my grief. There’s this misconception that you can easily move on, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. As painful as some of these emotions are (hi, regret), I need to feel them. So while it’s tempting to listen and then try and offer advice to help us move on, I ask that you just listen. In the end, there are no magic words that will make everything better. We need to feel what we feel when we feel it — and feel it without judgment.

    I’m always going to talk about my father, my grief and my journey. It’s all part of my life and my story. We each have to move through grief at our own pace and in a way that is comfortable for us. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be there for each other — in a way that is comforting without being condescending, sensitive without shaming, and helpful without being harmful. That just might be the greatest gift we can ever give someone: a safe space to grieve and begin the healing process.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Chris Cornell’s Widow To The Opioid Task Force: No More Shame

    Chris Cornell’s Widow To The Opioid Task Force: No More Shame

    Since losing her husband, Vicky Cornell has become an advocate for improving addiction treatment and spreading awareness about addiction.

    Vicky Cornell, widow of Soundgarden and Audioslave singer Chris Cornell, went before the Bipartisan Heroin And Opioid Task Force on Monday to make a case for better training and education on addiction for doctors.

    Chris Cornell died by suicide in 2017 after struggling with depression and addiction for many years, and multiple medications were found in his system by the autopsy, including a barbiturate sedative and the benzodiazepine anti-anxiety medication Ativan. The drugs had been prescribed to him, leading Vicky to file a malpractice suit against the doctor.

    Although it was determined that the drugs did not directly contribute to Chris’ death, Vicky released a statement to the press soon after her husband’s death blaming the substances for causing a lapse in judgment that led to his death.

    “We have learned from this report that several substances were found in his system,” the statement read. “After so many years of sobriety, this moment of terrible judgment seems to have completely impaired and altered his state of mind. Something clearly went terribly wrong and my children and I are heartbroken and are devastated that this moment can never be taken back.”

    Since losing her husband, Vicky Cornell has been an advocate for improving addiction treatment and promoting the proper education in medical fields and for the general public.

    “The part that hurts most is Chris’ death was not inevitable, there were no demons that took over,” she said to the task force. “Chris had a brain disease and a doctor who unfortunately, like many, was not properly trained or educated on addiction.”

    Chris Cornell often spoke about his experience with mental illness, drug use, and addiction. In 2006, he told Spin that he was diagnosed with panic disorder and believes it was a direct result of a bad experience with PCP that left him “more or less agoraphobic.”

    After that, he avoided drugs until his 20s, but started drinking at a young age and became an alcoholic. After Soundgarden broke up and his first marriage began to fall apart, Chris began experimenting with OxyContin. He entered rehab in 2002 and was able to quit using alcohol and tobacco by 2005.

    Years later, according to Vicky Cornell’s suit, her husband’s doctor prescribed him the Ativan, a drug widely considered to be addictive, for 20 months without seeing the patient for a checkup. Chris told Vicky on the night of his death that he had taken an extra Ativan and was acting strangely. 

    Now, she wants to make sure it never happens again.

    “We must integrate addiction treatment into our health care system,” she said on Capitol Hill. “No more false narratives about the need to hit rock bottom, no more secret societies, no more shame — we must educate health care providers on how to treat addiction and best support recovery.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Comedian Brody Stevens Dies At 48

    Comedian Brody Stevens Dies At 48

    “The Hangover” star was memorialized by his comedic peers on social media.

    Actor and comedian Brody Stevens, known for his role in movies like The Hangover and The Hangover II, has died of an apparent suicide, according to numerous reports.

    Stevens, 48, was found deceased in Los Angeles on Friday (Feb. 22). According to The Blast, officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were dispatched to the scene shortly before 1 p.m. on Friday. 

    “Brody was an inspiring voice who was a friend to many in the comedy community,” a rep for Stevens told The Blast. “He pushed creative boundaries and his passion for his work and his love of baseball were contagious. He was beloved by many and will be greatly missed. We respectfully ask for privacy at this time.”

    Many are mourning the loss, especially those in the baseball community, People reports. Stevens was a passionate baseball fan who reportedly played on a scholarship at Arizona State University. 

    The team at ASU honored Stevens, who was a pitcher, with a moment of silence before their game on Saturday. They also shared a statement on Twitter. 

    “We lost a treasured member of our Sun Devil Baseball Family yesterday,” the team wrote. “We send our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Brody Stevens. He will be in our hearts this weekend.”

    Others in the baseball community, including retired pitcher Dan Haren, also spoke out on Twitter. 

    “One of my best friends is gone, @BrodyismeFriend i love you man. He always took the time to talk to me about baseball, comedy and life. A true friend,” Haren tweeted.

    Phillies ace Jake Arrieta also expressed his sadness at the loss of his friend.

    “I will never forget the time spent with Brody Stevens during my time in Chicago thx to Mike Borzello,” Arrieta tweeted. “Every conversation was memorable, he loved baseball, and watching him throw a bullpen during an early spring morning will always be a highlight for me.”

    Fellow comedians also took to social media to mourn the loss.

    “#RIPBrodyStevens he was so funny and weird and vulnerable and wild and kind. Every time he was onstage it was an adventure,” comedian Nick Kroll wrote.

    Comedian Patton Oswalt took the opportunity to speak on the importance of reaching out for anyone who is feeling depressed or suicidal.  

    “If you are depressed or feeling suicidal please please please please please reach out to ANYONE,” he tweeted. “I never get to see Brody Stevens again I can’t stand this.”

    According to The Blast, Stevens has been open about his depression in the past. 

    If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, reach out the the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text “home” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or visit suicidepreventionlifeline.org.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Lady Gaga Disappoints Fans by Failing to Address Mental Health Triggers in "A Star Is Born"

    Lady Gaga Disappoints Fans by Failing to Address Mental Health Triggers in "A Star Is Born"

    Lady Gaga has worked tirelessly to help people with mental health problems, sharing her own struggles with debilitating depression. So why hasn’t she addressed the very real and dangerous depressive and suicidal triggers in the film?

    Trigger Warning: The following story discusses a completed suicide in a film and links to potentially triggering articles. Proceed with caution. If you feel you are at risk and need help, skip the story and get help now. Options include: Calling the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-TALK (8255), calling 911, and calling a friend or family member to stay with you until emergency medical personnel arrive to help you. 

    (This piece contains spoilers for A Star is Born.)

    Months after its release, the highly-acclaimed A Star is Born is still generating plenty of headline-worthy buzz, most recently with an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.

    It’s an incredible movie with an equally impressive soundtrack; I had every song memorized long before I seeing the movie. But months after seeing A Star is Born on a rare date-night with my husband, I still feel that Lady Gaga—Mother Monster herself—let the entire mental health community down. And while I agree that the Oscar-buzz is well-deserved, I also wonder at the media’s lack of attention to the film’s numerous potential triggers for alcoholism, addiction, depression, and suicide.

    Lady Gaga has made a name for herself as more than just a performer, using her platform to bring awareness to preventative mental health care. She’s spoken publicly about her personal struggles with her own “debilitating mental health spirals,” amassing a following of “Little Monsters” – fans who see themselves in her message. She and her mother, Cynthia Germonatta, created the Born This Way Foundation for a “kinder and braver world.” Germonatta also notably presented to The United Nations General Assembly in 2018 on behalf of the Born This Way Foundation on the topic of mental health, launching the United for Global Mental Health initiative. According to its Twitter page, the initiative’s vision is “a world where everyone, anywhere, can turn to someone who is able to support their mental health when needed.”

    You could say that I’ve been stanning Lady Gaga since before “stanning” was even a word, so I was well aware of her activism before seeing the movie. I was thrilled going into A Star is Born. But my excitement soon gave way to anxiety and sadness. Certain scenes left me dismayed and shaken, stunned that there weren’t safety protocols put into place to warn the very fans she has worked so hard to fight for and protect.

    Never having seen the original film (and not having done any research on the film before seeing it) I still knew going in that A Star is Born wasn’t going to have a happy ending. One friend had posted on Facebook that she was “gutted” as the credits rolled. But even that did not prepare me for the very real and incredibly dangerous depressive and suicidal triggers contained within the film’s ending, most notably Jack’s suicide (and the very brief glimpse of the belt from which he was hanging swinging through the garage windows). That shot alone, while problematic in terms of the little that could be seen and the dangers of suicidal triggers according to The Association for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), I might have been able to shake off. It wasn’t until the moment after Jack’s brother, Bob, was consoling Ally (played by Gaga) following Jack’s suicide, telling her that it was nobody’s fault but Jack’s, that I cracked. 

    I waited, breathless and crying, for Mother Monster to channel herself through the character she was portraying on the big screen, to speak up. She’d done so repeatedly while Jack was still alive and fighting his addiction, assuring him that alcoholism is a disease and that there was no blame to be placed or taken on.

    All she needed to say was that the addiction won; that Jack’s suicide wasn’t any more his fault than his alcoholism had been. 

    But she didn’t. And it broke me. 

    For a brief moment, I thought that maybe I was the only one. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I was just being too sensitive. But it wasn’t just me.

    In researching this piece, I discovered that complaints of “viewer distress” in New Zealand had caused the film to be reclassified with a suicide warning note. But why wasn’t a trigger warning for suicide added to the beginning of the film from the get-go? 

    David Shanks, head of the New Zealand film classification board, was quoted in The Guardian after demanding that the film add a warning to protect vulnerable viewers. “For those who have lost someone close to them, a warning gives them a chance to make an informed choice about watching.” 

    Houston-based licensed therapist Bill Prasad notes that for those who haven’t yet seen A Star is Born, it’s best to skip the film if proper resources are not in place. 

    “Triggers can be tricky and dangerous,” said Prasad, who added that those in the early stages of sobriety may also be adversely affected. 

    The AFSP’s fact sheet on suicide statistics, warning signs, and risk factors includes “Exposure to another person’s suicide, or to graphic or sensationalized accounts of suicide” among the many risk factors for triggering those vulnerable to act. A Star is Born triggered for me my own “debilitating mental health spiral.” I withdrew from my friends, both personal and those in my social media circles. I stopped writing. I stopped sleeping at night and started sleeping too much during the day. And when no one was looking, I kept crying. 

    As a writer whose livelihood depends on my ability to create, I lost months of income. As a survivor of my own suicide attempt with a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder, I am grateful that I’m not actively suicidal now or when I saw the film. That doesn’t mean, however, that I am not sensitive to associated triggers. Two months later, I’m still trying to find all the pieces and put myself back together. 

    I’m not asking for Hollywood to hold my hand. I know that hard stories need to be told. A Star is Born is a brilliantly acted film and rightfully deserves all the attention it continues to receive. I understand that perhaps it might not have been “realistic” for Ally to snap out of her grief-stricken state and set Jack’s brother right about how dangerous it is to blame the victim, that it’s never okay to even imply that.

    So I waited for Mother Monster herself to set the record straight after the fact. 

    But she didn’t. 

    Lady Gaga didn’t say a word. Not then, and not after, during countless interviews, did she reassure her monsters that depression is an illness beyond the control of the afflicted. Not once did she say that no one should ever blame the suicidal.

    As Prasad reminds us, “If you are struggling after the movie, reach out to someone or get professional help. You don’t have to suffer alone.”

    If you or someone you know may be at risk for suicide, immediately seek help. You are not alone.

    Options include:

    • Calling the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-TALK (8255)
    • Calling 911
    • Calling a friend or family member to stay with you until emergency medical personnel arrive to help you.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Doctors At High Risk For Depression & Suicide, Survey Says

    Doctors At High Risk For Depression & Suicide, Survey Says

    About 15% of physicians are depressed, and 44% say they are burned out, according to a recent survey.

    Physicians are tasked with taking care of others, but a new study suggests that their own health often suffers due to the pace and demands of their profession, putting them at high risk for burnout and even death by suicide. 

    According to Reuters, doctors are more likely than people in any other profession to die by suicide. About 15% of physicians are depressed, and 44% say they are burned out, according to a recent survey by Medscape. On average, a doctor dies by suicide more than once a day. 

    “There is a passionate argument surrounding the data and discourse about who’s to blame for this situation.” Dr. Carter Lebares, director of the Center for Mindfulness in Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco said that there are many factors contributing to this epidemic. 

    “Quotes from respondents in the Medscape survey capture this very poignantly: anger over a broken system, loss of time with patients, being asked to sacrifice dwindling personal time to ‘fix ourselves,’ and demoralization that the only way out is to quit or severely curtail our work,” she said. 

    The survey showed that administrative duties were the biggest cause of stress, with 59% of physicians feeling taxed by them. The other top stressors were spending too much time at work, not being paid enough or fretting over electronic records — about one-third of doctors said they were affected by each of these. 20% of respondents said they felt “like just a cog in a wheel.”

    Lebares said that doctors need to be taught to manage their stress in healthier ways. 

    “The approach we promote and champion in our research and programming for surgeons includes cognitive training for stress reduction through mindful meditation training; learning skills for advocacy; and engaging the institution to address broader change,” she said. 

    However, many physicians use unhealthy coping mechanisms to deal with the stress of the job. 21% of female and 23% of male doctors said that they drink alcohol to cope, while 38% of females and 27% of males turn to junk food. 

    Some have healthier habits for stress management: 52% of females and 37% of males say they talk to family and friends, while 51% of males and 43% of females exercise to alleviate burnout. 

    Lebares said that the medical system needs a cultural change, particularly with more doctors retiring, which may contribute to a physician shortage. 

    “Data are coming to suggest that an institutionally supported network of choices for wellbeing will be the answer — some combination of things like limited [electronic records] time, increased ratio of patient time, better food choices at work and home, room for personal health (like exercise breaks), tailored mindfulness-based interventions, financial planning services or untraditionally structured jobs,” she said.

    In the meantime, patients could be affected by physician burnout: Doctors reported making errors, expressing frustrations and not taking careful notes because of their exhaustion. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "Bird Box" Raises Mental Health Concerns Among Some Viewers

    "Bird Box" Raises Mental Health Concerns Among Some Viewers

    The Netflix blockbuster has received some backlash for its portrayal of individuals with mental health issues.

    If you read the news or take part in social media, you’ve likely heard of the new Netflix sensation Bird Box.

    The film, starring Sandra Bullock, is classified as a psychological thriller and is based on a novel that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. The film is quite graphic at parts, and, according to Psychology Today, could have some underlying messages about mental health. 

    In a recent column, Shainna Ali, PhD, notes that some viewers have voiced that the movie should contain trigger warnings for certain parts. While Bird Box is rated R, implying there may be “adult themes, adult activity, hard language, intense or persistent violence, sexually-oriented nudity, drug abuse or other elements,” it’s not quite clear to viewers exactly what the film will entail. 

    “While this rating is a helpful, it’s rather broad and fails to include specific elements pertaining to mental health,” Ali writes. “A system designed to flag potential warnings for children is an excellent start, but adults are not immune to being affected by triggering themes as well. The current classification could benefit from specifiers pertaining to mental health trigger warnings for themes such as anxiety, trauma, self-harm, and suicidality.”

    Some viewers, such as Twitter user @seraphfem, took to social media to voice their concerns.

    “trigger warnings for bird box on netflix: suicide, self harm, gore. lots of blood, graphic depictions and sounds of death/suicide. suicide via oncoming traffic, building jump, self inflicted gunshot, self inflicted head bashing, and self inflicted stab wound to the neck,” seraphfem tweeted.

    In addition to triggering scenes, Bird Box has also taken some flak for the way it portrays individuals struggling with their mental health.

    “Bird Box has received criticism for perpetuating negative portrayals of individuals living with mental health concerns, specifically those who are hospitalized,” Ali writes. “Some hidden messages could be gathered as well, such as the inability for others to see the problem and the subsequent tendency to minimize the gravity of the problem.”

    Additionally, Ali adds that the way the film is interpreted depends greatly on the life experiences of the viewer. 


    “Some people may experience triggers pertaining to their lived experiences, while others may not,” she says. “Some people may view the film as negatively depicting health disparities, while some may point to scenes that highlight positive portrayals. Some people may see a statement on the state of society, while others may feel a poignant connection to their own life.”

    View the original article at thefix.com