Rock singer Jon Bon Jovi made news in September when he and a video production assistant talked down a woman who stood on the ledge of a pedestrian bridge in Nashville.
Bon Jovi reportedly has training for handling crises, but a clinical social worker with Texas Health Behavioral Health says you don’t have to be trained to talk a person out of suicide.
Megan Graves spoke with KERA’s Sam Baker about some of the myths regarding suicide.
One (myth) is that suicide is inevitable. When someone decides to do it, they can't be stopped.
I think that we hear that a lot in our culture because there's just not a whole lot of education about suicide prevention. In reality, we can actually prevent suicide in any given moment all the way up until the act.
But that ties into another myth: that you have to be a trained expert to do that.
Of course, we have trained experts in the field who do suicide prevention education.
But anyone who is paying attention and anyone who can see signs that someone is not doing well or signs that somebody is considering suicide, the only thing you need to do is, one, you can talk to them and say, "Hey, I see you and please let me help you."
You don't have to know the right things to say other than let me get you help.
And two, you can get them the resources to get help:
- 988 is the National Suicide Prevention line.
- Figure out resources in your community, whether it be counseling centers or behavioral health hospitals, to get folks to.
- And then in any case, if it's an emergency, please don't hesitate to call 911 so that they can get trained professionals out into the field to intervene in real-time.
You said you have to be aware of the signs. What should we look for?
For people we know personally, we are looking for signs that their lives may be changing.
So maybe the way they're presenting every day, they're more depressed or more kind of inward and withdrawn from people, or those folks in our lives are starting to say their goodbyes and tie up loose ends in their life.
So, actions and behaviors outside of their normal life, purchasing guns or stockpiling medications - those would be some really big red flags.
Another myth: suicidal people keep their plans to themselves. There's no way to know.
That does happen on occasion. There's no signs. There's no symptoms. They don't talk to people about it. They don't allude to it.
But for the most part, there are things leading up to suicide. And I will say hindsight is 2020, right? Looking back, we can see kind of those patterns of change in behavior and their actions.
So, people may not outright come to you and say, "hey, I'm going to kill myself and this is how I'm planning to do it. But when we are educated on those signs and symptoms of somebody considering suicide, we can prevent. And in that case, because we know what to look for and folks sometimes even do say, I'm thinking about killing myself, we should always take very seriously.
So, another myth: people who talk about suicide won't actually do it and are only seeking attention.
I hear this a lot, especially in regards to adolescents and teenagers. But why? And I would say if someone needs attention that bad, I don't think it's harmful to give them the attention and there are lots of other ways to get attention. So most of the time when somebody is saying that they are considering ending their life, we should take that very seriously.
Where do these myths come from?
I think a lot of it is just misinformation. What we see in movies, we see things about suicide or about kind of teenagers seeking that kind of attention. We just assume it's true; kind of word of mouth like this misunderstanding of what suicide is like we pass that around with.
And so you see that these get carried out within media, within social media, and also just within kind of community groups. It's just in our understanding for, you know, the longest time that these things are true. But when we really look at the research, then we find that's not really true. And so how do we educate people about these myths and what might be actually true?
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