Learning to talk about suicide

“The thing that I was really amazed by is that nobody ever asked me, ‘Why did you kill yourself?’” Dave tells me as we talk about his attempted suicide that left him dead for somewhere between 10 and 13 minutes in 1994. “Nobody really asked me.”

So I ask him.

“It was like, this is the last thing I’m taking in this world, I’ve had enough. I’d already lived with too much pain,” he says. “I just said no more. I said this is it, I’ve already had enough insults, I don’t like this, I hurt too much, I’ve hurt too long. And it’s not being attended to.”

Everything that had been building all year — his entire life, really — suddenly broke loose, he says. Since then, as Dave has learned to rebuild his life, he’s also learned to not only talk about his experience but ask others about theirs.

“Let them have a good chance to speak honestly and openly about what brought that on,” he says. “People want to talk about it, they really do. It’s no big secret to them, trust me.”

It’s advice I hear over and over throughout the course of researching efforts to prevent suicide: We have to learn to talk about it.

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