Walk at Art Museum Sheds Light on Suicide - Published in the Doylestown-based Intelligencer, Thursday, July 17, 2014 - Read my comments after the article

Walk at art museum sheds light on suicide

 

By Ruth Z. Deming

 

Nearly 2,000 people participated in a suicide prevention walk the weekend of June 28, according to Maiken Scott of WHYY’s Newsworks. The walkers began and ended their 18-mile trek at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Organized by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the march featured participants from all over the country who wanted to honor and tell stories about their deceased loved ones.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is a mecca for suicide. But did you know that of the tiny percentage of survivors, all of them regret their attempt?

“I still see my hands coming off the railing,” said a 28-year-old man who survived his jump and is quoted in a 2003 New Yorker article. “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped.”

Last month, San Francisco approved funding to install a suicide barrier on the bridge, and not a moment too soon. Last year, a record 46 individuals jumped to their death at 75 mph. “It felt like crashing into a brick wall,” said one survivor.

What they really need, and what all suicidal individuals need, is someone to talk to. As founder and director of New Directions Support Group for people and families affected by depression and bipolar disorder, I know the importance of a compassionate friend, psychiatrist or therapist who will listen to the troubled individual and get to the bottom of his or her despair.

Just as there’s a stigma attached to mental illness, so, too, with suicide. Tell someone you’ve attempted to take your own life and you risk losing your job or being looked at disparagingly, instead of with care and compassion.

Tony Salvatore of the Montgomery County Emergency Service (MCES) in Norristown has devoted the past 18 years to suicide prevention. On call in the crisis center, he will ask callers three questions to determine if they are in imminent danger. First, are you thinking of suicide right now? Second, have you ever attempted to kill yourself? (If the answer is yes, the risk is far greater.) Third, have you thought about it in the last two months?

Salvatore and his colleagues at MCES are working with SEPTA on a stop-suicide campaign. Periodically, jumpers will end their lives by throwing themselves in front of a train.

“We just received mock-ups of signs from SEPTA, with the phone number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — 800-273-TALK — printed in SEPTA’s colors,” he said.

In 2011, 39,518 suicides were reported in the U.S., making suicide the 10th leading cause of death for Americans. It’s the third leading cause of death among young people ages 15 to 24. The highest overall rates of suicide are for adults ages 40 to 59, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Sadly, Tony Salvatore’s own son was one of those statistics. When it happens to you and your family, though, it is not a statistic but an event whose reverberations of grief, anger and guilt endure for a lifetime.

Shortly after his son died in 1996, Salvatore wrote a stirring testimony, available on the Internet, about what it’s like to be a family survivor. He addressed it to teenagers.

“I’m going to tell you what it is like to ‘be left behind.’ Maybe it will stop you from doing something stupid,” he writes.

“Loss is what happens to someone when you die. Paul’s death left me incomplete. It tore something out of me, and I will never be the same again. Loss isn’t passive or arithmetic — subtract one son. It’s active; it grows; it’s a ‘black hole’ that pulls everything in. I’m not whole and the hole won’t close.”

Because the norm at New Directions is to see a psychiatrist and a therapist, our members do very well. If by chance someone should become suicidal, we set up a call team and visit them at home or call them on the phone. As one of the bridge survivors said, if just one of those drivers who passed me by had asked about me, I would not have jumped.

Ruth Z. Deming, founder/director of New Directions Support Group of Abington and Willow Grove (www.newdirectionssupport.org) is a psychotherapist and poet. For information, call 215-659-2366, ext. 1.


When I worked as a therapist at Bristol-Bensalem Human Services, I had arranged a Display Case on Suicide Prevention at the Abington Free Library.

It was quite creative and included a pretend suicide note that a teenage girl had written. I did indicate that the note was not real.

I included a large photo of a 'teenage girl' who was really one of my son Dan's former girlfriends.

At work, I was seeing clients and doing fairly well even though I was manic/psychotic and on meds to cool the fires in my brain, as one of my psychiatrists called mania.

When the phone rang, it was the Abington Library. The pretend suicide letter was causing quite a stir, so I said, Just take it out of the display case.

What a shock that was!