- Being aware of the resources that are in the community, I think is vital.

I also think it's important that we start earlier in having conversations about loss.

I've seen multiple suicide situations that the person lost something.

They're bereaved, they're in grief.

They lost a relationship, they lost a job.

They've lost their health, they've lost a dream.

And so being able to sit through bereavement, starting very early, I think is one of the best coping skills we could give our children, we could give society, we could give each other.

- The deceased place their psychological skeleton in the survivor, the person left behind, and they put it in their emotional closet.

So here they are in their emotional world trying to understand someone else's psychological skeleton.

It's an impossible task.

The mind is more than just the brain.

So we can talk about brain chemicals and we can talk about this and that, but the mind is about all of our experiences in our life.

And this person could have had experiences that no one in their life knows about.

That they've always kept a secret, kept it to themselves, protected it, and that becomes a vulnerability for them that you're never gonna be able to discover.

And that's where they take that psychological skeleton and hang it in that survivor's emotional closet.

- There would be like blips of like, what if this, what if that?

And a lot of what if that's beyond your control too.

All of it's beyond your control, but like thinking, what if her friends had responded this way?

What if work had been going this way?

What if?

Like, I don't think that ever stops.

- All those questions of what could I have done and guilt?

And, you know, if this would have happened, would that have happened?

Or so many instances that replay in my mind.

It's just hard to go back and look back on the what ifs.

One of our amazing counselors told me though, because I keep just feeling guilty.

I'm like, I wish you would have called me that morning.

We could have talked about it.

And she said, you know, Jason, he knew if he called you, he wouldn't go through with it.

That's why he didn't call you.

And it's like, oh, that was helpful for me to know that he knew that I would have helped him, you know?

But he didn't want the help.

And he had already made up his mind of what he wanted to get done and do.

- So many folks say, I should have seen, I should have done, I should have known.

It's not your fault, they didn't want you to see.

They were protecting you from that.

- That's why I call it the Canyon of Why.

They struggle to understand why that person died.

And the reality is they took all of that with them.

People look for suicide notes hoping there'll be some explanation.

Suicide notes are rare.

They're usually about 15% of the time and almost 100% of the time they do not give answers.

It doesn't give you the "why" for your loved one.

Each suicide is unique.

It's unique to that person and to their age and the issue they were struggling with and how long they've been struggling with it.

And what other role models in their life might have demonstrated suicide.

It's a multifactorial manner of death.

There are just too many things in the equation for the observer to know.

So asking why is that effort to try and understand what was going on in their mind.

And we don't have that information.

- Grieving suicide gets in the way of grieving our loved one and having to move past the reality that it was death from suicide and what all that means.

(gentle music) And we just lose so much in suicide loss.

(gentle music) On top of losing our loved one.

- That's a hard, hard thing to swallow and because it's not well known, not everyone has done that.

You know, everyone maybe has lost a pet or everyone has lost somebody to old age or something, but not everybody has lost a family member or somebody that they love to suicide.

Not that there's shame in it necessarily, but it's like this weird feeling.

It's like, wait, I'm in a club now that I didn't know that really existed.

I mean, I knew that people dealt with suicide, but now that I'm in that club, it's like, oh, okay, this is how it feels.

And yeah, I feel like I'm grieving not only my brother, but I'm grieving how it happened.

- It's heartbreaking.

It's not just normal grief, but it's angry grief and devastating grief and guilt grief.

You feel all of the emotions and you think back to what you could have done.

And in all honesty, there's nothing that you could have done.

And that's something I've had to learn and I'm still learning it.

- So why is a distraction from your grief.

The Desert of What is where you deal with what does this death mean to me today?

(gentle music) - And I will say from getting that initial word of what had occurred, the next hardest thing was telling my parents.

(gentle music) That was the most difficult thing I think in my life that I've ever done.

Walking into my sister's house and my parents going, thinking we were still in the mountain looking, and they were kind of confused and I had to tell them.

And I've never heard my parents make the sounds that they made.

(gentle music) And that was hard.

That was really, really hard to console my parents, to let them know that, you know, they've lost a child.

That was really difficult for me, but, you know, held them and tried to console them as best as we could.

They had, you know, questions and things like that and I didn't have all the answers.

- I think as a parent, our main instinct is to protect our children.

And so then we're sitting there with the fact that we couldn't.

That's pretty heartbreaking.

I mean, it is a blow to being a parent.

In your wildest dreams, you wouldn't think that your child would go before you.

Then comes all the secondary loss, where, you know, not graduating high school, possibly, not graduating college, not starting their own family, just all of the losses that continue to come.

- That's what this death means to that parent, but it might mean something totally different to a sibling.

- For me, I'm still mad, and I didn't realize I'm still mad.

And I think I need to still process that anger because I just keep thinking like, man, what have you done?

What did you do?

And even this past weekend, my brother-in-law had a great conversation with me.

He said, there's no right or wrong answer to this.

But he said, do you think that with us wanting him back or wanting him here, do you think that's selfish of us?

Because if he was in pain, if he wasn't happy, if he wasn't feeling like he could survive, and that's what he did, who are we to say that we want to hold him in that world of pain and suffer and this and that?

And that was a little eye-opening for me a little bit as well of like, am I just being selfish?

Well, I want you back for me, for I want you back because I want you to be there for my nephew and I want you to be back there for my parents.

And I want you to be there for when we have to, you know, deal with the next big thing in our family.

And I want to see us grow old and this and that.

Those are all my wishes.

I never though about what did he want and what was he hoping for?

- I don't think there's ever going to be a pain comparable to what I've gone through losing my sister for this grief that you feel that never goes away.

And every grief that you have after that is really building on that.

You're never gonna feel an isolated incident of grief again.

It's always going to be tied back to that major inciting incident.

- We have to respect the fact that every interaction with the deceased reveals a different relationship and how that person grieves with that loss is also up to how they cope with grief.

And no two people are gonna cope the same.

- From my experience, grief is as individual as your DNA, your fingerprint.

- Like that's what I have taken away is everyone grieves differently, completely.

I haven't asked my family this, but I feel like sometimes people looked at me like, why is he not getting more emotional about this?

Like, did he not love his brother as much as we though he did or whatever?

And it's like, no, no, no.

I'm completely devastated.

I'm just trying to keep it together for my family.

And being an actor and a director, I think I was able to kind of.

Put my feelings in a side room.

Or, you know, this like emotional thing and just kind of play a character for a little bit.

It's just like I know how I can navigate this is by, again, being the strong person and being the person to help in all the situations.

It makes me think about like a clown, like they might have the big smiling face out on stage, but then when they take off the makeup.

You know what I mean?

There's the true self.

And so taking the makeup off, you know, and being just kind of true, true to myself at home or with my dog, my poor dog has seen all the emotions for sure.

That's been hard a little bit of just being like, okay, to be my true self in front of everyone, there's still a little bit of makeup there to help me get through the day or help me get through the situation for sure.

- Once you've experienced this type of crisis, bereavement, your threshold's different.

And so you just, you sit different in the world.

- I feel like my patience has decreased and that's hard for me to swallow because I was so proud of the person I was because I did have a lot more patience to things.

And I didn't get, things didn't escalate so quickly for me to get upset.

I feel bad.

There's been times where somebody has told me something and they're like, oh, it was the worst day, blah, blah, blah.

And I was like, really?

In my head.

I mean, I don't want to say that to them, but I'm like, really?

Was that the worst day?

- Culturally and in society and even in families, it's hard for other people to let us be who we are.

You know, you laugh and then you think, oh, is that okay?

Is it okay to laugh today?

- Now learning the grieving process, I understand I can feel happy.

There's times when I would feel guilty for being happy, but I know now that I can be happy.

I'm allowed to be happy, I'm allowed to be sad.

I'm allowed to be angry, I'm allowed to hurt.

And before that, I didn't think I was allowed to.

I didn't think I could enjoy life the way I used to.

- This idea that we no longer have the rights that we had before the loss is never issued to somebody.

Somebody doesn't come up and say, you no longer can be happy, but they surrender trust and humor at the grave because those are the two early victims in their life.

They have trouble trusting people will be safe.

There won't be another suicide.

They're hypervigilant, ever worrying about somebody else, but never asking or saying, are you having thoughts?

Just being on guard duty all the time because they can't trust.

It's already been violated.

And they say they don't have the right to ever laugh again.

They don't have the right to have happiness in their life.

Humor has now been ruled away.

(gentle music) We know that those people who have lost someone to suicide are at an elevated risk for suicide in the future, not because of biology, because of role modeling behavior.

- It is a significant risk factor for suicide to lose someone you love to suicide or an idol.

You know, the time when Robin Williams died, contagion was a huge fear, right?

I mean, people looked up to him and it was everywhere and it was unexpected.

So imagine now a family member loses someone unexpectedly.

- In the military, we've seen this happen where a suicide occurs of a squad leader in a platoon, and then one by one members of that squad who are also coping with the same difficult stress of the military and service and combat begin to see, I know why he did that.

That's what he was dealing with the same thing.

And this role modeling of a respected elder becomes a pattern that others might follow at some point.

That's contagion.

That's for me why this is a public health issue, not just a mental health issue.

We have the friend of the deceased as a number five relationship seeking help after a suicide.

Non-biological, non-familial person.

- We're seven times more likely as survivors of suicide loss to also die from suicide and that piece of it becoming an option.

As a survivor, I would've never dreamed of suicide being part of my reality.

It wasn't something that I ever considered.

It wasn't something that our family had gone through.

And so when our son, Drew, took his life, that's when the ambiguity set in for us because we were heartbroken.

- My grandfather died by suicide on October 26th, 1936.

It was the end of the Great Depression.

He was a steel estimator for US Steel, family of quite a bit of status, and he was afraid that he was going to lose that.

So just driving from Long Island to Manhattan one day, he stopped and died by suicide off the Williamsburg Bridge.

My grandmother had no indication because he wasn't struggling before that in any way.

He was, you know, a pillar in their community.

My mom was only nine months old and my beloved grandmother, who I did not know this throughout the time when she was alive, she made multiple attempts after losing him.

He was the love of her life and she never remarried.

She was the best grandmother you could imagine and so happy.

And on her deathbed, she called for him.

I mean, I was there with her and she just called for him and knowing that my mother would ask about my grandfather, her father, and they just said, we can't talk about that.

We just can't talk about that.

We don't talk about that.

- So that role modeling behavior and that difficult grief process is dangerous.

Even if you're over identifying with them, you're walking up to a dark canyon and you're leaning very dangerously in there trying to understand that canyon.

- I did write in journals, I wrote a lot.

I wanted to feel how he felt in that moment so I would, even though I wasn't there, I would write what happened, my interpretation of it.

- I asked so many questions.

I was like, which way was he facing?

Like, I wanted to know things.

For me, for some reason, I wanted to know what his last view was.

I wanted to know, you know, where he was on that log and things like that.

- This pin that I wear, survivor pin, one color is for the family and one or the friends left behind and one is for the deceased.

And if you look closely, there's a teardrop right in the center where the ribbons cross.

A mother in Ireland, in Northern Ireland, she used all her savings and bought these pins and would go around Northern Ireland speaking.

And I worried about her and I told her, you know, I really worry that you're doing all of this, but you never tell me that you're going to a group.

You never tell me that you're taking care of yourself.

Oh, Frank, it's too important.

We got to do this work.

You see, and here's this tear on that pin.

On the anniversary of his first year of death, she took her life.

(gentle music) That's what I worry about.

(gentle music) People that don't get to heal before they do the important health work are vulnerable.

(gentle music) This is work that you will pound your head against brick wall after brick wall.

(gentle music) So you got to be able to do it because people out there that don't understand suicide are gonna give you a hard time because most people would rather talk about how to prevent car accidents.

They would rather talk about anything because they don't know this is the 10th leading cause of death in this country.

They're ignorant.

If you ask them the biggest reason people die, then they're not gonna get anywhere near suicide.

- People don't want to hear about it, and I don't blame them.

So I have to navigate and say, okay, what is a safe space?

Who are my people?

And there are people that are no longer my people and it's of no fault of their own.

It's just heavy.

It's hard to continue to have those conversations.

- And so I think that that's the importance about talking about suicide, about things like loss teams, support groups, you know, the kind of.

We talk a lot about prevention, but postvention is prevention because we need folks to be able to find community and talk about what they're feeling and not have the kind of stigma that is so harmful and that was so harmful for my family.

- Well, the model I created looks like a group of arrows in a circle, and one arrow is prevention work.

If we do prevention work that works, we reduce the number of people who will have thoughts of suicide and act on those.

If we don't, then we need intervention.

So intervention is literally intervening on a person who's either having thoughts or have developed a plan or have attempted or taking action toward dying.

So if they live, then I've added a term called post-hyphen intervention.

So this is after an attempt, and that's for a person that did attempt, but now they can get help so they can be safe in the future for suicide.

The next arrow is postvention, and postvention is meaning after a death.

After someone dies, there are individuals that have been impacted by that death, and now they're receiving postvention services.

And Shneidman called it those kind acts that a community ought routinely provide.

Because when a person has a chance to disrupt the belief that this coping behavior of suicide is an acceptable answer, by venting the emotions they have for the person who died, we tend to lower their future risk.

- For me personally, I want to talk about it, but I can't find a crowd to talk to me about my lost ones.

They all shy away from the subject.

So coming to a group where you can talk about your loved one that you lost from suicide and talk about them and say their names.

How they died is hard, but it's all different ways of suicide that they died, but we can all relate.

- And on a regular basis, you talk to any suicide survivor support group of people who've lost someone and they come and get help talking about their loss with peers, others who have had that happen, what they tell you is, I think this group saved my life.

And they say that to the high numbers that report this, that I have no doubt when they tell me that it's true.

- I know that people on an individual level are just trying to level in any way that they can, but it's like there's ever anything that's actually gonna be helpful to me.

It's gonna be somebody who's felt the same thing.

And so like I found this group on Facebook and I don't know that I ever posted in it, but just seeing what other people were going through and not feeling so alone in it, just even being able to see it helped a lot.

- It's sort of a club, right?

I don't know how other say that you feel safer.

That's why loss teams and other models are really important because you're not really ready to process.

Therapy is a great place to kind of process, but somewhat dump your bucket, for lack of a better term.

Like this is what I'm feeling.

It's messy, it's unorganized.

I don't know what to do with all of this.

And the peer has gone through it, right?

Yeah, I had to dump my bucket and you know, like they, so in lots of ways it is also low barrier.

Peer support is usually a volunteer-based service or, you know, there are definitely crisis services that are peer-based, but it is just going to meet you where you're at in that moment.

- This is a grief where words break down.

They don't build a bridge to understanding because there are no words that help you understand that.

It's not that we want everyone to have to go through this to understand it, but we just want people to be in a place where somebody across from them has been through something similar and is doing better.

And that way they get to say, I want to do what that person's doing.

I want to be more like that person.

They have a very similar story to mine, and every week I admire how they interact with the group.

And this change in the legacy theme is what is happening right before your eyes when a group is working.

Support group work is very different than group therapy, and I think that's important for anyone to understand.

Peer support is what's going on.

- Because it's just that sense of not being alone, even if someone's not ready to talk and they just, I don't want any of this, knowing when they are that there's options.

Because some folks might be like, okay, I'll go to a clinician.

And I've done this work on the prevention side a lot with police, and they want options.

They want peer support and they want to know that it's confidential.

They want a clinician who's competent and they want to know what resources they are exist.

And then it's also empowering someone who feels completely out of control, you know?

With information and resources.

My grandmother, right, she couldn't talk about it.

You know, and so when you don't talk about it, then my grandmother made multiple attempts.

She had nowhere to put that grief, no shared space to talk with other survivors, no community that could understand the very unique type of grief that suicide loss is.

So she was in just so much pain, you know, that she made attempts.

She didn't want to leave her two children.

She just was, you know, brokenhearted, right?

And there was no place to go.

And when someone does say, you know, they're indicating that, they might say, well, I'm not doing well.

I don't know if I can keep going, feel overwhelmed.

It is important to say, so are you thinking about killing yourself?

The reason that's important is some people can't say it because they're afraid of how you're gonna respond.

So if you say it, they can just.

(gentle music) You know what I mean?

They don't have to verbalize it.

They may not have said it out loud to anybody else, so they aren't having to verbalize it.

Then anything they're feeling, you've just said the most serious thing they can, right?

I mean, you've just kicked that door all the way open so they can walk through it with whatever they've got.

And so the more we can just have some introduction conversation, even like what are first steps and what are resources?

Because how people respond in the immediate first time someone says they're struggling really has a significant impact because people often think, well, they say it to me, they'll say it to other people.

You may be the only person that they say it to.

Doesn't mean you have to have the answers, doesn't mean you have to fix it, but you need to recognize that you are the person they have decided to show that to.

And you might think, well, if they're saying this to me, they're definitely saying it to their family.

Most likely they're not because they don't want to overwhelm those people and they think you, this coworker or, you know, gym buddy can handle it.

I think that the important thing is that if folks take action to learn, so whether it's a class or there's tons of books or even just listening to, you know, what people are saying and being present.

And recognizing that we don't need this shame, this stigma, that it's just people hurting, you know?

And we as a society need to collectively hold the space for people to hurt so that we can lessen that because life is hard.

Life is really, really, really hard sometimes for all of us.

(gentle music) ♪ Here we go again ♪ ♪ This never ending nightmare ♪ ♪ If I run away, ♪ will they care ♪ (gentle music) ♪ I know I said ♪ I'll always stay ♪ ♪ But you said the ♪ same and disappeared ♪ ♪ Now I see you everywhere ♪ ♪ A blurry vision and repetition ♪ of you in all my fears ♪ ♪ I want to hug you and ♪ tell you that I love you ♪ ♪ But you're gone ♪ and I'm still here ♪ ♪ I want to scream your name ♪ ♪ And slap your face for ♪ this damage we can't clear ♪ (gentle music) ♪ This is sincere ♪ ♪ All is forgiven ♪ ♪ I'll never understand ♪ the way you felt ♪ ♪ Each waking moment ♪ thinking to yourself ♪ ♪ You're in a losing battle ♪ ♪ The demon's telling ♪ you to leave ♪ ♪ But your kid's ♪ in the car seat ♪ (gentle music)