Chronic, passive suicidal ideation is like living in the ocean. Let’s start talking about how to tread water. [...] What if we acknowledged the possibility of suicidality all around us, normalized asking and checking in? If people talked about feeling suicidal — not joked, as we’ve all started to do online, but really talked — as much as they talked about feeling depressed or anxious, would we finally be forced to see how common it is and start creating space for these conversations? Would it be the worst thing in the world if we started talking about not wanting to be alive, and what might help keep us here? Of course, even that doesn’t have a straight answer. “We really don’t know [the impact of] having more casual conversation about suicide,” April Foreman, licensed psychologist and executive board member at the American Association of Suicidology, told me. “Stigma is lower than it’s ever been and suicide rates are as high as they were during the Great Depression. If reducing stigma alone saves lives, the suicide rates should be going down.” [...] In the absence of good science, one of the most helpful things you can do for chronic suicidality is curate your collection of flotation devices. According to Foreman, if mental health care can only do so much to reduce our feelings of suicidality and equip us with the tools we need to tread water, then it’s crucial to nourish a life full of things we want to stay afloat for.

I've had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies — once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself. Not sure how or if I've helped many folks say yes to life but I've definitely aided in few folks dying slowly in America, all without the aid of a gun.

Jesse Bering: “I don’t think any scholar ever captured the suicidal mind better than Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister in his 1990 Psychological Review article , ‘Suicide as Escape from the Self.’” An exploration of the six conditions that lead to suicide — academic, informative, and imploring.