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TW suicide.
You never expect to be writing a post like this, and then one day you are. We can’t ever foretell what’s round the corner, neither can we foretell how we will deal with it and cope when it does. What this has taught me is that none of us are ever actually that far away from not wanting to be here or feeling our only way to cope is with behaviours that could lead to that. With the state of the world and the increasing hyper-individualisation, now more than ever it’s easy to feel as if no one cares, no one understands, and there is no way out of the situation you are in.
If we can support someone by not just looking at how their thoughts are ‘distortions’ or that they must have a ‘disorder’ and instead by ‘what experience in life is this an understandable reaction to?’ we might have a better chance at reducing the 720,000 a year that decide this is the only option. The fact that 73% of suicides happen in low-middle income countries, should be enough to highlight the greater systemic issues at play when it comes to this topic.
The entire month of September is dedicated to raising awareness about suicide prevention. Hotlines if you need help now:
1018 in Greece
116123 in the UK
988 in the US & Canada
🤍
Transcript
My name is Isabelle and this is Alice, my best friend who we lost to suicide at the beginning of this year. And this is Philip, my better, who we also lost just a few months later. Now I'm a therapist, so obviously I'm meant to know what to do, I'm meant to have the tools, how to help people who feel bad, how to even stop this happening. And the funny thing is is that I realized through this whole experience, it's not about the tools. It's not about what my professors said to do and not do at university. It's about that I've had to go back to work because I have bills to pay that aren't gonna be paused just because I'm really, really sad. It's that five months after losing my brother, I'm expected to be the same as I was before. I'm expected to function the same as I could function before. It's about that most people don't know what to say, and even if they do, they don't have the time to say it because they also have bills to pay. And sometimes I wonder if we're looking at the wrong source, that we're so quick to blame the individual and find a way to fix how they feel, we say that they're not manifesting hard enough, or they don't have an abundance mindset, or they're just being negative, and they're not regulated enough, because it's always regulate your nervous system, and never regulate the wider systems that we exist in.
