How can I support a suicidal friend? Feminist Advice
A reader seeks scripts to help them talk more effectively to loved ones feeling suicidal.
I am releasing two more surveys today, the results of which will be available in a few weeks. You can take my survey on sex in long-term relationships here. If you are a woman/femme/not a cis man, you can take my survey of racism and misogyny in medical care here.
Content note: This piece discusses suicidal thoughts and feelings, but not in graphic detail. The way we talk about suicide matters, because certain reporting styles may increase suicide rates. I wrote more about this in this piece, many years ago.
Additionally, it is a common tactic for abusers to threaten suicide when their victims attempt to leave. You are not the right person to support or help your abuser. Please get outside help for them.
A reader asks…
Do you have any advice, especially scripts I could use, for supporting a friend who is suicidal? I’m referring mostly to someone who is not an active, immediate threat to themselves, but who is still feeling immense despair.
My answer
Thank you for trusting me with this question. I have to give the usual disclaimer that I am not a therapist, nor a suicide expert. I spent a couple of years working on a crisis line, and have lost too many people to suicide, and watched too many more struggle with suicidal thoughts. I draw my advice from those experiences, and from the large body of research we have on the topic.
I want to start by emphasizing how harmful I think popular suicide narratives are. We have this notion that suicidal thoughts are inherently irrational, and that they come from nowhere, or from mental illness. That they are somehow inexplicable, and that convincing people not to kill themselves is about convincing them to behave more logically, or think differently.
In my experience, suicidal feelings are almost always the product of very challenging realities. The people I have known who deal with suicidal feelings are almost always coping with poverty, trauma, abuse, or loss.
To help them, we must acknowledge rather than demean these realities. We must accept that some circumstances are so awful that they feel unsurvivable. The problem is not bad thinking, or bad thinking alone. It’s the unsustainable and awful realities our culture has built for far too many people.
Helping a friend who is suicidal begins with acknowledging and validating their reality. It may also include brainstorming with them to help them out of that reality. By the time someone is suicidal, they may be too exhausted, sad, and beaten down to take the next healthy step. They might need help to call the collection agency, or make the doctor’s appointment, or do whatever feels most unbearable. Practical help matters. If you can be, recruit, or hire this practical help, please do.
And let’s not forget about the power of financial privilege. If your friend is struggling with poverty, or if they have a problem money could solve, don’t ignore this fact. If you have the money to help, please do. No amount of positive self-talk will compensate for not begin able to pay the mortgage, buy food, or afford a desperately needed abortion. If you can afford to pay your loved one out of the current crisis, please do. This is not enabling. It is crisis support.
If we want to build sustainable community, that begins with using whatever resources we can to help the people we love survive. If you can give to someone in crisis, please do.
But what if you can’t, or you need to offer more than just money? Here’s my advice, drawn partially from my own experience and partially from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention:
Take every threat seriously
People who talk about suicide are serious about suicide. They are not being manipulative. They are expressing despair. Even if you cannot help, don’t want to help, or have no more resources to give, assume that the person you love is serious about the threat, and find a way to connect them to someone who can help.
Share the load
Your well-being matters, too, and you cannot meaningfully show up for someone else if you are emotionally or physically drained. Moreover, you cannot singlehandedly stop someone from committing suicide.
Encourage your loved one to seek additional support, and ask them if you can reach out to others—a therapist, others in your friend group. But do not violate their privacy if at all possible. Often telling the wrong person can make everything worse. This is doubly true when a child is suicidal and their parents are abusive or unsupportive.
Keep talking—often that’s what they most need
If your loved one is talking to you, they are less likely to harm themselves. Keep them talking. So often, a suicidal crisis comes when a person has feelings that feel too big to manage, and incompatible with continued existence. Getting those feelings out matters.
You don’t have to say the One Perfect Thing. You don’t even necessarily have to say a good thing. You don’t have to fix it, or have any particular insight. Just keep them talking. Ask lots of questions:
When did that happen?
Why do you think that happened?
What does [person they respect] think about this?
Can you think of anything that would make this better?
If you can edge them gently toward hope, by encouraging them to strategize about what might make things better, do so, but don’t push it. The goal is communication, not fixing things.
Avoid giving too much advice, since the advice that might land well for you may not for them. Instead, I like to follow a simple formula:
Validate. Use earnest, genuine language, not a script. “That sounds hard” is the sort of language that rings hollow and disingenuous. “This is awful,” “I hate this for you,” “You don’t deserve to feel this way,” and similar expressions of support and solidarity work much better.
Seek to understand. Ask your loved one to tell you more. Follow up. Seek clarity when you don’t understand something. People who feel truly heard, who think there is someone who wants to listen to them, feel less despair.
Share light stories of your own. This doesn’t have to be a one-way street. If it feels right, injecting a funny story from your day or something your kid did can offer a bit of distraction, and may help them feel that there is more in this world than this all-consuming problem. Do not try to share your own problems, or compare who has it worse.
Critically, never, ever demean their suffering, tell them they should feel differently, or compare their suffering to your own. It doesn’t matter if you think they’re overreacting. Do you want them to think they’re overreacting, too? Because if they do, that compounds their shame, and increases their risk of suicide.
Create a distraction
You can’t fix the crisis, and you may not be able to fix the feelings. But often it’s enough to give your loved one a break from their misery. Create a temporary distraction from these unrelenting emotions. Take them to a movie. Bring them a meal they love. Buy them a treat. Something to do and something to enjoy or be happy about matter. The goal here is a short-term improvement that may inspire them to begin building back to longer term improvements.
Get them to agree to a safety plan
Don’t shy away from discussing suicide directly. Just make sure you don’t guilt, judge, or shame. Instead, focus on their safety. See what you can get them to commit to. Perhaps they’ll agree to not self-harm for 24 hours, or to wait until some future date to make their decision. Maybe they will promise to call you before they do anything irreversible. Get whatever commitment you can.
Try a script like this: “I love you, and I know things feel hopeless, but your life has so much value and you are so important to me. Can you agree to not harm yourself for x period of time? Can you commit to taking just a little longer to make this permanent decision?”
Keep checking in
Sometimes people in suicidal crises suddenly appear a bit better. This can be because committing to suicide offers them a sense of relief. Or it can be that they are faking because the support they are getting is not helping. Don’t assume that they are cured and better just because they’re not in active, obvious crisis. Keep checking in. Recovering from suicidal feelings—and from the life crises that tend to cause them—is a long-term project, not something that happens in just a few conversations.
Don’t make them feel like a burden
Suicidal people often feel like death would be a gift to their loved ones, because their existence is a burden, or is otherwise harmful. Making your loved one feel like they are annoying you, reacting irrationally, or demanding too much compounds these feelings.
Instead, encourage them to express themselves and validate that they deserve outside, expert help. If you need to end the conversation, end with reassurance and love, and ideally, with a plan for what they will do to remain safe while they are no longer talking to you.
Don’t create an adversarial discussion
Don’t put your loved one in the position of defending their emotions, or their reaction to their experiences. As soon as the discussion becomes an argument, it’s going to make your loved one feel worse. It’s normal and ok for them to express anger, sadness, and frustration. You cannot reason them out of these emotions. You can only listen.
Know when the discussion has become harmful
Sometimes discussions turn harmful. The suicidal person begins ruminating, attacking you, or is otherwise clearly getting worse because the conversation is harming them. This isn’t your fault—or theirs. It’s just a reality of human interactions that sometimes you may not know the right thing to say or do.
If the interaction seems to be actively harming you both, it’s time to gently end the discussion and find another resource for them.
Please consider calling 988 in the United States, to connect to mental health resources. Please do not call the police. Many areas also have mobile crisis units that offer immediate, safe support. Try googling your city+mobile crisis unit.
Thank you for caring about your friend.
Readers, do you have any additional tips?
A thing someone told me "saved them," that I didn't even realize I was doing at the time...
Many years ago, my friend told me she was feeling suicidal. She told me all the ways life was hurting and how it had kept being that way for a long time. However she felt like she couldn't talk to her family because of their religion, and they'd see her questioning her faith as an attack against them.
And the thing I said to her was basically "well obviously, I love you and wish you wouldn't kill yourself. But that's me being selfish and wanting to keep you. If that's what you decide you must do, I will understand. I'll be sad because I don't get to see you anymore, but my feelings aren't your responsibility and you don't have to keep suffering just so I don't get a sad feeling. If you do, I'll be OK. I'll still love you."
She's still around. She got a better job and a new apartment and a therapist who helped with her religious and social trauma. She was able to put some healthy boundaries up with her family and found a church she likes, that isn't so judgy. Every once in a while, she tells me that I saved her by being the only person who took the "guilt" and burden of someone else's feelings OFF of her, and that helped her realize she didn't have to carry all of everyone's expectations and feelings.
There's no one right thing to say, but maybe "think about other people and how THEY feel " is a wrong one. Especially for women, who have been drowning in Everyone Else First since approximately birth.
This is outstanding advice. I would also really love to see a small section about what to do when someone is weaponizing suicidal thoughts against you, especially considering the nature of your normal content. I never went looking for that information when I was helping friends because I didn’t believe that was the problem, but with at least two of those people, I needed to be told that it was possible that I was being manipulated (and how on earth do you handle that??).
I had no idea how to handle the icky feeling I was getting from them because, even if it was true, how could I protect myself without hurting them?
Regardless, though, all of your advice here is so solid. Many people shy away from those who experience suicidal thoughts and feelings because they’re afraid to say the wrong thing, but almost always, they just need connection.