You already know this feeling, even if you've never said it out loud: launching a career, raising a family, holding a household together, and somewhere underneath all of it, just trying to make it through the day. Most of us are better at performing okay than actually being okay. And the harder we perform it, the harder it becomes to stop.
A few years ago, the country lost two well-known public figures, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, to suicide within the same week, during Mental Health Awareness Month. Their deaths became a moment the whole country sat with, publicly, together, because it's rare for suicide to touch two visible lives at once and impossible, in that moment, to look away. What stayed with me wasn't the shock. It was the reminder of how much distance there can be between how someone appears and how someone actually feels.
Suicide is currently the 11th leading cause of death in the United States overall, and the second leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 10 and 34. Those aren't numbers meant to alarm you. They're numbers meant to make one thing obvious: this is not rare, and it is not someone else's issue. It's a public health reality sitting quietly inside families, teams, classrooms, and friend groups everywhere, including yours.
The Cost of the Mask
Here's what I notice, in the room, over and over: the widespread instinct to conceal struggle is the exact opposite of what mental wellness actually requires. Wellness asks for consistent self-care and real honesty. Concealment asks you to perform contentment until the performance itself becomes the thing that's exhausting you.
Roughly one in five American adults lives with a mental health condition in any given year. Sit with that for a second. Picture the next five people you see today, at the grocery store, in a meeting, across your own dinner table. Statistically, one of them is carrying something they haven't said out loud: depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, ADHD, autism, grief, or something they don't even have a name for yet. That smile stays in place until it can't. And most of the time, nobody around them can tell the difference between the smile and the person underneath it.
What We Actually Know About Risk
One of the most common questions I hear from people who've lost someone to suicide is some version of: could I have done more? Could I have seen it sooner? That guilt is heavy, and it's also, more often than not, not the full picture. Suicide risk correlates closely with low distress tolerance combined with depression, anxiety, and a specific kind of hopelessness, the belief that things cannot get better, not just that they currently feel bad.
This is often systemic, too. It moves through families and communities across generations, not because pain is inherited in some fixed way, but because silence is. Learning to ask for help early and often is one of the few things we know actually interrupts that pattern.
- Ask early, not after. Waiting for visible signs of depression before checking in is a reactive model. Build the habit of checking in before there's a reason to.
- Build distress tolerance on purpose. Life will bring difficulty; that part isn't optional. What's trainable is your capacity to sit with discomfort without it becoming unbearable. That capacity is a skill, not a personality trait.
- Practice compassion as intensely as you practice competition. We live in a culture that rewards striving. Rewarding connection and check-ins just as visibly is how a community actually protects its people.
- Say the true thing. If you are struggling, say so, to a friend, a family member, or a clinician. If someone you love seems to be struggling, ask them directly. Neither of those conversations has to be perfect to matter.
Pain in life is a guarantee. It always has been. But you can still build something good out of it, and you don't have to build it alone.
This isn't a reactive project you take on once things get bad. It's a daily practice, the same as any other form of care. Mental Health Awareness Month is simply a yearly nudge to check in with the balance we should be tending to all along: with ourselves, and with the people in our lives who are also, most likely, performing okay a little harder than they'd like to admit.
You don't have to wait until it's unbearable to reach out
If you are having thoughts of suicide, or you're worried about someone who might be, these resources are free, confidential, and available right now.
Be kind today, in a way that costs you something small and means something real. You never know which ordinary Tuesday is the day someone needed exactly that. Hug the people you love. Say the thing you've been meaning to say. It matters more than you think.
Alongside the work of connection, some clients find it helpful to support their nervous system and daily resilience with wellness supplements from our Holistic Store. Never a substitute for care, sometimes a helpful complement to it.
Written by Tamara Pommells, LPC, LCADC, ACS. Statistics reviewed and updated May 2026 against current CDC and NIMH data.
