Some mornings arrive already heavy. A few years back, I woke to the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death and, that same week, the news that a prominent public figure’s son, had died by suicide after his own long battle with mental illness. Two losses, decades apart, arriving on top of each other. It’s the kind of morning that makes the scale of this problem impossible to look away from.
Suicide prevention is a topic that we still can’t quite understand, it is wrapped in stigma, even now. Current national data puts suicide as 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 numbers haven’t moved in the direction we’d want them to. That’s exactly why open, honest conversation about it still matters.
Exhaustion That Looks Like A Decision.
If you haven’t personally been to a place of deep emotional despair, it’s genuinely hard to understand what drives someone toward suicide. I want to be exceptionally careful with the language here, because language matters: suicide isn’t a rational choice weighed against other options. It’s what can happen when pain becomes so unrelenting, and hope feels so completely inaccessible, that a person’s thinking narrows down to a single, distorted belief: that this is the only way the pain stops. Some people feel so backed into a corner, their brains stop seeing options. As clinician, we call this intrapsychic pain and distress.
As a clinician who has spent years in acute treatment, I have to look at this, both personally and professionally. I sit with it directly. When I’m with someone in that place, my questions aren’t about the act itself. They’re about what’s underneath it: How long has this pain been here? What has it taken from you already? What would even one different day look like? Those questions aren’t clinical detachment. They’re an attempt to hand someone back a sense of agency that unbearable pain has quietly taken from them. And everyone’s pain is their own, not to be judged against someone else’s pain.
At the same time, I hold real respect for how overwhelming life must feel for someone to arrive at this point at all, and for the exhausting work it takes to fight back against those thoughts. The exhaustion is real. This is rarely about one cause. It’s usually a convergence: mental illness, grief, isolation, and a nervous system that has been in survival mode for far too long. Burnouts lead to breakdowns.
The Many Faces of This Struggle
Kurt Cobain’s brilliance as a musician and this young man’s decades-long struggle with mental illness are two very different stories that end in the same place. It can be personally devastating but also culturally devasting, even generations later, as a significant loss. Their losses are a reminder that this cuts across fame, fortune, faith, and family support. None of it makes a person immune. That’s exactly why real community and connection matter as much as clinical care does.
What Empathy Actually Does
As mental health professionals, part of our job is to face depression, grief, anxiety, and fear with open hearts and clear eyes, not flinch away from them. A suicide assessment isn’t just a clinical checklist. Done well, it’s a chance to hand someone back a sense of possibility they’ve lost sight of. The right question, asked with real care, can be the first crack of light in a room that’s felt completely dark.
There is always a path forward, even when it’s hard to see
If you are having thoughts of suicide, or you’re concerned about someone who might be, these resources are free, confidential, and available right now. Please use them.
Beyond a crisis moment, the harder, longer work is building a culture where mental health is discussed openly and treated with the same seriousness as physical health, so fewer people ever reach that edge in the first place.
The Power of Connection
Working with both suicide risk and addiction over the years, I see the same pattern show up again and again: entrapment, helplessness. Regardless of income, status, or how many people love them, someone considering suicide almost always feels like there is no other way out. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can offer isn’t an answer. It’s the felt sense that a way back still exists. In my office, I like to say that you are driving the bus, but I am a passenger, here with you, as long as you need me.
By reaching out, listening without flinching, and offering real hope, we can help guide someone in despair back toward a horizon where life, imperfect as it is, still feels worth fighting for.
A Call to Action
As we hold the memory of everyone lost to suicide, the work in front of us is straightforward, even if it isn’t easy: keep educating ourselves, keep advocating for real mental health care, and keep extending empathy to the people struggling around us, some of whom we won’t even realize are struggling. Hope is never as far out of reach as it feels in the hardest moments.
That was heavy, and it should be. Alongside the deeper work, some clients also find it helpful to support their nervous system day to day with wellness supplements from our Holistic Store. Never a replacement for care, sometimes a helpful companion to it.
Written by Tamara Pommells, LPC, LCADC, ACS. Statistics reviewed and updated against current CDC and NIMH data.
