September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. But, damn.
I hate the phrase “suicide prevention.”
No shade to the people doing that work, because they save lives every day, but the name makes it sound like the best we can hope for is avoiding the worst thing.
I want more for you than that. So for the next two days, I’m calling it Sticking Around Month ✌️.
I know I’m squeezing this in with about two days to spare, and it’s because I wasn’t sure I wanted to write about this at all. It feels heavy. But then I realized how many of the young adults we work with carry this weight quietly, and how much of the heaviness comes from nobody talking about it.
So I’m talking about it.
Most of what gets posted this month is statistics, and, yeah, those matter. But I want to talk about hope.
Specifically the kind you get from meeting someone who was in the same dark place a few years ago and is now doing okay, complaining about their rent like a regular adult.
When things are at their worst, our brains tend to tell us two things with total confidence. The first is that nobody has ever felt this way before. The second is that it will always feel this way.
Just to cut to the chase, both are wrong.
And the people who can prove it best are the ones who used to believe them too. We know because we were those people.
Researchers in Vienna actually tested this. In a 2020 study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, people who had attempted suicide in the past year read an article by someone who’d been through a similar crisis and come out the other side. Their suicidal thoughts dropped by about 20 percent. Another group read coping advice from an expert, and the drop was about half as big, small enough that researchers couldn’t rule out chance. The difference came from hearing it from someone who had lived it.
This is a big part of why Not Therapy exists. Every coach on our team has been through something hard, whether that’s mental health stuff, time in a treatment program, addiction recovery, or a few years that went nothing like the plan. We started this company because we wanted young adults to have the kind of mentor we didn’t have at that age.
One thing our coaches hear all the time, usually in the first few weeks, is some version of “Everyone else has it together and I’m falling apart.” If that’s you, I promise you’re doing better than it feels like from the inside, and f*ck no, everyone else does not have it together.
Something shifts when young adults find out other people have been somewhere similar and are now on the other side, going to work, paying bills, laughing at extremely dumb videos. Just normal shit.
Can you believe we got here?
Some days we can’t either.
For us, hope got a lot easier to believe when it came from a real person we knew had been through some shit too.
People come back from this all the time, including plenty of us on this team who were sure we wouldn’t. And the other side has some really good stuff on it. There are road trips with the windows down and the aux cord in the right hands, inside jokes that make you laugh so hard you can’t breathe, a first apartment that’s all yours even if the couch came off the curb, a dog you haven’t met yet who is going to think you’re the greatest person alive, and friends you don’t even know exist yet. Some of the best days of your life haven’t happened yet.
You don't have to believe me right now. Just stick around long enough for me to say I told you so 🤫.
And by the way, if you’re doing even a little better than the darkest spot you were in, you have a freaking gift. Use it.
Somebody out there is a few steps behind you right now. Your story, including the messy middle part you’d rather skip, might be what helps them hold on. You don’t need a TED talk. “Hey, I’ve been there, want to grab food?” works great.
If you’re thinking about suicide, or you’re worried about someone who is, you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US, any time of day or night. You can also text HOME to 741741 to reach Crisis Text Line. If someone is in immediate danger, call 911.
I’m rooting for you.
We all are.
Happy Sticking Around Month.
💙Announcements💙
We have exciting news!
There’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.
It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.
OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.
Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.
Any parent can join and it’s free.
Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.