Stigmas around suicide silence life-saving conversations
Every month, I get my period. Every month, I sit (sometimes cry) in discomfort and pain. And every month, I feel like I have to come up with lame excuses for why I don’t feel up to doing certain things or why I’m not feeling well. It’s honestly exasperating.
The discomfort I feel when I mention my period or consequent side effects is palpable. But my period isn’t some spooky or mysterious thing; it’s a normal, natural, and important process, and it isn’t going away anytime soon.
This social stigma is so oppressive that for the first three years of having a period, I felt uncomfortable unwrapping a pad or tampon in the bathroom; the women’s bathroom, where literally everyone experiences the exact same thing. Years into having a period, I still felt like I couldn’t even tell my boyfriend that I didn’t feel well enough to go boating with him because I was on my period. Nobody talks about periods. The stigma that surrounds them is suffocating. In fact, that’s the very nature of stigmas.
Stigmas silence.
When we stigmatize normal and healthy things, we create a wall between those who want to talk about their experience and those who are too immature to address it. People who are incapable of realizing that periods aren’t embarrassing, bad, or gross, make it impossible for me to talk about what’s happening in my life. It makes me feel embarrassed for not wanting to leave my house to do things with friends because I’m cramping badly. It makes me feel like I have to secretly ask for a tampon when I forget one. Stigmas decide that periods are bad things, but they also create more significant problems by calling things “bad” when they are really things that need to be talked about.
The stigma that weighs most heavily on my mind is the stigma that surrounds mental health and suicide.
The stigma is felt as early as a sneaking suspicion that something might be wrong. We suppress feelings of depression and anxiety and refuse to acknowledge the feelings that are real and difficult because we either don’t know how to ask for help or we don’t want to. The conversation is silenced by existing stigmas before we can even know what is wrong or understand the way we feel. Stigmas separate people into groups of “us” and “them,” or the “normal” and the “affected.” The very nature of stigma is isolating and assigns negative attitudes and attributes to the “affected.”
What might have started as a less intense case of depression can quickly spiral into an all consuming and oppressive case accompanied by serious thoughts of suicide, if left unattended.
A few weeks into my first semester of college, I heard there was a boy who lived a few buildings away from me who died by suicide just a few days earlier. I expected there to be some way that the university could come together to use this opportunity to help others who were struggling. I thought we would all come together to take a moment to respect the life of the student and to start productive conversations about what to do when you need help. I was shocked when days went by without a word about this student. Someone had just lost his life at my university, and it almost seemed like it wasn’t a big deal. Nobody talked about it.
I began to wonder how many other students, kids like me, felt like they could not be helped. How many of the people around me felt like they were weak and not worth the effort? How many of my classmates were drowning under the silence induced by the stigma that existed around their mental health? How many of my peers had died? How many were forgotten because of the pressure to be silent?
Every 40 seconds, someone dies by suicide. Every year, 800,000 people are lost worldwide to what could be preventable but is instead left undiscussed. These numbers are far too high to let them be brushed aside. Suicide is an especially pressing issue in Utah. There isn’t a person whose life hasn’t been affected by suicide. Utah had the sixth highest suicide rate in the United States in 2019. If that number doesn’t scare you enough, suicide was the leading cause of death in Utah for adults aged 10-24. This problem is not just a social problem anymore, it’s a personal problem for every one of us.
We have a personal obligation to fight this stigma. We will need systematic changes made in schools that can facilitate productive conversations about mental health and suicide on a large scale with a wide reach, but an even bigger difference will be made when we work as individuals to start having difficult conversations on our own. Mental health challenges and thoughts of suicide should be subjects that are openly and frequently discussed in homes, classrooms, friend circles and workplaces. The responsibility is yours to begin having conversations with the people around you to stifle the stigma that has silenced these issues for so long.
Of course, suicide is a particularly sensitive subject. The stigma that surrounds it was created by well-meaning people who thought that maybe if we didn’t talk about it, it would stop happening. People still believe that drawing any attention to suicide glorifies the act and might somehow be encouraging to others struggling with these thoughts, and of course, that is never something to be encouraged. The issue should be approached carefully and respectfully, but I firmly believe that silence is not the way to be sensitive. My intention is not to promote suicide, but being quiet is different than being respectful. If we really want to respect the student and help others who might be struggling in similar ways, we can not allow ourselves to be silenced.
There is no growth in silence.
It’s true for any stigma we experience. When we refuse to talk about an issue, whether it be periods or mental health, we will never progress or understand where we have gone wrong. We owe it to ourselves and to each other to become better by using our intellect and experience to help ourselves and the people around us. Suicide is not a topic we can afford to stigmatize any longer. It is not a sign of weakness. The only way to fight this stigma is to start having difficult conversations and provide resources and tools to people who need them; and we all desperately need them.
There is no growth in silence. And I refuse to live in a silent world.
Author Biography:
Kaelin Hirschi is from Orem, Utah and is currently a student at Brigham Young University pursuing a degree in Public Relations. She works as the director of civic advocacy for the Independent Education Program based in Utah. She enjoys focusing her work on politics and hopes to intern in DC next summer. She also plays rugby and loves to stay busy.