World Suicide Prevention Day September 10
I wasn’t going to take World Suicide Prevention Day on September 10, seriously. I lost my twenty-three-year-old son Patrick Wood to suicide in 2006. He was the least likely person to kill himself—a valedictorian with perfect SATs, a Stanford grad with honors, a beautiful, hard-working, brilliant young man raised on a farm in Connecticut with his twin sister Libby and a loving family. I spent the next eighteen years learning why.
The ostensible reason was rejection from a boy. But rejection was only a small part of the reason. The bigger part was the disease of depression. Patrick had been treated for it since high school. He was hospitalized for it at Stanford. He had medication for it in Berlin, where he was a programmer for Siemens. But on a cold January day, he killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning. Carbon monoxide attaches to the hemoglobin and robs its ability to carry oxygen. He basically suffocated from lack of oxygen in his bloodstream after he took sleeping pills.
Patrick died from the disease of depression, which attacks our brains. It attacks the very part of our being that makes decisions, including the decision of whether or not to kill ourselves. I had to educate myself about depression because nothing else about Patrick explained his death. He was the person everyone wanted to be. He was a math major, who was working on his master’s in computer science. His future was unlimited. But his brain told him the opposite. His brain told him he was a failure. And that message, which he could not escape, made him too miserable to live. It overpowered every advantage, every success, and all the love from family and friends. It made me suspicious of sweeping movements like World Suicide Prevention Day. How are we going to prevent world suicide when we cannot prevent the suicide of one person, who should be on top of the world?
Then came Rory O’Connor, President of the International Association of Suicide Prevention (IASP), which began World Suicide Prevention Day in 2003 along with the World Health Organization. O’Connor lost a friend to suicide in 2008. Forty-year-old Clare was a former PhD student with O’Connor in Belfast and remained close to him. She and O’Connor talked about her mental pain and hopelessness, but months after the last conversation, she killed herself. In 2022, O’Connor wrote about her in his far-reaching book, When It Is Darkest: Why People Die by Suicide and What We Can Do to Prevent It. I gobbled it up after writing my own book about suicide, and then I understood. We do need to take World Suicide Prevention Day seriously. Suicide is preventable if parents like me know what to look for. In Patrick’s case, that means suicidal ideation (“I had thoughts of suicide... but don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything.”), a prior depressive episode for which he was hospitalized, rumination about the boy he wanted, humiliation at not succeeding, telling his friends he wanted to kill himself (they thought they had talked him out of it), refusal to seek help, and access to the means. Patrick ordered charcoal on the Internet three days before he died.
It's true that I am looking at these factors in perfect hindsight. I probably couldn’t put them together and predict suicide. But if I knew how to “start the conversation,” which the International Association for Suicide Prevention advocates on its website, I might not have been speechless when Pat told me he had thoughts of suicide. I might have done what O’Connor urges. Take those thoughts seriously. Ask the person how they got to that point. What made them feel that way? Show compassion for the answer. Consider a safety plan to identify suicidal thoughts and the activities that will help. Encourage them to get help. If they don’t, ask if you can do it for them. Most importantly, remove access to lethal means.
In June, I launched my book about Patrick at Pomfret School, where he was valedictorian in 2001. Toward the end of the book signing, one friend said we have to normalize talking about suicide, and I realized that’s what we had done. We had started the conversation. Let’s keep it going on World Suicide Prevention Day Tuesday, September 10, 2024. Maybe another mom, worried about her son’s depression, will learn what to do next.
Marie Lisette Rimer
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