114. SUICIDE PREVENTION: My Experience, Crisis Survival Skills, + Long-Term Recovery

Sep 18

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In honor of September being Suicide Prevention Month, today's solo episode is all about my experiences with suicidal ideation. This episode focuses on skills education to help you navigate SI or support someone struggling white avoiding graphics that could potentially be triggering. I discuss my experiences with SI, what allowed me to shift these thought patterns, psychology facts to remember when feeling suicidal, my top crisis management skills, emotion regulation and long-term skills to build your life worth living, and answer some listener questions!

Mentioned In The Episode…

+ 3East McLean Hospital

+ Ep. 28 feat. Blaise Aguirre MD

+ Atomic Habits by James Clear

+ Crisis Survival Plan

+ Text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line

+ CDC's Suicide Prevention Resources

+ Didi Hirsch

+ Teenline

+ About 988

SHOP GUEST RECOMMENDATIONS: https://amzn.to/3A69GOC

Episode Sponsors

🛋This week's episode is sponsored by Teen Counseling. Teen Counseling is an online therapy program with over 14,000 licensed therapists in their network offering support with depression, anxiety, relationships, trauma, and more via text, talk, and video counseling. Head to teencounseling.com/shepersisted to find a therapist today!

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About She Persisted (formerly Nevertheless, She Persisted)

After a year and a half of intensive treatment for severe depression and anxiety, 18-year-old Sadie recounts her journey by interviewing family members, professionals, and fellow teens to offer self-improvement tips, DBT education, and personal experiences. She Persisted is the reminder that someone else has been there too and your inspiration to live your life worth living.

a note: this is an automated transcription so please ignore any accidental misspellings!

[00:00:00] Sadie: Welcome to she persisted. I'm your host. Sadie sat in a 19 year old from the bay area, studying psychology at the university of pencils. She processed. It is the teen mental health podcast made for teenagers by a team. In each episode, I'll bring you authentic, accessible, and relatable conversations about every aspect of mental wellness you can expect.

[00:00:20] Evidence-based Tina proved resources, coping skills, including lots of DBT insights and education. Each piece of content you consume, she persisted offers you a safe space to feel validated and understood in your struggle while encouraging you to take ownership of your journey and build your life worth living.

[00:00:37] So let's dive in.

[00:00:41] Before we get into this episode, as I'm sure you could tell from the title, I would like to give a trigger warning for topics like suicidal ideation and suicide attempts.

[00:00:51] I encourage you to take care of your mental health first. And so if that means not listening to this episode to avoid being triggered, then do that set that boundary. Do what is best for you. A caveat. If you're still on the fence, this is a very skills heavy and education focused episode.

[00:01:06] I tried to really stay away from graphics. So nothing crazy in here, but just if that topic is triggering to you, here is your little trigger warning.

[00:01:14] Hello. Hello. Welcome back to she. Persisted. I'm a little bit nervous for this week's episode. It's a vulnerable topic. It's an important topic, which is why I wanted to do a solo episode on it. It hits very close to home. So definitely a little bit nervous to talk about this, but I am hoping that this episode will be helpful for you guys and that it will provide some tips and support that will help you in your journey.

[00:01:38] So with that two days episode is about suicide prevention and suicidal ideation. If you didn't know, September is suicide prevention month and so I wanted to do a little mini series of sorts talking about how you can navigate suicidal ideation, how to support someone struggling with suicidal ideation and speak from not only what worked for me, but about what the evidence shows is helpful. As far as resources.

[00:02:05] Next week's episode is a really exciting interview with the fellow teen in the mental health space. Her name is Adia. She works very closely with DD Hirsch. She is actually one of the people that picks up the phones. If you call nine, eight, eight, so we talked about what happens if you call 9, 8, 8, what to expect, if you ever call a hotline or a helpline, what questions they ask, some common tips that she gives that you can help implement. It's just an amazing conversation. And we talk a lot about the, the evidence and the research and the suicide prevention space, the dos, and don'ts all of that kind of stuff.

[00:02:41] And it's a very helpful, amazing episode that I've never seen anyone do in the podcast space before. So I'm very excited about that, but today's episode is going to be a solo episode and I'm going to touch on my journey and give you a whole bunch of tips and tricks and resources and skills that worked for me when I struggled with suicidal ideation.

[00:03:02] So. It's gonna be a lot. I also wanted to give a trigger warning at this point. I am going to touch on my journey. I'm not gonna go into any graphics or any details. It's gonna be very skills, heavy, very resource focused, because I like that will be what will be most helpful without triggering anyone or adding fuel to the fire, if you will.

[00:03:23] So to begin to give you a little bit of background. When I started struggling with depression, I was not struggling with suicidal ideation. I noticed I began to get suicidal after my first or second hospitalization when that kind of hopelessness set in and I would say it was kind of tied to having an understanding of what I was experiencing. I was struggling with depression. I had a lot of emotions that were very overwhelming and big and difficult to navigate.

[00:03:49] And on top of that, I wasn't really feeling a difference in these emotions, feelings, diagnoses, et cetera. I was trying a lot of different things. I was doing outpatient and inpatient and D B T and all these different things, but I wasn't seeing a shift in my mood or my ability to cope. And so with that lack of improvement, I started to feel a sense of hopelessness.

[00:04:13] And if you've heard me talk about my story before you know that I talk about those two years of treatment at home with an, an now increased sense of nuance, which is that I didn't believe that I was going to not be depressed, which again, the hopelessness was there. I didn't think that I deserved to be happy.

[00:04:31] My self-esteem was so shot and. I was going to all these resources, whether it was inpatient treatment or outpatient therapy or group therapy, but I didn't believe it was gonna work.

[00:04:42] I didn't think I was deserving of getting better. And so just like manifesting, I feel is the best way to explain this. If you don't believe something's gonna happen, it's not going to happen. And that's true if you're training for a marathon or pursuing a degree or getting better at a scale, if you are so sure and certain that it's not going to work, it probably won't.

[00:05:02] And that was true of my recovery, especially in the early days. So I was really hopeless. I felt really overwhelmed and I started to experience suicidal ideation. and that went on for probably a year or two years. It culminated in a suicide attempt before I went to three east. And when I noticed a shift in this symptom presentation being suicidal ideation, it was when I decided that I was no longer going to have suicide as an option on the quote unquote back burner in my life, I realized in a therapy session at McClain, that the way I operated through any challenge, whether it was a difficult emotion or a therapy appointment, or a tough conversation with my parents, anything and everything in my life, there was always this voice in the back of my mind saying, well, you know, what, if it gets really bad, there's always this option.

[00:05:53] Or if things are just really terrible, it's okay. I don't have to experience that. And keeping that on the back burner came at a huge deficit to me because I wasn't invested in my progress. It was always like this, like one foot out the door, one foot in the door, like if this works great, but also whatever, because there's this other option.

[00:06:12] And so I was in this therapy appointment, I realized, okay, this is how I'm operating through life. And this is why I can't stop feeling the suicidal ideation at this point at this therapy appointment during my time at three east, I forgot to mention if you are not familiar with my story halfway through my freshman year of high school, I went to a residential treatment program called three east at McLean hospital. It was a dialectical behavioral therapy program. I was there for 14 weeks and that's where I really saw a shift in my depression and anxiety and suicidal ideation.

[00:06:41] So. During my time there, I was in this therapy appointment and I had started to see improvements in my mood. I had started to see some behavioral changes. So my sleep was improving. I was starting to be vulnerable with my parents, my ability to use my coping skills was improving. So I was seeing shifts, but I still was really struggling with the suicidal ideation and so I was in this therapy session, we're talking through this and my therapist asked me something that allowed me to get to the realization that this is how I think about life.

[00:07:10] I have this thing on the back burner and she was like, that's, that's the problem here. This is why you're still feeling suicidal. This is why you're still having this ideation is because you always see that as an option. And because I had. Seeing these small shifts, I was starting to gain a little bit of hope.

[00:07:27] I was starting to feel what my life worth living really could be. I was able to say, okay, I can make this jump. I can decide this is no longer going to be my back burner. This is no longer going to be in the cards. I trust myself to cope with any emotions that arise. I trust myself to navigate any challenges that come my way.

[00:07:48] And I trust myself to persist through that without having this back burner option of. And that making that decision would not have been possible six months prior because there was no hope I hadn't made any progress. So I didn't see the light at the end of the tunnel where it was like, I know what it feels like to be happy and okay.

[00:08:08] And I can keep working towards that goal no matter what comes my way, because I just, I didn't know what that was like. I was blindly stumbling towards this idea of getting better. I didn't trust that that would happen for me. I didn't trust that I was capable of feeling that. So it took some small shifts.

[00:08:22] It took some progress for me to be able to make that commitment. But once I made that commitment, the way that I approached everything shifted. So instead of when I had a tough urge or a tough emotion or a rough day or an uncomfortable conversation, instead of kind of toying and playing around with that idea of like, well, if things are really that bad, there's always this option.

[00:08:44] I would like nip that thought, that urge that idea in the butt immediately. And I would say, no, my life worth living does not include having suicide as a plan B as a back burner, as a second option. That's not the life I wanna live. That's not the life I'm living. So no, even in the worst case scenario, even if this is incredibly challenging and embarrassing and overwhelming and difficult and stressful, I'm gonna cope with that and it's gonna be okay and I will get to the other side.

[00:09:10] And there is no plan B where's case scenario, second option that I will engage in. And it took a long time. It took months for those thoughts to start going away. But every single time I would have them, I would, in my mind, reconvince myself that I'd made this commitment. I'd made this decision and that actually wasn't an option.

[00:09:30] And we're gonna get into like how suicidal ideation. I like to think of it as a habit, rather than just an urge or an intrusive thought and why it takes so long to rewire, but with time with continuing to. Stick to my decision, my commitment I'd made to myself, those thoughts slowly started to go away.

[00:09:52] And I wanna remind you that this wasn't an overnight thing. I can pinpoint this moment, this therapy session as a shift, but it took many months after that to get to the point where I wouldn't have a suicidal thought passive or active for months, years at a time. And if there was anything in my treatment journey, that was like a progressive trajectory.

[00:10:13] It was that it was that commitment to no longer feeling suicidal, because I just kept reaffirming that commitment. I just kept reminding myself that this is what my life worth living is. And this suicidal ideation doesn't fit in with that. And so I'm gonna let that go. And just continuing with time to rewire that habit behavior thought urge, I really did see a difference.

[00:10:36] So that is kind of my story. Very boiled down again. We're staying away from graphics. That's not gonna be helpful to you because of our stories are all different, but that commitment I think, is helpful to share because I think that is something that a lot of people can relate to. And that I think is common on a lot of people's journeys.

[00:10:53] And it was such a light bulb moment in my therapy journey through east. Another thing that I wanna touch on. When I mentioned seeing those small shifts to give a little bit more clarity there, those small shifts that allowed me to feel hope towards the light at the end of the tunnel, the life worth living, the feeling happy feeling.

[00:11:12] Okay. Not being depressed. Some of those examples in the early days was not waking up immediately depressed. Like maybe five minutes after I got up, I was like, Ugh, don't feel great today. But there was this amazing shift from having 24 hours a day, feeling like numb and hopeless and overwhelmed to waking up in the morning and not immediately feeling terrible.

[00:11:31] So that was one thing. I remember being something that brought me a lot of hope. Using skills effectively. You guys know, I love coping skills, but getting better at being able to navigate emotions, getting better at being able to advocate for myself or be vulnerable or tolerate distress was something that also brought a lot of hope because it meant that down the line, no matter what challenges I encountered, I could cope with them and I would be okay.

[00:11:56] And then the last thing that I'll mention, and I'll go into more depth on this later during our skills, education was putting off, engaging in an urge for a given period of time. This is one of the key skills, not only in exposure therapy, which I've done in episode on before, but in navigating suicidal ideation and just urges in general, no matter what urges you're struggling with is making a commitment.

[00:12:19] That's really small at the beginning. It's like, I am not going to engage in this suicidal ideation for 30 seconds. I'm gonna put off engaging in this for a minute or five minutes or 10 minutes or an hour and slowly but surely you make it through the night. You make it through the day. You make it through the week.

[00:12:38] So being able to sit with the discomfort, being able to ride the wave of the urge for a day a week a month, brought me a lot of hope because it was like, okay, I can navigate this level of challenge and it won't derail me. It won't cause me immense stress and overwhelm and things. Won't implode. I am capable of handling life and these urges and not allowing it to completely collapse everything around me.

[00:13:04] Nothing's going to implode the world will continue to spin et C. So those are three things that brought me a lot of hope. They'll probably be different for you, but getting clear on what those things are, whether you write them down on a list, maybe they're always front of mind is really helpful and giving you a destination that you're working towards and being able to stay true to that commitment and all of those things.

[00:13:30] I feel like are pretty reasonable using a skill, putting off an urge, having a moment throughout the day when you feel a little bit more okay than you normally do, none of those are insane. Like, oh, I'm gonna run a marathon and that'll give me hope because I can do anything like no you're it's baby steps, baby goals.

[00:13:49] And those brought me a lot of hope. So the next thing that I wanna touch on is some little things that I've learned during my time at Penn, in my psychology classes that I think are helpful to keep in mind. If you're struggling with suicidal ideation, they put things in perspective. They remind you that the thoughts going through your head, aren't always. So the first is that as human beings, we are really flawed in our ability to predict how things pan out. And you're probably like, of course we are, we can't predict the future. But when you ask people in 10 years, how important will this test be?

[00:14:25] How important will this relationship be? To me, how much will I love this band that I'm obsessed with right now, people predict that it will be like a 100% correlation in 10 years. This will still be my favorite band. This test directly impacted the job that I'm at. Now. This relationship was so pivotal.

[00:14:44] We're now married with kids, et cetera. That is so not the case. When you follow people 10 years down the line and ask them, oh, how was that test? What about that band? What happened to that relationship? People are like, what are you talking about? That is so irrelevant to my current place of functioning and the life that I live whatever it is. The point is that we are really, really bad at impacting how things will turn out. So whatever stressors are currently consuming you, whatever relationships are feeling difficult, whatever emotions are becoming overwhelming. It's important to remind yourself that when your brain tells you, this is going to be so important in the future, this is night or day it's life and death.

[00:15:26] everything is dependent on this. I promise you it's not. And the science backs that up. The next thing is a piece of wisdom that came to light on the podcast. I talk about this all the time. I'll link the episode in the show notes. It is an interview with Dr. Blaze Geary, who is one of my doctors at three east things really come full circle.

[00:15:44] But the idea is that life is in permanent and that impermanence will be on your side. nothing lasts forever. At least at the same level of consistency, that's an emotion, a thought and urge a relationship, a behavior, things are constantly fluctuating and changing. And that is true for suicidal ideation. That is true for the emotions that can lead to that, the things in your life.

[00:16:09] And so when you are having a really rough day, a really rough thought, a really rough urge notice how the intensity of it increases and decreases. And I still, to this day, when I'm having a tough emotion, a tough day, a tough moment, I remind myself this will pass because by the laws of the universe, nothing is permanent.

[00:16:28] And this emotion. Urge relationship dynamic will pass too, because that can't last forever. And so that's something like a little mantra that gives me a lot of hope. And then the last thing that I wanna touch on that I've kind of been toying around with this idea recently is that suicidal ideation can be so difficult to quit if we can use that term because I feel like the way that I've always thought about suicidal ideation is through the O C D model.

[00:17:01] You have an intrusive thought it then causes all these emotions. It's like a spiral effect that leads to these behaviors and maybe impacts your relationships. But I found it a lot more accurate and effective to think about it as a bit of a habit, but also a self soothing mechanism.

[00:17:19] Because for me, when I had a difficult day, month emotion urge thought all of these things that would trigger these thoughts, having this back burner idea was really calming to me. It was really soothing to me. It was well, if all goes to hell, there's always this escape patch. There's always this plan B there's always this way to not have to feel this terrible.

[00:17:45] So every single time I would engage in a suicidal ideation. I would be decreasing my emotional intensity. It was like calming. It was self soothing. It was making me feel better. So what makes it so difficult to recover or quit? These thoughts and urges is that they're not only intrusively entering your mind, but you have trained yourself to utilize these thoughts as a way to sooth your emotions and it's become a coping skill.

[00:18:14] And so when you are trying to quit these thoughts or urges, you not only have to learn to say no that's thoughts, actually not true. I don't like that, but you have to replace the coping mechanism. You have to find a new way to deal with the emotions that arise that you. Previously sooth with the thought, if that makes sense.

[00:18:35] So there's a lot of different ways you could go about that. I really like the book atomic habits, which is just about habit making and breaking. And it talks a lot about the science behind it. When it's easier to make a habit when it's easier to break a habit it talks about like habit stacking. Like you can apply this to anything, whether it's your morning routine or trying to work out more, anything and everything.

[00:18:58] But I think this has a really interesting application to suicidal ideation, because you can think about every time you engage in a suicidal thought as reinforcing that habit and making it stronger, increasing that neural pathway. Whereas when you do that rewiring that I just touched on where you're like, no, you know, actually this isn't in my life worth living.

[00:19:19] And I don't agree with that. And this is not something that I want to entertain. You are not only breaking that initial habit, but you're building a new habit. And so. That's another way that kind of helped me was to like add some Ts to the side of making the new habit and take some away from this side.

[00:19:37] And it felt like I was making progress in the right direction, if that makes sense.

[00:19:42] Today's episode is brought to you by teen counseling. If you are struggling with suicidal ideation not already utilizing a mental health professional as a resource, I highly recommend checking out therapy. And one way to do that is teen counseling. Teen counseling is better helps branch of their company, specifically fourteens. They have over 14,000 licensed therapists in your network that can help you with a whole host of topics, whether it's anxiety or depression or suicidal ideation or stress relationships, you name it, they can help support you.

[00:20:14] What you are going to do is go to teen counseling.com/she persisted. You fill out a survey about what you're hoping to work on. You are match with the therapist that specializes in that area. And then you can start working with them via talk, text, or video counseling, depending on what level of support you're looking for super fast turnaround.

[00:20:32] You don't have to deal with long wait lists or trying to get referred by your pediatrician or local provider. It is a great solution and. Hugely effective. I mean, therapy changed my life. It saved my life as we talked about in this episode. And so I, I highly recommend giving that a shot if you haven't already.

[00:20:49] And one way to do that is teen counseling. So again, teen counseling.com Sashi, persisted, to try to check it out today,

[00:20:58] So that is the things to keep in mind section we're now gonna talk about crisis management. And then after this, we're going to talk about long term decreasing suicidal ideation and building your life worth living.

[00:21:11] So a lot of dealing with suicidal ideation and suicidal urges is the crisis management.

[00:21:16] It's the moment when you're having this urge, when you're having this thought and it's tolerating the distress in that moment, an important caveat to add before I give you these skills is that distress tolerance skills only stay effective. If we only use them in moments of extreme distress, the more we use these skills, the less effective they are.

[00:21:36] And a good example of this is like your comfort TV show. Mine is the office when I'm having a rough day or a rough night, or I'm stressed from school, I'll put on the office and it's so soothing and calming, and I love it. And I laugh. But if I watched the office 24 hours a day, every single day a week, it wouldn't be calming.

[00:21:55] It would be like background noise, it'd be white noise. Maybe it would get even annoying. So we reserve these skills for when our emotions are really bad so that they can maintain their effectiveness and help us when we really need it. So the first skill that I want to give you is the stop skill. This is from the distress tolerance module of D B T, or dialectical behavioral therapy.

[00:22:17] And it is an acronym that stands for stop, take a step back, observe and proceed mindfully. Most of the time, I think of the stop scale through the lens of anger or an argument, or maybe sadness or anxiety, where if you're super anxious about something you would stop, you would leave the situation. You would work through that anxiety and then reenter it.

[00:22:37] But I want you to think about it from the perspective of an urge. So if you have a thought in your mind, it's like an intrusive thought and you're like, wow, this is a suicidal ideation that has just popped into my brain. And now I'm feeling some distress about that. Stop and take a step back from the urge rather than entertaining it and listening to those emotions and starting to feel the distress and going down that thought rabbit hole instead, take a step back from the urge and be like, okay, I just had this thought.

[00:23:09] Pass into my mind. And I notice that when I have the suicidal ideation, I then feel stressed. I feel anxious. Maybe I feel hopeless. Maybe I feel overwhelmed. Maybe I feel angry, whatever emotions, observe those, and then decide how you want to proceed. And if it was me, the way that I would proceed is doing that thought rewiring, which we just touched on.

[00:23:33] So I would say, you know, at one point it was really effective for me to cope with what I was experiencing by entertaining these suicidal ideations. But now I know that being suicidal and entertaining, suicidal ideations, isn't within my life worth living. That's not the life that I wanna live and I have so much hope for my future and I wanna be around for that.

[00:23:55] And I know that no matter what I. Challenges are thrown at me. I can navigate them effectively. And for that reason, I am choosing not to engage in the suicidal ideation and I actually wanna be here and I wanna continue to live life and see this challenge through to the other side, whatever that looks like for you.

[00:24:16] And you perceive mindfully, you continue on with your life. So kind of rethinking about the way thoughts happen. They're not happening to you. You kind of have the decision to engage in them to go down that rabbit hole spiral, or you can kind of like nip them in the butt and rewire them. The next skill that I wanna mention is the ride, the wave skill.

[00:24:37] This was probably the most relevant skill for me when I was struggling with suicidal ideation. And this skill is really simple. The idea is that everything is, I permanent. It comes in waves. Whether that's an emotion, I use this skill when I get headaches, because the intensity of the headache will give and take like.

[00:24:58] It'll be more intense, then it'll gradually decrease. And I kind of like, wait for those moments of decreased pain, cuz I'm like, okay, this headache is gonna go away. It's gonna be fine. But the idea is that you experience your emotion or your urge or your thought as a wave. So it's coming and it's going, you're not trying to get rid of it.

[00:25:17] You're not trying to push it away, but you're just experiencing, as it comes and goes, you're not blocking it. You're not suppressing it. You're not necessarily trying to keep it around or entertain the idea. You're not holding onto it. You're not amplifying it. You're simply just letting it happen. And the great thing about this is that you can really hold onto those moments where it's less intense when these urges feel so scary and overwhelming and a lot to deal with and handle, you can hold onto those moments that they, they go away and that they're less present and they're less intense.

[00:25:51] And you can remind yourself that that lower intensity will return. The next skill is a huge one. And that is distraction. When you're having these really intense urges. Distraction is one of the greatest things that you can do to get yourself out of your head, to stop engaging with these thoughts, emotions, and urges.

[00:26:12] So distraction is pretty straightforward. There are two acronyms in D B T that are used to kind of break down the distraction skill.

[00:26:19] And I'm not gonna go into a crazy amount of detail here because I'm sure you guys know how to distract yourself, but in D B T the way that they break it down the accept skills, activities, contributing comparisons, emotions, pushing away, thoughts and sensations.

[00:26:34] So engaging an activity, help someone else compare what you're currently feeling with what you've previously felt like we just talked about with those urges, generate a different emotion. Maybe you watch a funny TV show. Maybe you watch a scary horror movie. You invoke a different emotion than what you're currently feeling.

[00:26:51] You push away. This doesn't mean that we're avoiding all of our emotions and thoughts together, but you're like, you know what? I'm not gonna think about this right now, or I'm not going to entertain this thought right now. I'm gonna put it on a shelf and we're gonna come back to it later when I have more emotional capacity to cope with it.

[00:27:08] You are again, rewiring those thought patterns like we talked about and then sensation. So self soothing using the five senses to calm yourself. So listening to music, drinking a smoothie smelling a nice candle, watching a funny TV show petting a dog, using those five senses to calm yourself. And then the improved skill is using imagery, meaning prayer, relaxation, one thing at a time, vacation and encouragement.

[00:27:35] So with the improved skill. You are using imagery to calm yourself. So maybe you imagine yourself in your happy place. Maybe you imagine yourself getting to the other side of this urge and feeling okay with meaning you are finding meaning on what you're experiencing for me.

[00:27:50] This came after a while, like when I was in crisis mode, meaning wasn't a skill I would use, but once I had started to decrease these suicidal ideations and was like a couple months into this process, and once I actually started the podcast, I was able to think about the suicidal ideations I had struggled with and these urges and realize this has given me an really interesting and unique skill set to help other people and speak from experience and share what worked for me and finding a purpose in that pain.

[00:28:24] Prayer. This could either be, if you're religious, you can either use a prayer or even just the repetition of having something to think through can be really effective relaxation, do things that relax you again. You can use the self soothing five senses. One thing in the moment you are doing one thing you are being mindful.

[00:28:41] So if you are, I don't know, I'm gonna go back to drinking a smoothie. You are just focusing on the sensations, the taste, rather than also having your mind be somewhere else with an urge and being overwhelmed and watching a TV show and having a conversation. You are just breaking it down to one thing in the moment and getting through that one moment.

[00:29:02] Vacation you are either physically or mentally taking a vacation from the emotional distress. So you imagine you're somewhere else. Maybe you take a walk, you take a break from what you're experiencing and then revisit it again, similar to the top stop skill, and then encouragement. This is like a little pep talk for yourself.

[00:29:18] You're like, I will get through this. It will be okay. This two shall pass this moment. Won't last forever, et cetera. We talked about self soothing. The next thing at the pros and cons scale.

[00:29:30] This was another really big skill that I used when I was struggling with really big suicidal ideation. I remember doing a pros and cons when I was in the hospital hospitalized for suicidal ideation. And the idea is that you pros and cons living, which if you've never been depressed or never struggled with suicidal ideation, you're probably like, what on earth are you talking about?

[00:29:50] But if you are really struggling and that is actually a decision that you are making and it can be really effective to have a list and get really clear on all the reasons to stay here, all the reasons that you love your life, all the things that you look forward to all the reasons to stick around. And I would take this a step further.

[00:30:09] And any time that you feel something that brings you joy any time, you're like, wow, this is pretty cool. Or I love this. Write it down, whether it's in your notes app, whether it's in a journal, whether it's on your hand, anything and everything have a running list. So when you have an intense urge, you can go back to this list and say, these are all the reasons I wanna be here.

[00:30:28] These are all the reasons I wanna stick around. And these are all the reasons that I love life, and even though right now, it doesn't feel that way. There's a lot of reasons why this life is really beautiful and amazing, and why I want to continue to be here. And you can also pull from that list as ways to build your life worth living, which we'll get.

[00:30:48] The next skill that I wanna touch on is your coat box. So this is an idea that I learned in D B T group, where you make a box or like a little bag. If you go to school and you wanna put it in your backpack, but it's all coping skills that you use in crisis. So some things that I had in mind was a printed out list of the hundred coping skills.

[00:31:08] And those are things like Kona, walk Petta dog, like all these tiny coping skills that you can use that might not immediately come to mind. A book that you like, maybe headphones to remind you to listen to music. Another one is those little ice packs where you pop them and they get cold. So using the tip scale, by putting ice under your eyes to decrease your physical, emotional intensity, maybe a piece of gum or a lollipop, like a piece of candy, I would put notes in there from family members or friends, maybe a movie like a DVD, just reminders of how you can cope and be effective without having to think of all those things on top of trying to cope with an emotion.

[00:31:48] And you can make a travel version for your backpack in addition to like a bigger version in your room. But the idea here and with the next skill I'm gonna mention is to make things easy for yourself. When you're in crisis mode, you don't wanna have to be trying to figure out how do I cope with a crisis and then implementing your skills you just wanna implement.

[00:32:07] And you wanna make things really easy for yourself when you're struggling and you're more emotional and you're not able to pull from that rational side of your brain. So the next thing is a crisis survival plan. And I will link this in the show notes. but what you do is you write down your warning signs. So what are the thoughts, feelings, behaviors that come up when you are triggered when you're at in crisis mode. And this could be different for anxiety versus depression versus suicidal ideation.

[00:32:32] But if we're doing this one for suicidal ideation, what urges come up? What thoughts come up? What emotions come up? What behaviors are you engaging in? You're gonna list out some people that you can reach out to. So that is going to be maybe a friend, a family member, a parent. You are going to put their phone numbers there because you're making this really easy for yourself.

[00:32:53] You're going to also list some crisis professional resources. Maybe that's your therapist's phone number. Maybe that is your local hotline. Maybe it's the crisis text line, which is text 7 4 1 7 4. And I think the word is home. There's a lot of them, I'll put it in the show notes, but what are the professional resources you can utilize?

[00:33:13] You're also going to include the coping skills you can use. So how can you distract yourself? List your top three and maybe those are in your coat box. Then you're going to list from past experience. What helps you when you feel this way? Is it taking a shower? Is it talking to a friend? Is it watching a movie you're making this super, super easy for yourself?

[00:33:33] And then the last thing to include here is ways to keep yourself and your space safe. So maybe it's asking a parent to remove things from your room. Maybe it is doing a sleepover with a friend. So you're not alone. I slept on my parents' bedroom floor for six months, because that was what was necessary to keep myself and my space safe.

[00:33:54] Maybe it is clueing a teacher in or a friend in, so we can just keep an eye on you and, and check in. So all of those things are meant to make your life easier. When you're in crisis modes, you don't have to plan and implement. We're just going to implement, and we're gonna do the work beforehand so that we're not double stressed.

[00:34:13] Okay. The last tip for crisis management that we are going to give is to take things really slow. I touched on this, but I want you to not think about how I'm gonna get through tonight when I'm so deeply suicidal and having so many urges every three seconds, but how I'm gonna get through, how am I going to get through the next 30 seconds?

[00:34:32] Am I gonna do some deep breathing? Am I gonna get in the shower? Am I gonna take a walk? Am I gonna watch a TV show? Like literally just 30 seconds then you're gonna say, how am I gonna get through the next minute? How am gonna get through the next five minutes and break it down incrementally and just take it minute by minute, day by day.

[00:34:49] Don't think about this long term life worth living when you're in crisis mode.

[00:34:53] And then I know that I said that was the last thing, but I've touched on this in the crisis plan, but ask for help. What I, the worst thing I think that people could come away from this episode with is thinking that you need to do all these things by yourself. No, my hope is that you have so many people in your corner to give you ideas on how to cope, to be there, to support you when you're at your lowest to check in on you, to remind you that they want you and love you in this world.

[00:35:21] So ask for help when you're in crisis. That was probably my number one skill was to call a therapist or a friend or a parent, and just have someone around me ask for help. Is that phone coaching, is that a helpline is a texting. Is it just spending time with someone? Is it doing a movie night, have people in your corner?

[00:35:38] I don't think anyone should be expected to navigate suicidal ideation by themselves. And if anything, I think being by yourself adds to those feelings. So. If there's one skill. I know I said this top skill was important in distraction and self seething, but number one is ask for help again, no one should have to deal with this alone.

[00:35:56] And so I think if there's anything that you take away that you implement, ask for help, please. And my DMS are always open. I also forgot to mention that if you ever are like, I literally have no one to talk to. And I just don't know what skill to use right now. And I need support, send me DM. I will do my very best to get back to you and be there for you because anyone that has struggled with this before, I I think would want to support someone on the other side of it.

[00:36:22] And that's true for me. So always here, always here to support in any way that I can. Okay. Now we're going to talk about long term building your life worth living and decreasing these skills because crisis management skills are really helpful in the moment, but like we talked about, if you implement those all the time, they lose their effectiveness.

[00:36:41] So what do we do to decrease suicidal ideation? Over the next week, month, three months, six months, et cetera. The first thing that I wanna mention is getting really clear on your life worth living your life worth living. I've said that a lot of times during this episode is an idea that is a key pillar of D B T.

[00:37:02] You're working towards this life worth living, because the idea is that if you are in your life worth living, you are no longer struggling with suicidal ideation because your life is worth living. So one of the first things that you do when you start D B T is you get really clear on what that is, and you get really clear on what you're working towards.

[00:37:21] What is your goal and what does that life look like? How do you cope with your emotions? What does your support system look like? What does your daily routine look like? Do you, can you actually engage in school and feel passionate about what you're learning? Do you have healthy relationships? What are your hobbies?

[00:37:38] How do you spend your free time, et cetera? Write that out. Maybe you draw a picture, maybe you put it in your notes app and you remind yourself again and again and again, this is what I'm working towards because when you're abstractly kind of pursuing this goal of getting better, it can be really discouraging.

[00:37:56] It can be, it can cause you to feel really hopeless, especially if you don't identify emotionally with that concept. If you're like, I don't remember what it feels like to be happy. So how can I possibly work towards that goal? That was something I struggled with so much. So we get really clear on what this life would look like if it was worth living and, and start making incremental steps towards that point.

[00:38:19] And when you do get into that, that crisis mode, remind yourself, this is the end goal. I'm, I've already made so many steps towards getting to that point, and this is why I'm gonna keep going. The next thing that I want to mention here is routine.

[00:38:35] So routine is something that is really common across the board. When it comes to mental health, if you've ever been in a treatment program, they are really big on routine. It's like you get up at this time and you take your meds and then it's breakfast. And then we do this group therapy, and don't forget, we have this one hour of room time.

[00:38:52] And that's the same, whether it's like an outpatient, an inpatient, a residential therapeutic boarding school. They're really big on schedule. And I'm sure there's logistical reasons for that with staffing, but routine is also shown to be really important for mental health and have really positive impacts on mental health.

[00:39:08] And I felt this firsthand, but the research also backs this up. So there's three reasons that I wanna give you to implement a routine. The first is that decisions can increase stress. And when I, when I wrote this down on my bullet points, I immediately thought of Steve jobs in his like black turtle neck.

[00:39:25] And he didn't want the stress of like, or the mental expenditure of like choosing an outfit in the morning. So he is just gonna wear the same thing every day. Like, that's not really what we're going for here, but trying to decide in the morning, like, okay, am I gonna make eggs and bacon or cereal and get my nutrients in when you're consumed with like stress and suicidal ideation and depression, that's a lot to add to your plate.

[00:39:47] And the end goal there is just to get nutrients in your body. So you're not more emotionally vulnerable. So if we can just decrease that stress and take that out of the equation and have a routine that you stick to, you're not adding more fuel to the fire, and you're not adding more emotions when you're probably already very emotionally sensitive and reactive and overwhelmed.

[00:40:07] The next reason I wanna give you that routine is helpful is. Many many, many things in life can't be controlled, whether that's other people's actions, their beliefs of us. A lot, sometimes our schedules, our commitments, our relationships. So many things can't be controlled, but in many ways, your routine can.

[00:40:24] And so because of this, if you can have a consistent routine that you stick to, you can garner a sense of calm, a sense of reliability, a stability. And this is a game changer when your emotions and your mental health don't provide that. So for me, I have a really consistent routine that I stick to.

[00:40:42] I get up, I wash my face, I brush my teeth, I do my skincare. I do my makeup. If I'm wearing makeup that day, I do my hair. I get dressed. I make my bed, I make my coffee, which I look forward to every day. And then from there, it's kind of up in the air. Maybe I have class, maybe I'm working out. Maybe I'm meeting a friend.

[00:40:58] Maybe I'm studying. Not really sure what happens, but then at the end of the day, I come home. I shower, I put on my skincare, I do my hair. I put on my lotion. I put on my pajamas, I watch TV show. I read before bed. And that morning and end those book ends of the day are really consistent. All of those things within the routine are really calming.

[00:41:19] They're really reinforcing. They bring me a lot of joy and I can count on them. They're very grounding for me. So if you can have these little things in your life that bring you that reliability, that stability and that calm throughout your day, it can be a huge game changer with regards to your mental health.

[00:41:37] The last thing to add about routine is that it helps you stay on top of behaviors and habits that are really important for your mental health, which will gradually improve your baseline. So D B T there's an acronym called please, which helps you decrease your emotional vulnerability by staying on top of your physical health. So you are treating physical illness, you're eating balanced, you're avoiding mood, altering drugs. You are getting enough sleep. You are exercising in a balanced way. So you are decreasing potential stress and dysregulation that could come from not eating enough from drinking too much coffee from skipping, taking your meds from not exercising. So you don't have any endorphins from being sick and being so physically depleted all of these little things that could make navigating emotional situations worse.

[00:42:26] You're trying to avoid that from happening. So for your routine, you're not only giving your sense yourself, the sense of calm and stability. But if you have a morning and night routine with what you're eating, so like in the morning you have your cup of coffee and then you have these three nutrient filled breakfast that you choose from.

[00:42:43] And after school you come home, then it's dinner time. And these are your four favorite dinners that you choose from throughout the week. You are solving for being hangry or emotionally overwhelmed from not getting enough food or nutrients. Same thing. If you have this consistent morning and night routine, where you wake up at the same time every day, you go to bed at the same time, every day, you're solving for getting enough sleep and not being emotionally overwhelmed from that.

[00:43:07] Again, another example would be meds. Maybe for me, my med time is at night and it's built into my routine, so I never miss it. And if I do miss it, I notice I'm like something's missing something feels off. What did I forget to do? You are avoiding potential emotional dysregulation that could come from not taking your meds.

[00:43:24] So if you stay on top of your routine, you are also staying on top of behaviors and habits that are important for your mental health. And over time that improves your baseline. If you want to get better about building habits, Tomic habits, it's such a good book with so many applications to mental health.

[00:43:42] I highly recommend, and it's like a normal book. You've probably seen it all over TikTok. It's not like very heavy and dark and all these crazy things. It's just about building habits and improving your routine. And it's a great resource. The next thing that I want to wanna talk about is emotion regulation.

[00:43:57] While the distress tolerance skills are helpful in crisis emotion regulation is what will help decrease these suicidal ideations long term. And so one skill that is really important here is accumulating positives. We just touched on this in morning routine, but having things that improve your mood and make you happy and make you joyful, allows you to add to that pros column that we talked about.

[00:44:23] So if you are having a really bad urge and you are having a thought where you're like, I have nothing going for me, everything sucks. You go back to that pros column. You go back to these positives that you've accumulated, and you say, you know what? I have all of these things that make my life worth living and all of these things that make me really happy.

[00:44:40] So it's not true that I have nothing going for me, nothing to look forward to because I have all of these things that bring me joy and long term accumulating positives and planning, moments of joy. It decreases the distance between your highs and your lows and increases your emotion regulation. Some other things that are important to implement, but are hard to boil down and tell you how to do on a podcast is healthy relationships, having good communication with your loved ones and having people that care about you and support you and want you to be okay.

[00:45:13] Therapy or treatment is really, really effective and helpful. Especially dialectical behavioral therapy. When it comes to suicidal ideation, it's proven to decrease it. And there's a lot of studies that back that up. And so if you have noticed, you're having these thoughts, try and find a D B T therapist near you try and see if they can help you decrease these emotions and feelings.

[00:45:35] In addition to trying these coping skills, when you're in crisis. then the last thing is having structure and commitments. I think a really big thing that can be tied with suicidal ideation is not having a sense of purpose or somewhere to show up and get to, or I have to be at class. I have to be at this meeting, or I have work to show up to so trying to build your routine in your schedule or you, you have places to be and people to interact with and things to look forward to can be really helpful in increasing that sense of hope.

[00:46:06] Today's episode is brought to you by prime student. You guys know I am a huge Amazon prime fan going along with last week's trend this week, I ordered myself some chip clips and they are cute colors. I love them. I am obsessed. My grandmother also sent me a little contraption that makes a very loud noise in case there is a safety issue.

[00:46:25] So those were my Amazon orders. We love Amazon prime. If you are a college student, you can get Amazon prime student, which is at no cost for the first six months. After the first six months, it is 50% off the normal price of prime. With Amazon prime, you get free shipping. It's super fast shipping like a couple of days, turn around.

[00:46:46] And with prime student, you also get access to LinkedIn premium GrubHub, plus course hero student universe discounts, a free calm, premium subscription, and so many other partnerships that have been created with students in mind. It's an amazing deal. I'm obsessed. Again, use it on a weekly basis as you just heard.

[00:47:07] So if you would like to check out prime student, you can go to prime student.co/join student. Again, that is prime student.co/join student. And you can order atomic habits, which is what I recommend in this episode.

[00:47:20] The last section of this episode is listener questions and there's a lot, but I'm gonna try and go through these really quickly to try and touch on some topics. And I didn't already mention.

[00:47:31] The first one is tips for feeling passively, suicidal on how to deal with the recurring thought that you want to die. But you know that you're not actually going to hurt yourself because you can't hurt the people around you. So feeling suicidal without intent. So this is called passive suicidal ideation.

[00:47:47] Passive suicidal ideation is when you have thoughts of not wanting to be alive, but you don't necessarily have intent or a plan. And so the tips that I would give here is to start building your life worth living. It sounds like that life that you're operating in and working through isn't one that feels worth living.

[00:48:06] It feels like you have a, a need to show up for other people, or you feel like you should. You, you don't wanna add that burden to other people. So I would get curious on how can you adjust your life to make it feel more worth living and more enjoyable and more hopeful. Is that relationships, is that a routine?

[00:48:24] Is that a behavior? How do you feel navigating the challenges that come up? Is it your coping skills? Is it the people in your corner, et cetera. So kind of rethinking that and working towards that goal and seeing if those urges shift as well. I would also say to anyone that is struggling with passive suicidal ideation to start really working on your support system, I'm not saying that your suicidal ideation will shift and develop and get worse potentially.

[00:48:52] If that's something you already know, you're struggling with, you really wanna make sure you have a good support system so that if you ever need it, which it sounds like you probably do right now. Anyways, you have that in place and you have those people to lean on and you have those people in your corner.

[00:49:06] The next question is advice on specific language to use when talking to your parents to tell them that you're depressed and need help. This depends are whether your parents, maybe there's a lot of stigma in the way they think about mental health. Is it that they think you should just be capable of navigating this independently?

[00:49:24] Have they never felt that way before? I would go to your school counselor or a, or a local counselor potentially your pediatrician and have them looped in on the conversation. Having an adult that's in like a kind of professional position to also provide resources and say, Hey, I think this could be helpful, can be really powerful to convince a parent.

[00:49:44] And I would also another tip here is to make an appointment, prepare your parents. Like, Hey, I wanna talk to you about something really important when would work for you. And also go into that conversation. Not expecting to get a response immediately. And maybe you go in, you make your ask. You use a dear man.

[00:50:01] You can Google that like a dear man, D B T. And it'll tell you exactly how to make a request to get your objective met. I've mentioned it in episodes before, but go in, make your request and give them time to think about. Next question. What are the steps I should take? If I'm concerned about a friend who might be suicidal.

[00:50:17] So as you will hear in next week's episode with the DIA, there's a lot of tips there. You can call 9, 8, 8. If you have a friend or a loved one that's suicidal and you don't know how to support them. So that is one thing I would definitely mention. I would say first, make sure that your own mental health is okay.

[00:50:33] Supporting someone that suicidal is a really challenging and emotionally exhausting thing. It puts a lot of pressure on you. It it's very overwhelming and it can be very stressful. So I would make sure that you are in a good spot and you have the emotional capacity to support them. And if not set boundaries, and I'm not saying you leave them on their own to navigate this independently, but maybe you're there as a safe space as someone that they can spend time with and laugh with.

[00:51:02] And you're always there to spend quality time with them, but you're not the person that they like give SU super graphic details of the thoughts that they're having. Like that's for their therapist, you're there to just have quality time with and be a safe space. So depending on what level of emotional support you can provide, set those boundaries.

[00:51:22] Yeah. And, and try not to be judgemental, try not to problem solve, just be there as a listener. As we talked about in the episode with Michael Sian, being vulnerable and sharing a quote unquote secret, or just being vulnerable about anything that you don't talk about broadly. A lot of the times it goes a lot better than you think it will.

[00:51:41] Even if it's like a subpar response from the other person, you see that as a positive experience, that's what the research shows. So even if you're just neutral and you're like, wow, that's really difficult. I'm sorry. You're feeling that way. The other person will see that likely as supportive and helpful and an overall positive experience.

[00:51:57] Next question. When does suicidal ideation becomes serious? So like I mentioned, there's a difference between active and passive suicidal ideation. Passive is thoughts without an intent, maybe something like, I don't really wanna be alive or I hate life. I mean, that's not really suicidal ideation, but like I just would rather not be here or things like that.

[00:52:15] Whereas active is with intent. Whereas active it's with a plan it's kind of more fleshed out. And then the, the second thing there is with, or without a plan. So is there a date, is there a time, is there intent? And when you get into the, with a plan with intent with that's, when you would wanna call nine one one call nine, eight, eight, when someone is really at risk of being a harm to themselves and, and they, they need more professional support than you can likely offer.

[00:52:42] when they're in that passive camp, it's difficult because you don't wanna see anyone suffering to the degree that they're feeling suicidal or they don't wanna be here. And there's also kind of that acceptance of, okay, even though this is so incredibly painful, they're not necessarily a danger to themselves right now.

[00:52:57] So this might be a long term, something that shifts with lots of time and, and effort and conversations and skills usage. But there's not that that quick fix, which is a difficult thing to, to grapple with. The next question is how can family members of someone with suicidality support them? So again, you can call 9 88, if you're worried about the person, especially if they're getting into that spectrum of being more active and with a plan, the, the key things here are to be non-judgmental just to kind of be there as a listening ear, create a safe space for them, make them feel okay and comfortable coming to you and talking to you if they need support, avoid problem solving.

[00:53:39] I think most people. I mean, like, can you even solve suicidal ideation? Like that's something that is really difficult to solve. I suppose you could be like, well, like what does your life look like now? What do you want your life to look like? Let's make a 12 step plan to get you there. Like if I was suicidal, that would be hugely unhelpful to me because you're probably so emotionally exhausted and overwhelmed teaches want someone to validate and support you and to feel seen and feel loved and supported.

[00:54:05] So don't problem solve. Just be there for them, love them, support them, tell them that you would miss them if they weren't here and you really value them as a person. And again, if you feel outta your wheelhouse, if you feel like you need help ask a professional. So call 9, 8, 8, talk to your pediatrician and talk to a therapist, talk to a school counselor.

[00:54:23] All of these people can give more information on how to navigate this. The next question is why was 13 reasons? Why so problematic? 13 reasons. Why is a show. I have a lot of beef with. I've never watched it, but a study done in April, 2017 by the national Institute of mental health showed that there was a 28.9% increase in suicide rates among youth age 10 to 17 in the month, following the show's release.

[00:54:56] I don't even know how to follow that. Like any show that leads to a 30% increase in adolescent suicides. There's a huge red flag there and there's, something's not right. And the way that we are portraying suicide on the media, if there's a 30% increase. That just feels so not right. And so not okay to me.

[00:55:13] And it's, it's so saddening and the national Institute of mental health again, they, they say that it, it highlights the necessity of using best practices when portraying suicide and popular entertainment and a, and across media. It's, it's just so, so saddening and, and so concerning. And yeah, I don't even know what to say.

[00:55:34] I'm at a loss for words, because it's just anything that causes that much of an increase in teen suicide is hugely problematic personally. Like I said, I never watched a, so that's a boundary I've set for myself because around the time that came out in 2017, I was suicidal. I was going through treatment and then I was just newly not suicidal.

[00:55:54] So engaging with content that was GRA that graphic and potentially triggering was something that I had a feeling would not be good for my mental health. So. If you were someone listening and you haven't watched it or you're like, oh, like, I don't know if that would be good for me to watch it. Maybe not maybe set that boundary, think about it, but yeah, that's, that's the data there.

[00:56:15] If you're not familiar with that, it's heartbreaking. It's terrible. And it's, again, shows why it's so important to be intentional with how we talk about suicide. And I hope that I've done that well or somewhat effectively in this episode. Two questions left. One is what was the number one skill that helped you overcome suicidality?

[00:56:35] I touched on a couple riding. The wave of urges was huge. Distraction really gets you through those moments, but asking for help and having people in my corner that were continuously helping me move in the right direction and therapy and treatment and building my skills usage, and continuing to use that muscle of, of coping and, and working towards my life worth living was huge. But I, I mean, consistency with those things was really what made a difference. The last question is how can universities who have a suicide in their community best respond? What programs should they fund?

[00:57:10] What support should they provide, et cetera, to do their best, to prevent future repeat incidents. This is difficult because the data does show that when there is a teen suicide, there can be repeat suicides or it can be triggering to other teens and talking about it and bringing a lot of attention to it and glamorizing it can have negative impacts.

[00:57:31] I think at a minimum, having extensive skills, education, and resources. Be very transparent. So emails going out saying if you are struggling with grief or you are struggling with suicidal allegation, or if you are struggling with more stress this week, these are the skills you can use. Use the people you can call these are the resources currently available.

[00:57:51] I think getting really curious, following such a tragedy on what causes this person to feel so overwhelmed and alone. And like this was the only option. Was it relationships? Was it the amount of stress they were experiencing? Was it unrelated to school and like, whatever it is getting curious and then trying to solve in the future is, does that mean changing the way that teachers schedule exams and tests to decrease a workload to not cause that much overwhelm, does it mean providing more resources?

[00:58:23] So people feel that there is an option or someone that they can go to when they feel that way? Yeah, I, it's hard and there's not an easy answer and. I had a conversation about this in one of the mental health clubs at Penn last week. And the students that had gone to the events put on by Penn, following student suicides, weren't seen as very effective and very helpful.

[00:58:46] And so it's hard, even if the best of intentions are there, it's not always received well, it's not always, doesn't always land. And so it's very difficult, but I think skills, education, and resources and transparency of how you can get help if you need. It is huge.

[00:59:03] And then looking at how you can change the culture of university, if there were specific factors that led to that are, are some good steps to take and getting curious, talking to students, talking to friends of that student, talking to peers, family members, and. Trying to not have any other students in that position in the future is a good place to start.

[00:59:24] So that was a lot, a very heavy episode, but I, I hope it was helpful. And I hope that you can come away with this with some really tangible ways you can support someone or you yourself cope with these emotions and urges. If they arise, hopefully they never do. Again, the best case scenario is that you never have to apply anything in this episode that you just listened to, or that you are never familiar with any of this.

[00:59:50] That would be amazing. And we live in a world where many people struggle and many people in our lives struggle, and it would rather us be prepared and feel capable to support them than to be at a loss of like, I don't even know how to help this person. And I'm just so overwhelmed. I hope this was helpful as always, if you found this episode to be supportive and informational and helpful share with a friend or a family member, if you have any questions or any thoughts, or if this episode be sure to DM me, I would love to hear how it resonated or if there was something you wish was said differently, or if there was something that wasn't effective that it's really helpful feedback for me.

[01:00:32] And yeah, it will include a ton of resources in the show notes about hotlines and suicide prevention, educational resources, and awareness and companies that are doing amazing things to help individuals that are struggling with suicidal ideation. And so. That that's it. Thank you for listening.

[01:00:54] I will see you next week for an amazing part two to the series with Theia where we talk about what happens when you call a hotline, what to expect some resources that she recommends, what she tells people when they call a hotline. So some skills that you can implement that they would recommend. And just generally within the suicide prevention industry, what is happening, where she hopes that, where she sees that going, how we as a society can improve the suicide prevention work.

[01:01:26] Thank you for listening or watching. I really appreciate all you guys and yeah, I'll see you next week.

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