Category Archives: suicide

I Survived My Suicide Attempt. There’s 1 Uncomfortable Thing We Can All Do To Help Save Others.

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Earlier this year, as I walked into the University of Missouri Hospital, I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. I felt unsteady amid flashes of memories of ambulance lights, hospital gowns, and being handed a bag with the clothes that had been cut from my body. I read the words that hung on the wall — “Our Mission: To Save And Improve Lives.” One of the lives that hospital saved was my own.

I was there to speak to their emergency room medical residents about my patient experience. I walked into the conference room and there stood Jenn, the ER nurse I had spent years searching for.

I had checked Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, to no avail. I’d typed her name into Google and found many Jenns with her last name, but none of them was her. One of the administrators at the university was finally able to locate her for me.

Eight years ago, when I was rushed to that very ER after my suicide attempt, it was Jenn who helped pump pills out of my stomach. She poured charcoal down my throat and filled my veins with IV fluid to neutralise the effects of the pills. As she helped save my life, a bond of hope was sealed between us, and it would last for years to come.

I ran and hugged her, and she smiled. “I’m glad you’re still with us.”

“I’m glad, too,” I responded.

The author (right) chatting with nurse Jenn at University of Missouri Hospital.
The author (right) chatting with nurse Jenn at University of Missouri Hospital.

For my talk at the ER department, I had made a massive poster with photos of my life since my suicide attempt. Photos of me attending all three of my children’s weddings and holding my first granddaughter. Photos of me doing mental health advocacy work with first responders, veterans, and women in prison. Photos of me giving keynote speeches and making national TV appearances. My award-winning memoir. Photos of all the things I would have never experienced had the hospital not saved me.

Yet, that poster was missing the other part of my life.

There were no snapshots of my panic attacks or of the sleepless nights spent shaking, crying and pacing every room of my house for hours. I don’t have photos of the hot showers at 2 in the morning, or of praying on my hands and knees begging for God to give me relief, or my recent terrifying five-hour screening for electric shock treatment that is now part of my suicide prevention plan. What I told Jenn was the truth, because some days I’m glad I’m still here, but I still have days when I wish she and her colleagues hadn’t saved my life.

Many people applaud me for having conquered suicide ideation, but that isn’t actually what I did. I survived my suicide attempt, but I still have suicidal episodes. They are to be lived with — not conquered. Suicidal ideation can be treated through prevention, intervention, support strategies and suicide prevention plans. I’m not alone — many people who seek treatment for anxiety, depression, or eating disorders struggle with suicidal thoughts and urges.

Two weeks after I returned home from Missouri, I went into another deep suicidal episode.

As I taught a Sunday school class about trials, a woman asked if I would trade my trials for someone else’s, and I hesitantly replied, “Sure.”

The author with her dad.

Courtesy of Sonja Wasden

The author with her dad.

Religiously speaking, it was the wrong answer.

“You would trade with someone who is dying?” she asked. As a mental health advocate, I felt the pressure to be an inspiring example of a suicide survivor. I knew what I was not allowed to say, yet I felt the truth rising in my voice.

“Yes,” the words slipped out, “I want to die.” She gasped. The entire room went silent.

It scares people to talk about suicide. The number-one myth is that if we talk about suicide, it will lead to and encourage suicide. That is false.

Suicide is a complex issue that can include many contributing factors, including bullying, prejudice or stigma around a person’s race, gender, disability or sexual identity. What makes people want to end their lives can be sexual or physical abuse, addiction, financial difficulties, relationship problems, long-term illnesses, or cultural and social pressures, as well as mental illnesses and lack of mental health resources, of course. Each of these situations can make a person feel isolated, inadequate, hopeless and silenced.

Every 40 seconds, a person dies from suicide. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for Americans ages 10-14 and 20-34. Suicide is a leading causes of death for people across the United States.

In 2004, my father attempted to die by suicide. My brother and sister found him in time, and he lived only seven years more: He experienced a bipolar episode and died by suicide. The ever-present guilt of what more I could have done to save him still haunts me. I often wonder, if he and I had talked — really talked — about our suicide ideation, whether he would be alive today.

Some studies estimate that a single suicide loss impacts the lives of 135 different people.

The widespread suicidal ideation among teenage girls — nearly one-third of female high school students reported in 2021 that they had recently considered suicide — is extremely concerning and catastrophic, because it coincides with a national disinvestment in mental health care. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health care inequities in the U.S. resulted in more than 100,000 deaths and cost the economy about $278 billion over a four-year period.

The author with her granddaughter.

Courtesy of Sonja Wasden

The author with her granddaughter.

I am one of the lucky ones who receives proper mental health care. It would be terrifying — and most likely fatal — for me to go without the support of mental health professionals.

My dialectical behavior therapist taught me that two truths can coexist: We can be lost and found, or in despair and hopeful, all at the same time.

My two truths in that Sunday school class were that I wanted to live — and I wanted to die.

As a mental health advocate, I have been terrified to admit that second truth out of fear that I would be stealing hope away from people who desperately need it. But I now believe I would be taking hope away from them if I didn’t share the whole picture.

Relapsing into another suicidal episode makes it’s hard not to question if I have somehow failed. But finding the strength to live another day takes courage. Surrendering to the reality that many will struggle with suicide ideation more than once, and for some like me, potentially for the rest of our lives — that is where hope lives. Hope is a choice to surrender to what “is” in that moment, knowing that dark times do not last forever and there are more joyful moments for us to experience.

Jenn later texted me, “To know and understand and feel that I was valuable and important to you, just the way you were and are to me that day and every day forward, was an amazing feeling I hadn’t felt in almost two decades of nursing.” It was a reminder that each of us is valuable not just in the sense of our individual worth, but in relation to each other.

The one thing we can all do to help prevent suicides is having open and inclusive conversations with our families, friends, co-workers and students, and in our communities, where people can share their unique experiences without feeling ashamed or broken. This expands our collective understanding of suicide by hearing different perspectives, and creates a more supportive environment for those struggling.

Suicide is not inevitable for anyone. Talking openly about suicide leads to more people seeking help for their mental health, which reduces the risk of suicide.

This is how we save lives.

Sonja Wasden is a suicide survivor with over 30 years of lived experience with mental health challenges. Her award-winning memoir, “An Impossible Life,” which details her struggles with mental illness, was featured on “CBS This Morning” as a story of hope. She is a member of Newsweek Expert Forum and has traveled the country speaking with Fortune 500 companies, not-for-profit organizations, government officials, advocacy groups and top media outlets about the importance of mental health. She has been an op-ed contributor for Oprah Daily, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Hill, Ms. Magazine and the National Alliance on Mental Illness, among others. Sonja has been interviewed over 50 times on local and national news about the importance of raising mental health awareness. She has had the privilege of sharing her story and message of hope with millions of people.

Help and support:

  • Mind, open Monday to Friday, 9am-6pm on 0300 123 3393.
  • Samaritans offers a listening service which is open 24 hours a day, on 116 123 (UK and ROI – this number is FREE to call and will not appear on your phone bill).
  • CALM (the Campaign Against Living Miserably) offer a helpline open 5pm-midnight, 365 days a year, on 0800 58 58 58, and a webchat service.
  • The Mix is a free support service for people under 25. Call 0808 808 4994 or email help@themix.org.uk
  • Rethink Mental Illness offers practical help through its advice line which can be reached on 0808 801 0525 (Monday to Friday 10am-4pm). More info can be found on rethink.org.
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After 31 Years, I Read My Mother’s Suicide Note For The First Time. Five Words Changed Everything.

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I read my mother’s suicide note for the first time at 36 years old while making chocolate chip protein pancakes for my daughter.

It was difficult to read — literally. It had been written on a hotel notepad 31 years ago and photographed as evidence after it was found. The photos sat in a filing cabinet until the case was closed, when the note was converted to microfiche. But I recently submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the police department for my mother’s death investigation case file. Then, the note was printed on white copy paper and handed over to me.

At the kitchen counter, I turned to flip the pancakes and then flip through the file, reading about the housekeeper who found my mother’s body, the interviews that police conducted with my family, the medical examiner’s report. My daughter played with Lego bricks at the kitchen table. I had planned to wait until she went to school to read the report, but the compulsion to learn about my mother’s death after all those years proved an overwhelming draw.

My mother died when I was 5 years old and my sister 2. I was told at the time that my mother had a “brain disease.” I suppose that was the way a professional had advised my dad to explain mental illness to a child as young as I was. I remember being in kindergarten with the school social worker and drawing a pink, blobby brain shape with a graphite gray spot on it.

My dad was not, is not, shy about his love for my mother. Every anniversary, he writes a column — poems, song lyrics, words — about how much he misses her and how proud of us she would be. When I was younger, these columns were published in the local newspaper. In recent years, they have transformed into moving Facebook posts with pictures of the grandchildren she will never get to meet.

As children, my dad took us to the cemetery often to “visit” my mom. My sister and I took turns choosing the flowers that we put in the upturned urn on her headstone and snuggling with a small, tan teddy bear he told us had belonged to her. My mother’s side of the closet stayed full of her clothes for decades, and mementos of her still remain in my dad’s home. We talked about the loss, but we never really talked about the woman, her life and her death beyond the superficial.

At some point in my childhood, I must have worked up the nerve to ask more questions about her, although I do not remember a specific conversation. That is when I learned that my mother had taken her own life at a hotel near our home. No additional details were forthcoming, and perhaps that is why, over the decades in between, I never asked any more questions. What more did I need to know, and what good would it do?

As a young child, I was often angry that I didn’t have my mother as a “room mom” or to celebrate Mother’s Day with. I was resentful when teachers assumed that it was a mother who packed my lunches and signed my permission slips. But as I grew, I got good grades and received scholarships to college, and I met and married an incredible partner. It did not seem to matter that I did not have a mother — until I became one myself.

My daughter was born healthy, beautiful and colicky. She cried nearly constantly for the better part of six months. Nothing I did seemed to help — breastfeeding, baby-wearing, multiple trips to the pediatrician. I spent the days and nights listening to her incessant, incriminating howls. The cries accumulated in my psyche as evidence that I didn’t deserve to be a mother, that I would never be good enough. I began to have fleeting thoughts of leaving like my mother had. I also wished she was there to help and reassure me.

I survived those early months, when I wasn’t fantasizing about starting a new life, by writing to my daughter. I wrote messages of love in the covers of books I ordered for each holiday and piled in her room. I wrote cards and letters, crying onto them while she cried in the background. I wrote over and over again to my daughter about how special she was, the joy she brought to our family, my hopes and dreams for her future.

I sealed the notes to my daughter in envelopes and stacked them into a pink safe I ordered for this purpose. If it turned out that I couldn’t stay, at least my daughter would have tangible evidence that her mother loved her.

Eventually, the crying subsided — and along with it, my thoughts of departure.

As my daughter has grown, I have been awed by her empathy, compassion and creativity while simultaneously feeling unworthy of the privilege of being her mother. I have tried to fix this through frenzy; I enrolled her in private school, fed her fruits and vegetables, minimized screen time. We moved to a bigger house, bought her a scooter with light-up wheels, adopted a guinea pig. Checking all of the boxes kept the feelings of inadequacy at bay for a while.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and we went through the same shock and upheaval as many families across the world. For my daughter, the stresses were perhaps compounded by my working as a nurse in the emergency department and my husband in law enforcement. Again, nothing I did or tried could fix how she felt.

Out of desperation, I resumed writing. I signed up for a writing workshop and penned a 78,717-word novel about a woman with a dead mother trying to parent her daughter through hard times. After months of revising the draft, trying to write the happy ending that I wanted for my characters — and for me and my daughter — I gave up. There were too many holes in the story, and the biggest was the protagonist’s relationship with her dead mother, i.e., my relationship with mine. I finally confronted the fact that to write the ending, I needed to look back to my beginnings, to my relationship with my mother. Perhaps there would be wisdom in unraveling our history.

I began my journey by obtaining my mother’s death investigation file and court records. In hindsight, it seems revealing that I would rather look through a police file than have an honest conversation with my family about who my mother was.

When I finally read my mother’s suicide note for the first time, five words jumped out at me.

“I was a horrible mother.”

I surprised myself by feeling not shocked or sad, but relieved by her words. “I am a horrible mother” had been the refrain in my mind for my daughter’s entire nine years of life. Thirty-one years after my mother’s death, here was physical evidence of the thread that connected us across the decades.

It wasn’t until months later that I noticed additional text at the bottom, nearly impossible to make out. I had to reference the typed rendering in the police report. It was transcribed as my initials, then my sister’s, and then “I love you and I did the best things for you.”

Her last words were to tell us that she loved us and was trying to do right by us. I find this somewhat comforting. But having now known my daughter twice as long as my mother knew me, those words on that scrap of paper, and the intention, don’t make up for my loss.

Although my heart hurts for my mother and how sick she must have been, her actions sent out shock waves of trauma with intergenerational consequences. Their impact on me may be part of the reason that my daughter feels the hurts of the world so deeply.

But the moral of my mother’s story seems to be simple: My presence means more than perfection to my child. I hope that the more I am brave enough to ask the hard questions, and to speak and write honestly, the more my daughter and I can undo the “horrible mother” legacy, break the cycle and create a better future.

Help and support:

  • Mind, open Monday to Friday, 9am-6pm on 0300 123 3393.
  • Samaritans offers a listening service which is open 24 hours a day, on 116 123 (UK and ROI – this number is FREE to call and will not appear on your phone bill).
  • CALM (the Campaign Against Living Miserably) offer a helpline open 5pm-midnight, 365 days a year, on 0800 58 58 58, and a webchat service.
  • The Mix is a free support service for people under 25. Call 0808 808 4994 or email help@themix.org.uk
  • Rethink Mental Illness offers practical help through its advice line which can be reached on 0808 801 0525 (Monday to Friday 10am-4pm). More info can be found on rethink.org.
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