The REACTOR: “Men and Suicide”
A reaction to a fellow author’s work
I’m a big believer in the power of reciprocation.
I know that to earn your willingness to listen to me about the things which I care about with ferocious urgency, I must first take an interest in what you care about.
That’s just how it works.
This is why I’ve started The REACTOR series. Instead of putting my effort towards trying to get that viral curation of my own work, I’m trying to foster meaningful dialogue with my fellow authors, one at a time, about the works that you’ve written.
This evening’s winner of my attention is Shirley J. Davis, and I’m responding to her piece that attempts to raise awareness about one of the issues that will need increasingly more attention in the coming weeks, months, and years: suicide.
This article is an excellent reference filled with useful information about identifying risk factors and it lists numerous resources that you can turn to for help if you know someone who you’re worried about. I’m not going repeat that because it is already there for you in her article.
What I will do is share from my own thoughts and experience, as someone who intimately knew depression and suicidal ideation in my younger years. In retrospect, I had a blessed life in so many ways, but that could be hard to see when I was a shy, lonely, awkward kid.
I can’t stress how important it is for men to have people in our lives who care about us and depend on us. That’s ultimately what probably saved my life when I couldn’t see any real point to living. I never made any suicide attempts or followed the dark thoughts past the edge of the rabbit hole because I knew my parents would be devastated. The thought of them in pain discouraged me from ever beginning to seriously pursue suicde as a real option for ending my own pain.
Suicide rates have been skyrocketing, and one of the possible methods of fighting this could be pet ownership. The unconditional love of dogs in particular is something that has given me joy in recent years, and something researchers have speculated might be part of the defense against suicide. However, the data is inconclusive and is notoriously difficult to make sense of because even if everyone in a sample of 100 who committed suicide owned a pet, that still wouldn’t tell us what we want to know about the relationship between pets and suicide because what if there are 100,000 people whose suicides were prevented because they owned a pet? We’d simply never know.
But one thing we do know is that the loss of structure and stability from so many jobs being destroyed in 2020, the fear of pandemic itself, the social tension, it is all amplifying the psyches of vulnerable people around the country and around the world. Now more than ever, we need to reach out to people in our communities and connect with them. That human connection and support is without doubt (for me at least) the strongest tool in our arsenal for saving lives. That’s why from the start of this pandemic, I made a plea to take action. However low quality the production value might be, I’m glad I said something. It is better to tried and failed than it is to have never tried in the first place.
But did I fail? If I brightened even one person’s day by convincing them to reach out and call someone, then no, I didn’t.
On another project, I’m especially grateful for my new friend and a guest of my podcast Phil Ord who had a great many things to say in our recent episode. Phil lost his sister to suicide when she came to believe that she had contracted COVID-19. You can listen to our conversation here.
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