Denver, Colo., Dec 28, 2019 / 03:02 pm (CNA).- On Monday of National Suicide Prevention Week this year, popular evangelical pastor and mental health advocate Jarrid Wilson, 30, reportedly committed suicide. Just hours prior to his death, Wilson had posted a message on Twitter about Jesus’ compassion for the depressed and suicidal.
“Loving Jesus doesn’t always cure suicidal thoughts,” Wilson wrote. “Loving Jesus doesn’t always cure depression. Loving Jesus doesn’t always cure PTSD. Loving Jesus doesn’t always cure anxiety. But that doesn’t mean Jesus doesn’t offer us companionship and comfort. He ALWAYS does that,” Wilson tweeted.
Wilson had been a long-time advocate for mental health, and founded “Anthem of Hope,” a Christian outreach for the depressed and suicidal, with his wife. His death this September followed that of Pastor Andrew Stoecklein, another young, vibrant evangelical pastor and mental health advocate, who committed suicide last year.
In the span of just 16 years, suicide rates among working-age Americans (aged 16-64 years) spiked 34% between 2000 and 2016, according to data from the Center for Disease Control. Among Americans aged 10-24, the spike was even more dramatic – CDC data shows a 50% increase in suicides among this group between 2000-2017.
The suicides of these two pastors highlight this concerning upward trend in suicide, especially among young people, even among those who are part of a Christian community.
CNA spoke with three mental health professionals about why suicide rates, particularly among young people, are increasing, and what the Catholic Church and other faith communities can do to help.
Overconnected, and under pressure
Deacon Basil Ryan Balke is a licensed therapist at Mount Tabor Counseling in the Denver area, and the co-host of the podcast “Catholic Psyche,” which aims to educate people on the integration between the psychological sciences and Catholic spirituality, philosophy and theology. He is also a married deacon with the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church.
Balke told CNA that he thinks one of the driving factors of an increase in suicide among teens and young adults is their constant connectedness to the world through mobile devices, coupled with a lack of greater meaning in their lives.
“When I was in high school…I would go home, and I wouldn’t really have any contact with my friends unless I wanted it,” Balke said.
“And now with the saturation of the iPhone…you get the communication that is constantly there and constantly moving and so you can never unplug, and you can never continue on with life outside of the image you have to put out into the world (through social media),” he said.
“They’re always distracted, always moving forward. I was a youth minister for many years as well, and it was just – these kids never had a moment’s peace,” he added.
Tommy Tighe is a licensed marriage and family therapist in the Bay area in California, who also hosts a podcast on Catholicism and mental health called “St. Dymphna’s Playbook.” Tighe told CNA that despite having more connections, young people today are more isolated than ever.
“There’s so much more pressure…there’s so much more of a drive to be popular,” Tighe said, but social media connections often do not equate to “a close-knit community of close friends.”
According to a 2015 article from the peer-reviewed research journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, frequent social media use in children and teenagers is associated with poor psychological functioning, as it limits their daily face-to-face interactions, impairing their ability to keep and maintain meaningful relationships.
The study found that students who reported using social media for two or more hours daily were more likely to poorly rate their own mental health, and experienced high levels of psychological distress and suicidal ideation.
“There’s a trend towards superficial relationships, and of course you don’t post on Instagram ‘I’m depressed’ or something like that, so I think people don’t know who to reach out to,” Tighe noted.
Furthermore, Balke said, “I think what is also happening is the younger people have lost meaning in their day-to-day lives as well. I think all of us have lost meaning as a force in our lives.”
Balke said especially for young people, there is an increasingly intense pressure to perform academically or athletically that has replaced the things that used to bring people a sense of greater purpose, such as faith or virtue or close familial connections.
“Whether it be sports, they have to be track stars, they have to be in all AP (advanced placement) classes, they have to have like 30 college credits before they graduate high school, a 4.0 is not good enough anymore it’s gotta be a 4.3 or something,” he said. “I don’t even know how you do that. They’re pushing themselves so aggressively to the point where there’s no meaning behind it all because they don’t have an overarching purpose. These things are substitutes for that.”
“You might do something stupid like literally eating a tide pod, laundry detergent, and you become world-famous for thirty seconds. It’s so crazy,” he said. “It’s like these kids are just waiting for their next big break.”
The lingering stigma of mental health care
Another driving factor in the spike in suicides among young people and other populations is the lingering stigma of seeking out therapy or other mental health interventions, Tighe said.
“I think we try to act like we’ve really changed (as a society) in our perception of mental health, but I don’t think that’s really true,” Tighe said.
“Especially…it seems like every time there’s one of these mass tragedies in our country, mental health gets brought up and I think that pushes people even further away from wanting to reach out or identify as having an issue,” he added.
Additionally, Tighe said, not only do young people today have a harder time making meaningful relationships with their peers, parents are also often afraid to broach the subject of suicide and mental health with their children.
“I’m hoping that the younger generation of parents will be a little bit more willing, but it’s scary, right? That’s super scary to talk about.”
But talk about it parents must, Balke said, and the more specific they are, the better.
“You want to use that exact phrase: ‘Are you thinking about killing yourself?’ Or ‘Are you thinking about suicide?’ You don’t want to use the phrase ‘self harm,’ or ‘Are you thinking about hurting yourself?’” he said. “You want to be very clear.”
Some people fear that bringing up suicide may plant the idea of suicide in their child’s head, or may worsen their depression, but Balke said that studies show that these fears are unfounded.
“Statistically speaking – you can’t catch suicidal thoughts,” Balke said. “You’re not going to be pushing kids to become suicidal by asking, ‘Are you thinking about suicide?’ That’s actually… helping them come out of that isolation.”
The Soul Shop movement: helping congregations prevent suicide
In 1999, Fe Anam Avis was the pastor of a Presbyterian church in a small suburban town in southern Ohio when the suicide of three students within seven months rocked his community.
Searching for help and resources for his grieving congregants, he found that there was little to nothing when it came to faith-based resources for suicide prevention and mental health. He started traveling to speak about suicide, but noticed that clergy and church leaders weren’t among his audience members.
“He said, ‘I would go to these towns and they would have me in a fire hall and I would give a presentation about suicide and a hundred people would show up in a small town. And not one of them would be a clergy person,’” Michelle Snyder told CNA. Snyder is the director of Soul Shop, an organization founded by Fe that trains clergy and congregations in suicide prevention and interventions. Fe has since retired.
“(Fe) said consistently it felt like people in the church were not connecting this issue of suicide prevention with faith, and pastors were just not showing up to engage with this as an issue as a matter of faith.”
That’s what spurred Fe to found Soul Shop movement, a group which now travels the country to give workshops to congregations on how to speak about suicide, how to prevent it, and what the warning signs are.
“I’ll often say to a group of faith community leaders, if you’re asking yourself the question, ‘Is anybody in my parish thinking about suicide?’ you’re asking yourself the wrong question. Because the right question is, which six people out of the hundred here are thinking about suicide right now?” Snyder said.
Part of the training consists in simply raising the awareness among clergy and church leaders that there are people in desperation within their own congregations who are at risk for suicide and need help. Snyder said they also train congregations on how to support people who have been impacted by the suicide of a family member or friend.
In addition, they study the stories about suicide, or suicidal ideation, found in Bible passages.
“There’s quite a few,” she said. “We’ve got Judas, the story of Judas, and that’s a suicide. But you’ve also got stories like Elijah (who was) praying to die. You’ve got Saul, who fell on his own sword and killed himself…you’ve got Job, who said death would be better than what I’m experiencing. You’ve got lots of heroes in the Bible who thought about (it) or else just said, ‘I’m in so much pain. Death would be better,’ but who didn’t attempt (it). So you’ve got lots of suicide – you’ve got suicide attempts, you’ve got suicides, you’ve got suicide intervention.”
They also train church leaders in spotting some of the warning signs of a person who is at risk for suicide.
Tighe said some of those warning signs include people who have been noticeably depressed for long periods of time, social withdrawal, talking about suicide or self-harm, or the giving away of prized possessions, among other things.
A warning sign that might seem strange, Tighe said, is when someone who has been depressed for a while is suddenly and inexplicably happy again.
“If someone’s been super depressed and then all of a sudden they’re sort of feeling really good…that makes us very nervous, because sometimes it’s because they’ve made the decision like, okay, on Friday, I’m going to do it. And they feel like a burden lifted off their shoulders, because there’s an end in sight,” he said.
When those risk factors are spotted, those are the times to specifically ask people if they’re considering suicide, Tighe added.
During the Soul Shop trainings, Snyder said, the group takes a public health approach to suicide, meaning that they train faith communities to take a collective responsibility for the health of their own people.
“We spend a whole day equipping communities of faith on how to be communities of faith in relationship to this issue,” she said.
One of the biggest suicide prevention tools that communities of faith can provide, Snyder said, is being “soul-safe” communities of faith, where people feel connected and valued as whole people, and not just for one aspect of their identity.
People who are more resilient to suicide are those whose don’t have all of their “eggs in one basket,” Snyder noted.
“If every egg is in the basket of being on a full scholarship for football, and then I get injured, every egg was in that basket. I have no Plan B, and so that becomes a risk. And helping our people in our congregation become well-rounded people with lives that are full and rich and diverse can be a suicide prevention initiative.”
At Soul Shop, church communities that are trained in suicide awareness and prevention are called “soul-safe communities,” Snyder said, which are “communities where people are intentionally connected to each other…communities where everybody knows what to look for. Communities where we are aware of our tendency to shun when we get uncomfortable and are challenged to not do that.”
What else can be done?
Besides hosting a Soul Shop or other suicide prevention training, what else can pastors and parishes do to help prevent suicide?
Balke said he would encourage all pastors to meet with their staff and frequent volunteers in order to familiarize them with locally available mental health resources. They should know the location of clinics, the hours of those clinics, and what crisis numbers to call, he said.
“They need to have quick access to them, so that when someone is coming in their office, or after a bible study or whatever it is when this kind of conversation comes up, they have it on their phone ready to go and they won’t have to go searching for it,” he said.
Tighe said he recommended that parishes have flyers posted on their bulletin boards with information on local mental health resources, as well as local crisis hotlines to call or text. In the United States, texting “741741” will connect users to a crisis text line.
Text lines get great response rates, Tighe said, because “everyone’s like, okay I would send a text, because it’s easier. And they’re incredible. We get people who come to our clinic who are like, ‘I was driving to the bridge, (because that’s a very popular thing here in the Bay Area for people who are suicidal), and for whatever reason texted these people and they told me to come to your clinic before I went.”
Pastors and clergy should also make it a point to build a personal relationship with the mental health professionals in their congregation, Balke said.
“Someone that they can just phone and say, ‘Hey, what do you think about this? What should I do in this situation?’” he said. “I have a number of priests and deacons who have phoned me on a regular basis and say, ‘You know, someone came into my office and said this this and this. What’s going on here?’”
Pastors and other church leaders also need to treat suicide and mental health issues with the seriousness they deserve, Balke said, and not treat them as something that is either not a serious issue, or something that can be solved solely by prayer or spiritual direction.
“Mental health in the Church is a real problem, and…it’s not necessarily being addressed with the seriousness, from an institutional level, that it deserves. People are committing suicide in our parishes and in our churches.”
Snyder said that she is confident that, if properly trained, churches and parishes have a key role to play in preventing suicides in their communities.
“We talk a lot about putting your seatbelt on before the accident happens. And that’s kind of what we’re describing here, is how do we do that in faith communities long before crisis strikes,” she said.
This article was originally published on CNA Sept. 15, 2019.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Included deep in the article is this especially useful information–interveners and those who work with the young, please notice that, ” In the United States, texting “741741” will connect users to a crisis text line.”
We examine causes at least statistically and respond. Emile Durkheim sociologist made the first scientific study of suicide [Suicide 1896] citing statistics as would any sociologist. However as in Denmark which had the highest rate stat markers such as alienation, cultural social change, amorality – the latter predominant related to amorality is a word he coined ‘anomie’, a lack of the usual social or ethical standards in an individual or group. Durkheim per force of his surveys concluded beyond sociological limits a more comprehensive psychological conclusion that alienation of the individual within their culture had a spiritual dimension marked by amorality. Denmark the home of Kierkegaard reacted [religious existentialism focused on the here and now] to his own observations of a Lutheranism that allowed for anomie if not in accord with the Gospels rather in accord with predetermined salvation or condemnation. Suicide rates based on Durkheim’s findings are expected to burgeon in the rapid dechristianization and moral chaos [LGBT and the rest] of the West. If nothing matters insofar as what we do then what we are alive or dead may seem pointless. Human nature, the soul of Man designed by God finds in that the deepest despair. For Catholicism translating our permanent moral standards and doctrine to Kierkegaard’s more relevant existential approach seems promising. Priests, laity can communicate Apostolic truths to meet the challenge. As was the case during my experience in Africa, and our Southwest. Literally Christ saves.
A footnote on Kierkegaard’s existential religion and on Suicide. Kirkegaard studied Plato favored Socratic dialogue. “Copenhagen in the 1830s and 1840s had crooked streets where carriages rarely went. Kierkegaard loved to walk them. In 1848, Kierkegaard wrote, ‘I had real Christian satisfaction in the thought that, if there were no other, there was definitely one man in Copenhagen whom every poor person could freely accost and converse with on the street; that, if there were no other, there was one man who, whatever the society he most commonly frequented, did not shun contact with the poor, but greeted every maidservant he was acquainted with, every manservant, every common laborer’. Kierkegaard came to hope that no one would retain their sins even though they have been forgiven. And by the same token that no one who truly believed in the forgiveness of sin would live their own life as an objection against the existence of forgiveness. He made the point that Cato committed suicide before Caesar had a chance to forgive him. This fear of not finding forgiveness is devastating. In 1954 Samuel Barber set to music Kierkegaard’s prayer, ‘Father in Heaven! Hold not our sins up against us but hold us up against our sins so that the thought of You when it wakens in our soul, and each time it wakens, should not remind us of what we have committed but of what You did forgive, not of how we went astray but of how You did save us!” (Wikipedia).
It is not only churches that are failing at helping those dealing with depression and other mental illness. It is possible to find the most obscure items for sale on the internet, information on obscure subjects, videos on nearly every subject imaginable and access to decades of movies and tv shows, as well as music. But try to find access to resources for those seeking help with mental illness? They are not there. There is encouragement to call toll-free numbers (which are great for the moment but not for long term help), there are lists of providers that are less inclusive and useful than lists of restaurants, and there are links to agencies that might help. But there is little meaningful information about practitioners or clinics, agency sites often offer little beyond call us.
The mental health system is horribly broken. I spent nearly seven months this past year getting mental health “care” from the VA. I had three sessions with a psychiatrist, went through a course on how to be a psychotherapy patient and started a course on depression. My primary care doctor, who is wonderful at physical care, gave me a referral to a clinic that wanted me to sign up for at least six appointments before they would see me. I was fortunate enough to get an intake appointment (for free) from a therapist at another clinic who encouraged to self admit immediately (the primary doctor concurred). I contacted the hospital we get all our care at (which has a psych unit) and after three attempts over two days (!), finally spoke to a human who said they didn’t take my insurance (never mind we have had the same insurer for fifteen years and there’s never been a problem before). I ended up at another hospital that had a psych unit, spent six days in hospital and got help. They also set me up with a great therapist and a not so great psychiatrist. When, early last month, I realized my meds needed adjusting (lots of side effects, no real change), I tried to read it. My insurance denied it but did pay for a partial program which I will conclude this week after four months. They have connected me with a new psychiatrist, something I spent a futile two weeks trying to accomplish before getting in the program.
The sad part of this is I am intelligent adult, with both a bachelors degree and 27 hours of post-graduate work who is a skilled and experienced writer/researcher and had this much trouble. How much harder is it for someone less able than I to make progress?
It’s past time that we acknowledge that there is no line separating mental and physical illness. There is no stigma in getting help for physical health issues and there shouldn’t be for mental health issues. What does it say about our culture (within and outside religious communities) that I am regarded as brave for seeking help, but no one talks about bravery when someone seeks medical care? Why is it that public libraries have sadly outdated books on mental health issues but current ones on physical health (I got more help finding books on Amazon than at the library)? Doctors and other healthcare workers routinely ask if your being abused, some ask if you have a gun in the house, some might ask if you’re feeling suicidal. But over forty some years of adult life, only one asked if I was depressed or if I wanted to talk to a mental health professional. Like so many other “systems”, mental health care is broken, and, tragically, people are dying because of it.
Freedom of choice if you truly value freedom then why can’t you accept the persons choice of taking their own life
This is the ultimate form of freedom after all
The only thing we can do to help is give hints pointers towards a better future
If you go forcing people to live against ther will that seems quite sad
Besides in the future whether you like it or not suicide booths will be legalized and graveyards will be seen as a waste of valuable resources
The dead can be used as fertilizer or even a alternative energy source you are also forgetting the birth deth ratio every day over 100k+ people are born in die every day
Its part of life
Sorry not trying 2 be rude or hurt anyones feelings
Have a nice happy day/nite if you are seeing this
Please don’t judge a book by its cover