A powerful post was featured on the TODAY show. Please click HERE and watch this moving interview with Harry Miller. My thoughts are below….
This is such an incredible video, so moving and powerful. Please watch it, share it, have your young people watch it….it is so important. I am so grateful for Harry Miller’s transparency and bravery in sharing about his battle with mental health and depression. I am so grateful that he stayed.
It has been 821 days since we got the worst new of our lives. I don’t sit and keep an actual count in my head every day honestly, but he died on the 21st and so days like today can be more difficult. It isn’t as overwhelming as it once was, but I am always aware of his forever absence in our family. I wish he could have held on for one more day, I wish he could have seen past the darkness. I wish we could have saved him.
The news has been filled with stories lately of young people dying by suicide. Men and women who “seem to have it all together”, who appear “fine” on the outside but are carrying a burden inside that they are certain they can’t share the full weight of with someone else. For these men and women, the darkness becomes overwhelming and an end to their suffering seems like the only option. I am sure it is hard to understand if you haven’t ever struggled with depression. If your mind has never been ravaged by constant thoughts that you are a burden and worthless and everyone would just be better off if you were gone. Maybe you read about these people, my son, and you just think “how selfish.”
I understand. I was that person once too. I didn’t understand, or try to. I naively thought Isaac just needed to focus on the positive or pray more…then he would see all the reasons he should be grateful and that would pull him out of the pit. But it didn’t…and sometimes because of brain chemicals that are out of whack or the effects of medications or a variety of other reasons positive thoughts and prayers are just not enough. The darkness suffocates.
Suicide is NOT the answer. Don’t hear me wrong and misunderstand. I don’t agree with my son’s end of life exit, but I see how hopeless he must have been to get to that place. I don’t want another family to experience what we have. And when people like Harry Miller come forward and cry on national television and plead that we would just hang on….and honestly share his reality and remind us that it is ok to be open and share ours as well…maybe, just maybe instead of a late-night visit from a police officer with horrific news, our young people will start picking up the phone and calling us instead.
Have the hard conversations with your people. Be a safe place for them to go to with their ugliest, darkest feelings (without shame!!) so that they don’t hide them away and believe the lie that they are the only ones who feel this way and it won’t ever get better. They aren’t and it will….but we need to be willing to walk with them so they believe it for themselves. #endsuicide
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