Content note: discussion of suicide and suicidality
“Should I press the button?” Nancy asks.
My stomach flutters as I look to Lisa Marie’s calm face. Her smile is a reminder that we’ve got this. Some weeks, she’ll send what we call a ‘loving reminder’ to me via the chat box and I feel my shoulders drop as my tension melts.
Nancy, on the other hand, takes nerves in her stride. Her email signature is a Celine Dion quote: “If you go alone, you go fast, if you go together, you go far“.
I nod. Let’s go. Nancy clicks the button and strangers enter the Zoom room. I begin to speak:
“Welcome to our Alternatives to Suicide group, some of you might have been here before, some of you may be new, so I’ll set the scene: this is a place to speak openly and confidentially about suicide“.
For the next ninety minutes, we have a conversation about what it is like to want to die. I’d tell you about what’s said, except that confidentiality is one of the principles that members count on. What is said in the room stays in the room; everyone agrees we won’t call the authorities.
The conversation is led by the people in the group and we’re all led by the charter values which guide us.
It has taken a while for people to feel safe enough to speak. Many of us have never had a place to speak without fear of being caught up in coercive safeguarding, forceful intervention or punishing criminalisation; when you say you want to kill yourself, people stop seeing you, they only see a problem.
But for the next hour and a half, we see each other. Everyone is very different yet the four Alternatives to Suicide paradigms hold us in sync: we’re responsible to each other, not for each other. We uphold consent and choice. We respond to the injustices around us. We heal in communities, in this group and in our lives.
I used to assume that I could talk to a suicidal person. I’m a chronically suicidal person, after all. I’d taken Mental Health First Aid training, I’d been doing group work for years; I assumed friends knew they could come to me. In the last few years alone, several people in my life have died by suicide, Sam, Poppy, Rachel, Aoifa, Nicholas, Sabrina. Suddenly nothing I could say felt sufficient anymore. I wanted to learn how to really talk about suicide. So I joined a Wildflower Alliance training course, which is where I met Nancy and Lisa Marie.
The training offered me an opportunity to speak aloud about a suicide attempt I’d once made. I realised I’d never been given the space to speak about the pain which I’d been in. No one asked me what I had wanted; what in my life needed to end for me to live? I’d never sat with another person who listened deeply without trying to fix me. It felt like my heart was freed from the weight of the shame that curled around my ribcage.
This is what I needed, I realised. There is nothing in the UK like this. We need this.
Now, the new UK group meets every fortnight — mostly due to facilitator logistics the hope is to meet weekly in future — and at the end of each meeting, Nancy, Lisa Marie and I sit for a moment. We hold a mutual awe of what the group offers each other. I learn so much from what people have to say about wanting to die. Occasionally members send me their own epiphanies about living via email. It feels like we’re learning how to survive our pain together.
The pain can resonate inside me after my laptop closes. One Monday morning, there was a car collision on my street. The scene was blocked off and when a neighbour asked me about it, I discovered I was full of tears. “I don’t know if they are ok, if anyone is ok”. That’s the hardest part of holding space, not knowing if people are OK. A wise friend reflected: “people who come to the group aren’t OK before they show up and you won’t make them OK in 90 minutes either”, and they’re right, Alternatives to Suicide is not about taking control or being responsible for making everybody OK.
Alternatives to Suicide is one alternative to the failing mental health system that punishes people for wanting to die. The tyranny of the ‘OK to not be OK’ slogan-speak is put aside. This is a peer-led approach, it belongs to suicidal people themselves and exists outside of the system that has caused so much harm that many of us can never go back to it. What do people do when they can’t make the broken system work despite all efforts? They find sanctuary in each other instead.
Alternatives to Suicide groups go far together: people go far into conversations that aren’t sanitised, and when people are willing to go further than safety contracts and scripts, then the embers of hope can be sustained. We go to dark places together, sit with the dread of questions like “what if I never feel like I want to live?”. The alternative to fixing each other is witnessing; in silence, in softness, in rage, in dark humour, compassion, in curiosity. In this space, the constricting dread dissipates.
This group cost me £250 to set up. As a lifesaving intervention, that’s a bargain. For that, I got accreditation, a zoom account, an email account and two wonderful American facilitators who give up alternate Sunday mornings for free. Sometimes I feel angry that there is so much talk about what ‘to do’ about suicide, when a response to injustice is what’s needed, and that response does not have to be complex or expensive.
What this group has given me is priceless, it’s given me an alternative to despair. It’s given me a different relationship to my own suicide experiences and a chance to see other people’s relationship to suicide shift. And it’s a tribute to everybody I’ve lost: before every session I sit quietly to light a candle for everyone who has gone from our world.
Most of all, our group has given me a way to go on living, and a community who I can go onward with. Alternatives to Suicide is one path onwards, out of the failed state and toward a future. If I could send you one loving reminder, it would be this: the future doesn’t live within the broken system – it lives within what we can imagine collectively.
You can visit the Alternatives to Suicide UK Group blog site here.
You can also find Alternatives to Suicide on Twitter here.
Mental Healthcare in a Failing State
This blog is part of our new series, “Mental Healthcare in a Failing State”. All the blogs in the series, when published, will be added here.