We’re still failing at suicide prevention
Like Tommy Raskin, I concealed my pain
On New Year’s Eve, 25-year-old Harvard law student Thomas Raskin died by suicide. He left a short note for his family, which read: “Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.”
His parents, Rep. Jamie Raskin, DMd., and Sarah Bloom Raskin, memorialized Tommy in a lengthy post on Medium, introducing many of us to their much-loved son. Tommy “had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind,” they wrote. He also had a secret, which ultimately took his life.
At the end of the statement, the Raskins named the disease that killed their son. His depression was “a kind of relentless torture in the brain for him, and despite very fine doctors and a loving family … the pain became overwhelming and unyielding.”
A friend sent me the Raskins’ message because she knows I’ve been an advocate for openness about not only mental illness — especially depression, which I also suffer from — but also the plague of suicides, which took nearly 50,000 Americans in 2018. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the annual suicide rate increased 35% from 1999 through 2018, with the suicide rate among men nearly four times higher than women.
Because of the stigma surrounding suicide, many researchers say these numbers are underreported. It took courage for the Raskins to come forward. The family continued to show courage when, the day after Raskin buried his son, the grieving father found himself caught in the Trumpfueled insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, where the congressman believed it was his duty to count the electoral votes.
Misunderstanding depression
As much as I was pained by Tommy’s death, I was vexed as I read comments on his public Facebook page, because some posts highlighted wrong notions about depression and suicide.
One woman posted that she wished she could have been there for him. It’s not that Tommy was alone. The Raskins said their son had been “enveloped in the love not only of his bedazzled and starstruck parents but of his remarkable and adoring sisters.”
I, once, had to learn the limits of “being there” in the hardest way imaginable many years ago when I lost a friend to suicide. We had met at the University of California, Berkeley, when I was in the throes of depression and she had suffered what she understood to be a concussion. Five years later, my friend was suffering from hallucinations and most likely bipolar disorder. She spent her last year in and out of the psychiatric ward. For what turned out to be her final months, I spoke with her every day, thinking that my attentions would help safeguard her.
I even sent her an airplane ticket, to be used any time, to visit me. Only later did I understand this folly. Someone consumed by a severe mental health illness is not able to make a reservation, pack a suitcase, go to the airport and get on a plane. One night, she swallowed her stockpile of meds and died a few hours later.
Another troubling discussion started on Tommy’s Facebook page underneath a post he had made 10 days before he died, encouraging Georgia voters to turn out in the Senate runoffs on Jan. 5. Someone couldn’t understand how he could die from suicide while looking to the future. A different friend replied that it made perfect sense to those with depression.
I was lucky
Three years ago, I wrote a column for The Washington Post with the headline, “I wasn’t suicidal, until suddenly, terrifyingly I was.” Trying to taper off my medication, with the supervision of a doctor, something went wrong. As I wrote: “I could not find my emotional — or physical — balance . ... For about a month, I found myself treading water in a vast sea of hopelessness.”
I was lucky not to be near a cliff or to have access to a gun. I understand how Tommy could be urging Georgians to vote as he engaged in a life-and-death struggle with his illness. No one would ever have been the wiser — until the illness forced his hand.
Here’s what I learned: That moment when I wanted to take my own life was short-lived, and had the scales tipped ever so slightly there would have been no one able to stop me.
It took a psychiatrist to help me gain mastery of my illness, and to convince me that I would not always be on that precipice. I wish someone could have convinced Tommy Raskin of that, too.
His parents called him “a radiant light in this broken world.” But depression operates in the dark, and its wiles create secrets that sometimes cannot be uncovered until it’s too late.
Steven Petrow, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is the author of the new book “Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old.”
If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800273-8255.