“Suicide is preventable, help is available, treatment can be successful, and recovery is possible.”
My homily on January 22, 2024, St. Christopher’s (Richmond, VA) Upper School Chapel
Gracious God: may only your words be spoken, and your words be heard. Amen.
“Suicide is preventable, help is available, treatment can be successful, and recovery is possible.”1
As you know, Ray Paul, father of Buck Paul, St. Christopher’s class of 2006, will be speaking here this Wednesday about mental health and suicide prevention.
Thanks to the MIND Leaders and the seniors on the Center for the Study of Boys Advisory Board who helped plan the program, on Wednesday you’ll find very good and thoughtful resources for our community.
As part of the preparation for Wednesday, I’ve been asked to provide, this morning, a bit of spiritual or religious context to the issue of mental health in general and suicide in particular: namely, what does our faith teach us about mental health and suicide?
Well, when it comes to what Christianity teaches and Christians have believed about mental health and suicide, there’s good news and bad news.
The bad news is this: when it comes to using our power and example of life to influence society’s attitudes and public policies, Christians and Christianity have been on the wrong side of history as often as on the right side.
The sad truth is, on this as well as on a whole host of important matters, Christians have thought and said and done things to cause harm and turn people off at least as often as we’ve thought and said done things to bring about healing and hope and draw people in.
The good news is, God’s not done with humanity or the church yet, and God refuses to give up on us. And on most matters, thankfully, Christians have made a lot of progress in our attitudes and behaviors and advocacy.
Specifically, the Episcopal Church has made a lot of progress on our attitudes and teachings about mental health and suicide:
More understanding, less judgment.
More compassion, less stigmatizing.
We’ve come to believe that suicide is preventable, help is available, treatment can be successful, and recovery is possible.
Speaking personally: over the course of my career, I’ve come to an understanding of depression -- and a way of understanding deaths by suicide that sometimes follow untreated depression -- that I’d like to share with you this morning.
And this understanding is in the form of an analogy. The analogy is this:
Depression can be thought of as losing, over time, one's peripheral vision.
Right now I am looking straight ahead, but I can see what is beside me and even a bit of what is behind me: the St. Andrew’s sign, the edge of the grand piano.
That is "normal" vision, and “normal” mental health. It includes such peripheral vision.
With mild depression — which most of us will live with to some degree at some points in our lives — we lose some of our peripheral vision.
We see less, hear less, encounter less. We feel less, enjoy less. And we begin to think we are less.
But suicide is preventable, help is available, treatment can be successful, and recovery is possible.
However: if for whatever reasons we don’t seek help, and our depression is left untreated, it can get to the point where it's as if we are wearing blinders [showed that with my hands on either side of my eyes].
And because depression tends to be a progressive disease, as it progresses, it's as if we are looking at life through a paper towel tube.
People living with persistent depression cannot see SO MUCH of reality: what is around them, the things that used to give them joy and meaning, the things people say to them.
Left untreated, depression can get to the point where it's as if they are looking at life, on a daily basis, through a plastic drinking straw.
Now imagine that that drinking straw sometimes getting pushed right into their eyeball.
That kind of excruciating pain, plus the inability to see anything else, is why sometimes people die by suicide.
==========
The good news is, suicide is preventable, help is available, treatment can be successful, and recovery is possible.
Suicide is preventable -- it is not inevitable — precisely because help is available.
Again thanks to Ray Paul’s talk on Wednesday and the program and resources your classmates have put together, there are simple, practical, and effective ways for us to help ourselves and to help others help themselves. Which is good news, because treatment can be successful [demonstrated a widening view/restoration, a regaining of peripheral vision].
And because suicide is preventable, help is available, and treatment can be successful, recovery is possible, which means more and more and more of our loved ones can say,
“Amazing grace -- amazing pharmaceuticals, amazing therapy -- I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now, I see.”
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