NEW YORK — They look intently at the camera, some impassively, some with smiles, all of them aware that they’ve just shared with an online audience a most personal story: Why they tried to kill themselves.
By the dozens, survivors of attempted suicide across the U.S. are volunteering to be part of a project by a Brooklyn-based photographer, Dese’Rae Stage, called “Live Through This” — a collection of photographic portraits and personal accounts.
It’s one of several initiatives transforming the nation’s suicide-prevention community as more survivors find the courage to speak out and more experts make efforts to learn from them. There’s a survivors task force, an array of blogs, some riveting YouTube clips, all with the common goal of stripping away anonymity, stigma and shame.
“Everyone feels like they have to walk on eggshells,” said Stage, who once tried to kill herself with self-inflicted cuts. “We’re not that fragile. We have to figure out how to talk about it, rather than avoiding it.”
Such conversations are proliferating.
In January, the American Association of Suicidology launched a website called “What Happens Now?” — described as the first sustained effort by a national prevention organization to engage survivors in a public forum. It features a blog, updated weekly, with contributions from survivors sharing their experiences and often using their real names.
In one of the latest posts, the founder of a respite home for suicidal people writes powerfully about her own suicide attempt eight years ago, involving both pills and a kitchen knife.
“Survivors have a unique perspective on what life’s like down in the deep, dark hole,” writes Sabrina Strong, executive director of Waking Up Alive in Albuquerque. “We found our way out. … We’re not afraid to crawl down in the dark hole with someone else.”
Seeking to encourage those types of contributions, the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention — a federally funded public-private partnership — has formed a first-of-its-kind task force comprised of prevention experts and survivors. It plans to issue recommendations this fall for how practitioners and organizations in the prevention field can “engage and empower suicide attempt survivors.”
One of the task force co-chairmen is psychologist John Draper, project director of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a network of centers that field calls from emotionally distressed and potentially suicidal people. According to studies cited by Draper, about 7 percent of survivors later kill themselves.
“Yet that means 93 percent go on to live out their lives,” he said. “We’ve got to talk to them, engage then, find out what is bringing them hope and keeping them alive.”
The other co-chairman is Eduardo Vega, the survivor of a suicide attempt who is executive director of the Mental Health Association of San Francisco.
“Nobody can speak to the issues, the sort of agony, even the decision-making that goes on when you’re actively suicidal so much as somebody who’s been there, and can relate to all that’s going on in a nonjudgmental way,” Vega said in a recent video. “That’s the sort of magic that will make a difference.”
