September is Suicide Prevention Month.
It still feels strange to describe myself as someone with “lived experience” with suicide. For much of my career, I understood suicide through the lens of behavioral health, as a clinician, manager, leader, consultant, and someone working to strengthen the behavioral health field.
But now, I understand it differently. I have lost both my mother and my older brother to suicide. My brother never made it to his 34th birthday. His birthday is next month. My mother never made it to her 56th birthday.
When I talk about suicide prevention today, I am speaking as a behavioral health professional, but also as a daughter and younger sister who knows what it means when prevention does not happen in time. We need to keep talking about mental health and suicide, particularly within Black communities.
For generations, many of us have been taught, directly or indirectly, to survive. Keep going. Pray about it. Handle your business. Be strong. Strength has helped Black people survive things we should have never had to survive. But somewhere along the way, strength can become confused with silence.
When asking for help is viewed as weakness, people may suffer privately. Combine that with barriers to affordable, accessible, and culturally responsive mental health care, and the problem becomes even more complicated.
Awareness matters, but awareness cannot be where our work ends. We cannot spend one month telling people to seek help without asking whether the systems we are directing them toward are prepared to receive, understand, and support them.
Throughout my career, I have worked across almost every level of behavioral health, from direct service and clinical care to management, leadership, technical assistance, organizational development, and systems-level work. I have watched community needs grow while the behavioral health workforce navigates shortages, high caseloads, limited resources, secondary trauma, and burnout.
We ask behavioral health professionals to create safe spaces for others while sometimes placing them in environments where acknowledging their own struggles feels unsafe. We encourage clients to ask for help while sometimes creating workplace cultures where saying, “I’m not okay,” feels professionally risky. The people doing this work are human, too.
If we are serious about suicide prevention, we have to care about both sides of our systems: the people seeking care and the people providing it. Too often, conversations about suicide prevention begin when someone is already in crisis. Crisis services are necessary, but prevention cannot exist only at the point of crisis. We have to ask: What happens before the crisis?
There are several places we can start:
- Create spaces where people can tell the truth. Normalize conversations about mental health within families, workplaces, faith communities, and community spaces so people can say, “I’m not okay,” without judgment or shame.
- Invest in culturally responsive and accessible care. Telling people to seek help means little if they cannot afford services, find a provider, or receive care that understands their culture and experiences.
- Treat workforce wellness as a systems responsibility. Self-care cannot compensate for unsustainable workloads, inadequate staffing, poor supervision, or unhealthy workplace cultures. Organizations must examine the conditions they are asking people to work within, not simply teach employees how to cope with them.
- Build prevention into everyday systems. Schools, workplaces, healthcare systems, faith communities, and community organizations all have opportunities to recognize distress and connect people with support earlier.
This conversation is especially important within Black communities because we have inherited powerful traditions of resilience. Our resilience deserves to be honored, but resilience should not require suffering in silence. Strength can look like therapy. Strength can look like medication. Strength can look like setting boundaries, resting, telling someone you are struggling, or admitting you cannot carry everything alone.
We do not have to abandon resilience. We can expand our definition of it. For me, this work will never again be purely professional.
My brother never made it to 34.
My mother never made it to 56.
I cannot change those realities. But in honoring them, I can continue using my voice, my work, and my experiences to make space for honest conversations, compassionate support, and meaningful systems change. Because suicide prevention should not begin when someone reaches their darkest moment. It should be embedded in how we care for one another long before they ever get there.
If you or someone you know needs support, call or text 988, or chat at chat.988lifeline.org. Spanish-language services are available by calling 988 and pressing 2, or by texting AYUDA to 988.
