I was mid-sentence when someone slid a sheet of paper across the table to my friend Sam.
“This is for you,” a female-sounding voice said to Sam, and the messenger slipped away without my ever seeing her.
We were lunching at a popular diner in Denver. I was intrigued: What was on that piece of paper?
Sam happened to be wearing a T shirt that could be construed as anti-Trump. Perhaps the person had dropped a note expressing solidarity. But the longer Sam read, the more their face tightened.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
With a grim expression, Sam passed the paper to me.
Speaking of Suicide Between Friends
I should mention that Sam had been telling me about their son’s suicidal crisis last year.
Like me, Sam’s a social worker who’s done a lot of suicide risk assessments, safety planning, and counseling with people in crisis. Sam said those experiences made it easier to have a calm, empathetic conversation with their son about his wanting to die. In contrast, many parents panic or resort to toxic positivity.
Our restaurant booth was tiny. There was barely enough room for one person on each side of the postage-stamp table. A thin, wooden partition separated us from the booth next to ours.
Evidently, the person had overheard us.
Hey there,
From one clinician to another I truly empathize with your situation and I’m asking you to stop talking about these things in public. Not only are you divulging your own trauma to everyone in here that cannot consent to hearing it, the details of your own involvement in your child’s mental health crisis are unethical. Please speak about these things in private like our code of conduct dictates.
Sincerely,
Another clinician who now knows way too much
Is It Wrong to Talk about Suicide in Public?
For the record, there is no code of conduct that prohibits social workers or other mental health professionals from discussing their own child’s suicidal crisis with others.
If the social worker discusses a client in a crowded restaurant, that’s a different story – of course. Professionally, we are ethically and legally bound to keep what our clients tell us confidential, with very specific exceptions. Personally, mental health professionals are entitled to talk about their own lives, just like everyone else.
There’s also nothing in social workers’ Code of Ethics that forbids speaking about suicide or other mental health challenges in a public place. Or, for that matter, that forbids using well-practiced active listening skills with your child.
“It’s stigma,” I told worry-stricken Sam. “If you’d been talking about your diabetic child becoming dangerously hypoglycemic, would they have left you this note?”
I seriously doubt it.
Maybe the letter-writer assumed Sam’s son would be embarrassed or ashamed if someone he knew recognized Sam. That kind of automatic assumption is rooted in stigma, too.
Not everyone finds a suicidal past embarrassing or shameful. Our son, for example, also went through suicidal crises as an adolescent. He also attempted suicide. And he doesn’t buy into the stigma.
In anticipation of writing this post, I asked his permission to mention his history here. He said yes.
“Thanks for giving the okay,” I texted. “May I ask you something? I’m wondering why it’s OK with you?”
Our son is 25 now. He texted back, “My adolescence was spent on the internet in some shape or form. That’s how we communicated with each other. The internet is a very open place, and in turn it’s made my generation very open.”
We Want People to Speak of Mental Health Challenges More Openly
I know, I’m fretting about just one person’s scolding note in a diner. But I also know that many others probably agree with the anonymous scolder’s sentiment, “Please speak about these things in private.”
Suicide is so stigmatized, so taboo, that it’s often spoken of only in hushed tones, if it’s spoken of at all. Many people with suicidal thoughts hide their predicament as a result.
That’s why so many suicide prevention messages try to convey that, really, it is OK to talk about suicide. Not only OK, but also potentially life-saving:
“It’s time to stop whispering about suicide. We are losing too many to silence,” the Samaritans explain.
“Talk saves lives,” the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention says.
“Break the silence,” AllOne Health advises.
“Start a conversation” the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill urges.
I agree with all those statements. We need to make it okay to talk with friends about suicide and suicidal thoughts wherever they want, not restrict those conversations to private rooms with locked doors and soundproofed walls.
But …
At the same time, all of this has left me wondering if I’m the best person to assess when a conversation about suicide is too sensitive for public spaces.
I mean, I run a website called Speaking of Suicide. I’ve written books, conducted professional trainings, taught courses at the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work on helping people at risk for suicide, and shared publicly about my own suicidality in my 20s.
It’s possible I’ve become unusually desensitized to talking about suicide. Maybe I’m even naïve about the enormity of such conversations – or idealistic about their acceptability.
To me, it’s no big deal. The talking about it, I mean, not the suicidal episode itself. At least, talking about it shouldn’t be a big deal. It should be like discussing a child’s blood sugar levels or broken arm.
But I do wonder: Have I lost perspective in some way? Perhaps so, because of my immersion in suicidology, my conviction that we need to drop the stigma, and my openness about my own suicidal crises.
Either way, even if I am inured to discussions about suicide, that doesn’t make it OK to treat suicide as unspeakable. As I said in an earlier post, it’s awfully hard to help suicidal people – and for them to ask for help – if we treat suicide as a dirty word.
© 2025 Stacey Freedenthal. All Rights Reserved. Written for Speaking of Suicide.
Great article. I think we must talk about suicide openly. Especially when someone needs us to hear their story. It seems you were supporting your friend.
My concern is with the professional who passed the note. I’m glad they are concerned with ethics, but concerned with their judgment. Perhaps they are reacting to their own discomfort with suicide.
Scott,
Thanks for your comment. I agree, the other therapist’s behavior was very problematic. I think you’re right that she must have been reacting to her own fear or other issues. I sure hope she doesn’t have any clients with suicidal thoughts!
Dear Stacey, this is an excellent post. Sometimes I too wonder about speaking about suicide in a public space or reading a book about suicide, especially on public transport.
I wonder about this as I would hate to re-traumatize a person who has a connection to any aspect of suicide, if they overhear me speaking or see the word on a book’s cover. And yet I was once returning from a Lived Experience Summit and was wearing a T-shirt with a mountain design on it (as too were 4 others). As I was ordering a drink from the airport coffee hub, the young girl behind the counter asked if we were mountain climbers (if only I could climb a mountain!) and I answered “No.” But then I just felt a strong need to share that we were returning from the Summit and that it was about Suicide and Suicide Loss. She responded by asking some more questions and saying how what we were doing was so important.
Yes, I took a risk….but that is how we can de-stigmatize a subject whose very stigma can lead to suicide. Your article makes me feel that what I did was very important.
As an animal activist of old, I can read what I choose to read to learn about those issues affecting animals, just as the clinician who sent that note to your friend, asking them to stop sharing, can choose to continue to listen to your friend’s story. To say that they now know too much is so disrespectful to your friend and her son. We need to share so that others learn. We need to share so that healing can begin to occur.
I once shared in a Suicide Loss Support Group how I had experienced intense suicidal ideation over a 4 year period (almost on a daily basis) and that I now welcomed this experience as it has caused me to be able to appreciate the reasons why people may suicide or attempt suicide. And not one person in that group was shocked; they understood how this makes me to better facilitate the group.
And yet the risk was that they could also have doubted my ability to lead a group of people experiencing the pain of a loss to suicide. They could have left and yet they didn’t.
Love the honesty and authenticity that comes through your articles. Take care and blessings of Peace as you continue to do what you need to do.
Heath,
Thanks so much for sharing your perspective — and for your kind words. It sounds like you know very well the risks and benefits to consider around openness about suicide. Triggering someone is a real concern, but if that happens, their upset will pass. If we stay silent out of fear of triggering someone, the outcome can be permanent. Which, of course, you know already. Your thoughtful comment just has me thinking aloud.
Hi Stacey,
It is awfully hard to talk about suicide. And it seems to me it would need some Suicide Pride! to overcome that. Just for the balance, to come out in the middle somewhere. The problem with suicide is that it relates to death, and death contradicts the idea that we will live forever. So it is surrounded by fear, willful ignorance and rejection. That defines the taboo. Best not to talk about it, so as to not get confused. And sudden death means sudden loss, which is awfully hard to take.
You say: It should be like discussing a child’s blood sugar levels or broken arm. And I appreciate the practical approach of it. It makes sense. But also, I am not a child. I get the impression that anything I would say about suicide, you will take as if I am a child, you will analyse the psychology of it, classify it and suggest some treatment or therapy for it. I think you are that good. And then you are happy and I will shut up about it.
The question that won’t go away is: may I die or not and do I need your permission for it? And how to think about this?
Do you have any thoughts on that?
With kind regards,
Bern de Veld
Bern,
That’s a great point about the letter writer responding to an overall taboo about death generally, not necessarily to stigma about suicide specifically. Years ago, I taught a course on death and dying. One day in class I asked students to write a list of all the different euphemisms they knew for death. Nowadays they’d just ask ChatGPT, but it was an enlightening discussion. I learned many new euphemisms, some quite creative.
(Out of curiosity, I just now asked ChatGPT and it provided 160 such euphemisms, even though it prefaced it with, “Here’s a broad (though not truly exhaustive) list of euphemisms and figurative expressions for death, dying, or being dead.” So, I guess there are even more out there.)
As for your other comments, I used a child in the analogy only because Sam had been talking about their child’s suicidality. I don’t perceive everyone who has suicidal thoughts to be child-like or childish, except that we, all of us, retain within us the child we once were. And the child we still are, to a degree.
You ask, “May I die or not and do I need your permission for it?” I’m not sure what you’re asking. I have sometimes felt while providing therapy or working at a crisis hotline that people were seeking my permission for suicide, almost as if they needed to persuade me why suicide was right for them. While I always try to understand the suicidal wish from the other person’s view, and to see why suicide makes sense to them, I would never do anything to encourage suicide. If you are actively considering killing yourself, I hope you’ll avail yourself of one of the resources listed here, where you can get help by phone, text, email, or online chat.
Thanks for sharing here, Bern!
Thank you for responding. You are my heroine of free speech. It allows me to speak my mind. You saved me. And as always, I will have a think about it. I think, and therefore I am.
Bern,
Best wishes to you! Thanks for sharing here.
Obviously, Stacey, you and I and a few others, from the comments, feel the same way. Folks aren’t going to stop killing themselves if we stop talking about it so let’s discuss it as we need.
I couldn’t put myself out to the person who had the unmitigated gall of writing that note, nope, no way!
My forum is going so slowly that it may as well not even be around but every year at renewal time someone chimes in with “it helped me and I want it to stay around so here’s a few dollars.”
Dragon,
That’s exactly right — even if we don’t talk about suicide, it still will happen. So we might as well talk about it and try to help.
Sorry to hear your forum‘s going slowly, but happy to hear it keeps getting support. You never know whose lives you’ve touched.
Thanks for sharing here!
I very much believe it should be a open dialogue however for most of society it can be activating but collectively more conversations from a wider speaker area. Often only those who have certain pedigree get the opportunity to voice or if they are of the acceptable optics from a lived experience which at times has been sanitized to the extent the message has been stripped of nutrients. Employment is a big area for me I live/exist alone and if you mix suicide ideations while trying to keep a roof over your head it’s something that is skirted around but needs to be addressed. I always am cautious when I post about this topic on LinkedIn as I do work and at times you never know who is lurking. Having candid conversations that don’t reduce a person and their agency is major and can lead to people feeling supported but as our world has such an odd hierarchy many burn out and could have been helped. Having to conceal is extremely exhausting on top of other optics.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn. Our group talks about it all the time. And what you don’t want to write in public, you can DM me. And our suicide prevention crew will surround you with love and support. When I first started posting about suicide on LI 7 years ago, it was crickets. Not one comment, or like. That has changed. https://www.linkedin.com/in/emotionallynaked/