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.
I have often spoken out loud about suicide in coffee shops and restaurants, with both suicide loss survivors and those who have attempted suicide. Sometimes I wonder if people in adjoining booths or at nearby tables can hear us and, if so, what they think. But I proceed (sensitively, of course) because, ironically, some of the safest places we can talk about some of the most awful realities of suicide are NOT in the therapist’s office (where even I was shut down for wanting to talk about my daughter’s body) or in suicide loss support groups (where it became evident early on that talking about dead bodies was literally “unspeakable”), but rather in coffee shops and other public places where people meet up. Should we take our conversation outdoors, to spare potential listeners? I don’t think so. Maybe it’s unpleasant, definitely it’s socially unacceptable, but therapeutically, it’s essential to our long-term health and well-being to be able to say literally anything we need to about suicide, its causes, and its consequences. So, please, don’t edit or censor or silence yourself, even in public, as these places may be, tragically, the last bastions of free and honest speech about suicide. If someone gets pissed or offended, maybe you’ve just done them a favor–bringing the stigma to light, and demonstrating a willingness to engage intelligently and compassionately. Let’s keep talking, okay?
Jay,
What you say is spot on. It’s sad that speech is stifled in so many places! I’m especially troubled that a therapist shut you down when you tried to talk about your daughter’s dead body. Once a therapist who worked with rape survivors told me that when a client would speak of the rape, she’d hold her hand up to signal her to stop, then say, “I don’t need to know the details.” I understand not wanting to hear about a rape or a dead body, but the client’s need to process the trauma or to have someone bear witness should take precedence, in my opinion.
And yes, I agree with you, we need to keep talking about suicide!
Thanks for sharing here.
She (or he) must have worked hard to hear your every word and it was certainly none of their business.
As an adolescent I was suicidal and made a few attempts. I was seeing a psychologist but could never bring up the subject because that was a subject that was verboten. It would have helped at the time if I hadn’t felt so ashamed of the idea/actions. I finally did disclose but it took me almost the entire 50 minutes to get up the nerve to tell her I had tried an overdose. She replied, ‘if you feel that way again, make sure you call me.” She did seem concerned but not invested in what I had just shared, despite seeing how terribly hard it had been for me to say it.
ChatGPT, Reddit, LinkedIn and other digital sites are, in my opinion, no longer safe for free speech about suicide. There is a crackdown on dissent and damaged people.
I have an accomplished therapist friend who talks cryptically about their “hard cases” with disdain about their manipulative suicidality. Little would they know about my own struggles. It strikes fear within me.
The stigma is real and it lives on. I wouldn’t even talk here if I wasn’t tunneling through several VPN’s and TOR just to say this.
I hurt. Not everyone survives.
I’m sorry you and your friend experienced this at all. The fact that this was another self-identified clinician particularly perturbs me, for so many reasons:
1) Identifying herself as a clinician in her note asserts power and holds her responsible for what comes out of her mouth next. She acts as if what she is saying is clinically sound. It clearly is not. No best practices nor research would reinforce what she is saying or how she is saying it.
2) Her words and could be dangerous and increase lethality risk for some. She is reinforcing shame and silence, which we know are two of suicidal ideation’s strongest allies. Clinical evidence would reinforce the opposite.
3) If anyone is being unethical or practicing outside of their code of conduct, it is the clinician who identifies herself as one and then uses that power to shame someone who is discussing their family’s own mental health. And she also does so in a relatively objectively unhelpful (and I would say likely harmful) way for a majority of people who would have received that note. If anyone should feel ashamed, it should be her for allowing her own discomfort to be projected onto others and then using a position of power to try to soothe her own discomfort through silencing and/or trying to change the other person through shame.
4) How does she respond when clients who are seeing her experience SI? If she responded like this in public with a stranger, what does she do in private? What do her clients experience?
Kristin,
Those are all excellent points. I think you’re saying what I didn’t give myself permission to write, partly because I worried I’d lost perspective because of my immersion in this field, and partly because I didn’t want to distract from the core message of the post. But yes, I’m angry and concerned about that clinician, too, for the reasons you articulated here so well.
Thanks for sharing here!
Thank you for bravely speaking of suicide. Having lived the first 50 years of my life haunted by the silent shadow of suicide, I did not know anyone could recover from a suicide attempt or get over suicidal ideation. During this time, I had severe depression for decades and attempted suicide on 7 occasions. Speaking of Suicide emboldened me to realize recovery is possible. With much support, I have learned to celebrate life. I have had the privilege of sharing how I learned to embrace joy after decades of depression and a disabling suicide attempt with more than 75 audiences. Thank you, Stacey Freedenthal, from the bottom of my heart.
Shannon,
Thank you for your sweet message. I’m grateful this website has been helpful to you in your journey, and even more grateful that you’re still here and helping others.❤️ Thanks for all you do!