Lip Service

Bridging the Gap: Rethinking Mental Health Support and Suicide

The content critiques the ineffective responses to mental health crises and suicide prevention efforts, highlighting the gap between awareness campaigns and actual support. It argues that prevalent misconceptions about mental illness, particularly genetic determinism, ignore the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), ultimately exacerbating the suicide crisis by misplacing responsibility and failing to provide adequate services.

Too many people keep spouting off on social media and such saying, “You’re not alone and you matter” including the adverts for Crisis and Suicide Hot-lines. But, when you reach out to any of them, you are either ignored, disbelieved, gaslighted, or told you are not yet bad off enough and the lines need to be kept open for those who are.

No wonder the suicide rate in this country between 2020 and 2021 saw the sharpest annual increase. Across all demographics, people are realizing after the mass media and celebrity campaigns for suicide awareness and prevention began, things have actually gotten worse—hot-line counselors lack adequate training to be consistently effective, mental health services are still inaccessible to low-income people, barriers such as Medicare quotas and Quality Adjusted Life Year cost-effectiveness calculations prevent access to mental health services for the elderly and disabled.

But, here is the biggest problem: Everyone, especially celebrities, give a whole lot of lip service during these campaigns each May for Mental Health Awareness Month and September—Suicide Prevention Awareness Month (SPAM). Then, aside from saved recordings on video platforms, things go deathly silent.

There is this all-permeating view that suicide is something only mentally ill people contemplate. However, research has found that only 46% of people who die by suicide had a known mental health condition. The wide-spread assumption that all mental illness is some form of genetic chemical imbalance is another harmful attitude.

While there is genetic testing that can show a predisposition to certain mental conditions, a predisposition requires a trigger to be activated. No one is actually doomed by their genes. And, this attitude that mental illness is strictly genetic is the biggest cop-out to the reality that Adverse Childhood Events are the likely trigger for most mental illness. Toxic stress from ACEs can change brain development and affect how the body responds to stress. ACEs are linked to chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance misuse in adulthood. ACEs affect the developing brain whether or not there is a genetic predisposition to mental illness.

This prevailing attitude that suicidal people just have a genetic chemical imbalance causing mental illness or addiction does a huge disservice to those who experience suicidal thoughts. The main purpose of this attitude, in my opinion, is to let toxic family members and other perpetrators of abuse off the hook from taking any responsibility for having contributed to a person’s decision to take their own life. Couple this with the abdication by family and friends to pass the troubled person off onto failing mental health and community services and you’ve got a suicide crisis on your hands.

The condescension toward suicidal people is even within the mental health and community services themselves with the laying on of guilt, shame, and the entire responsibility for their suicidal thoughts onto the suicidal person. Just look at the overt message in the acronym for Suicide Prevention Awareness Month—SPAM—and you will realize how, from all directions—family, friends, community, and mental health services—those who are suicidal end up feeling like literal unwanted garbage; while, all the sympathetic focus is on the so-called suicide survivors, who were likely part of the problem.