4 Ways to Talk to Boys About Suicide
Graphic by Solar Seven
By Jonathon Reed
Trigger warning: suicide ideation
I spent almost two hours on the phone last night with a young teenager as he did his best to get the weight of depression off his chest.
This kind of intervention is not easy to write about, but key practices from my work at Next Gen Men keep coming up in my relationships with boys struggling with suicidality. As I hung up the phone, I started thinking about the strategies we use to draw boys into meaningful conversation. I chased that idea, and where it led proved really valuable.
I’m sharing them now because this week is #BellLetsTalk, the pillar of Bell’s decade-long campaign to shift the conversation on mental health and promote mental health initiatives. In 2018, it was the most-used hashtag on Twitter in Canada.
In 2018, suicide was the absolute leading cause of death for teenage boys in our country.
It’s clear that we need more than a single day of awareness to ensure their wellbeing. We need sensitive and committed caregivers who understand the unique needs of boys and young men and anchor them in supportive environments and relationships.
Promote his self-esteem.
Even if they don’t show it, boys are highly conscious of what their parents and educators think of them. One of the worst messages that we can inadvertently send is that something like a school assignment matters more than their wellbeing. Simply put, boys need to know that they matter.
“It isn’t enough just to care about boys, or to be committed to helping them. We should translate those good intentions into visible signals that boys can readily understand as signs of acceptance and calm.”
This is particularly important for boys who are dealing with depression, because they often carry beliefs about themselves that reflect the bleakness of their mental illness more than our actual perception of them.
A 13-year-old recently told me that he doesn’t like it when other people worry about him. “I’m not worth worrying about,” he added.
His decision to share that sense of worthlessness wasn’t by chance. It had to do with my understated but consistent promotion of his positive self-image. For him to reveal that part of himself, he had to believe that I would respond to it by lifting him up. For him to believe that, I had to prove it.
Find entry points.
That conversation about whether or not he was worthless also didn’t come out of nowhere. I wove mental health into our conversations here and there until it became natural to address it when it was a relevant digression from a less vulnerable topic.
No boy wants to feel out of depth, particularly when it comes to articulating his feelings. One of the ways Next Gen Men facilitators used to lead boys into meaningful discussion was by hooking them on a conversation about the 2018 NBA Finals—we’d start by talking about LeBron James’ reluctance to ask for help in the midst of adversity, for example, and then talk about our own. The idea is to increase boys’ conversational courage by taking small steps instead of jumping into the deep end.
Don’t undermine his autonomy.
A 12-year-old I know has tried to tell his dad about how much he’s struggling with a particular medical treatment, but his dad consistently dismisses him as ‘just being a teenager.’ A 14-year-old I know coped with his depression by self-harming rather than talking to his mom because he was sure his mom would respond by overreacting and taking over his life.
Independence is one of the most precious commodities of adolescence, particularly for boys who are pressured to be self-reliant in order to achieve manhood. Honouring a boy’s authority over his own life means listening to his thoughts and experiences without judgement, and engaging him as a partner in exploring how to change things together.
I know firsthand that it can be tempting to tell a struggling boy exactly what he needs to do in an attempt to prevent him from experiencing the pain that you know is ahead. There are certainly moments in suicide intervention necessitate that level of control. But that’s how to put out a fire, not kindle long-term change.
Be patient.
None of these things happen overnight. Key components of suicide prevention like trust and vulnerability are things that cannot be rushed.
Some boys doggedly hang onto an image of self-assurance for much longer than they should. Like a sea captain of old, they believe they’d rather go down with the ship than plunge into the depths of the unknown—as much as therapy has been popularized over the last decade, it remains, for many boys, unknown—or face the shame of admitting defeat.
If you’re trying to support a particular boy’s mental health, take your time and take a breath. Strive to be a steady presence in his life rather than a dynamic transformation. You’ll be making a difference even when you don’t see it firsthand.
Read more: You can find Adam Cox’s Cracking the Boy Code in the NGM Library.
ICYMI This Week
In High School, the Kids Are Not All Right (Edutopia)
How we’re managing our mental health in the third national lockdown (YoungMinds)
Surge of Student Suicides Pushes Las Vegas Schools to Reopen (The New York Times)
Written by Next Gen Men Program Manager Jonathon Reed as part of Learnings & Unlearnings, a bi-weekly blog reflecting on our experiences working with boys and young men. Subscribe to Future of Masculinity to get Learnings & Unlearnings delivered to your email inbox.