When the World Gets Small
September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, and I want to begin by doing something that can sometimes feel surprisingly difficult. I want to say the word suicide.
There. It is in the room with us.
We have a tendency to treat this particular word as though saying it might make something happen. We soften it, whisper around it, change the subject, or worry that asking someone directly about suicide might somehow place the thought in their mind. Research tells us otherwise. Asking someone about suicide does not create suicidal thoughts or increase the likelihood that they will act on them (Dazzi et al., 2014).
What it can do is open a door that silence keeps closed. As a psychologist for more than 20 years, I’ve sat with this. I’ve heard it. I know how human this can be. My many years sitting in the therapist chair have thought me that thoughts of suicide do not belong to some separate category of people who are fundamentally different from the rest of us. I have heard these thoughts arrive in the midst of grief, a marriage unraveling, financial fear, loneliness, shame, depression, identity-related distress, chronic pain, overwhelming stress, or simply during a period of life that has exceeded someone’s usual ability to cope.
Sometimes the thought isn’t even I want to die. Sometimes it sounds more like, I can’t keep doing this. I wish I could disappear. I just want everything to stop. Or, Everyone would be better off without me. These thoughts matter. We should take them seriously. But we don’t have to be afraid of the person having them, or make them afraid of themselves.
And here is the important news: having a thought does not necessarily mean someone intends to act on it. Thoughts can come and go, sometimes quietly and sometimes insistently. Thoughts are not coaches. They are not commands, and they are not necessarily predictions. But thoughts about death and/or suicide are giving us important information we do not want to ignore.
And sometimes resilience begins right there…not with some grand declaration of hope, but with noticing. We hear what has been circling through our own mind and think, Geez, the way I’m talking to myself right now probably isn’t very healthy. That little bit of awareness creates some distance. Instead of being entirely inside the thought, we have noticed that we are having the thought.
There is a striking example of this in Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Before becoming a spiritual teacher, Tolle writes about years of intense anxiety and periods of suicidal depression. During one particularly painful night, a thought repeated itself in his mind: “I cannot live with myself any longer” (Tolle, 1999). And then…he noticed what he had just thought. He became curious about the sentence itself. If I cannot live with myself, who is the “I” noticing this suffering self? Tolle describes what followed as a profound turning point in his own life.
I’m not suggesting that suicidal depression can be resolved simply by noticing our thoughts or changing our perspective. But there is something beautifully human in that small initial movement: for a moment, we can no longer sit completely inside the thought. We can see it.
This brings up an important part of the healing journey, the ability to actually see the suffering rather than simply being inside it. The difficulty in noticing suicidal suffering can be due to what mental health professions might describe as cognitive constriction. When emotional pain becomes intense, our thinking can narrow. Options become harder to see. The future becomes more difficult to imagine, and what is happening right now can begin to feel like what will happen forever. Baumeister (1990) described this narrowing of thought and attention as part of the suicidal state, where immediate distress increasingly occupies awareness while access to alternatives becomes diminished.
In other words, the world can get very small. There is a sense that we are shrinking or becoming a lesser version of our healthier Self.
Interestingly, before I chose this month’s newsletter topic, I was inspired to write a meditation called The 10,000-Foot Perspective. It began with a simple question: What happens to our view when we rise high enough above a landscape? From the ground, we see what is immediately in front of us (the steep hill, the obstacle, the road that seems to end, the mountain we have no idea how we are going to cross). From 10,000 feet, the mountain is still there, but so is everything else. We can see roads we couldn’t see before, valleys beyond the ridge, another trail, another direction, a horizon. The landscape hasn’t necessarily changed. Our perspective has.
Later, it occurred to me that getting a to a higher perspective when the thoughts are really at their darkest is crucial, especially when we feel pangs of suicidal ideation. While I would never suggest that someone in profound emotional pain should simply “change their perspective,” “think positively”, or somehow “rise above their suffering”, we can reach for help. Sometimes we simply cannot get ourselves to 10,000 feet. Sometimes we need another person to help us see it. I suppose this is where my meditation could fit in because perhaps one of the most important things we can offer one another is borrowed perspective.
I’ve learned that there is something powerful about being able to stay in the room with a thought that frightens us. To hear it without recoiling. To become curious. To ask another, perhaps better question. If someone tells us they don’t want to be here anymore, we can ask what they mean. We can say, “Tell me more.” We can ask directly, “Are you thinking about suicide?” And then we can listen to the answer.
Research consistently identifies social connection and support as important protective factors in suicidal thoughts and behaviors (Darvishi et al., 2024). I think there is something both clinically important and beautifully human about that finding. We are relational creatures. Sometimes another person can hold a little of the landscape for us when we cannot see it ourselves.
This doesn’t mean we minimize suicidal thoughts. Taking them seriously is important, particularly when they become more frequent, more specific, harder to resist, or begin to involve planning or preparation. But taking something seriously is different from being frightened or ashamed of its existence. We can name what is happening, become curious about it, and bring another person into the conversation.
Additionally, when the mind becomes so loud with pain, fear, shame, exhaustion, or hopelessness that we simply cannot feel much beyond it, maybe we don’t need to demand hope from ourselves. Hope might feel too far away.
Maybe we can have a more reachable goal. We can notice the thought. We can say the frightening thing out loud. We can let someone sit beside us. We can ask for help. We can allow another person to hold some of the perspective until we are able to see more of it ourselves.
Because the place you are standing is real. The pain is real. The mountain may be very real. But it is not the entire landscape. There is more here than you can see from where you are standing.
And maybe that is where I want to leave us. No need for ‘an answer’ to this experience, but with each other. There is no measure by which your pain has to qualify before it is worthy of being heard. We don’t need to compare our suffering, diminish it because someone else “has it worse,” or wait until we are certain we cannot manage alone. We were never really meant to do all of this alone. We can struggle and still be resilient. We can hurt and still reach. We can lose sight of the larger landscape and borrow the view from someone who can see a little farther that day. I’m here. We are here. And there is room for all of it.
A Place to Reach
If thoughts of suicide are visiting you, or you are worried about someone you love, you don’t have to decide whether the situation is “serious enough” before reaching out. In the United States, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day by calling or texting 988. If there is immediate danger or a medical emergency, call 911 or seek emergency care.
References & Further Reading
Baumeister, R. F. (1990). Suicide as escape from self. Psychological Review, 97(1), 90–113. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.97.1.90
Darvishi, N., Farhadi, M., & Poorolajal, J. (2024). The role of social support in preventing suicidal ideations and behaviors: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Health Sciences, 24(2), e00609. https://doi.org/10.34172/jrhs.2024.144
Dazzi, T., Gribble, R., Wessely, S., & Fear, N. T. (2014). Does asking about suicide and related behaviours induce suicidal ideation? What is the evidence? Psychological Medicine, 44(16), 3361–3363. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291714001299
Tolle, E. (1999). The power of now: A guide to spiritual enlightenment. New World Library.