Starting a conversation about suicide is just as hard as starting an article on it. The only time when we are allowed to talk about suicide is when someone has already taken their life. It’s disappointing that the death of someone loved by many is what is required for society to sit down to have a conversation that they should already have had.

When someone commits suicide, we grieve for that person, and maybe speculate on why they did it, but very few people go any further. Then perhaps someone who was close to them begins a campaign to prevent this from happening again, and we will maybe share a hashtag or buy a T-Shirt with a slogan, but overall, we completely miss the point the campaign was trying to make.

When we buy a shirt from a campaign or donate a few cents we overlook the fact that this acts to trivialize an epidemic sweeping through the country. Campaigns that start due to a single person’s suicide allow people to simplify the matters at hand and focus exclusively on the loss of one person rather than trying to help prevent other people from turning to suicide because it’s easier for us to mourn a loss than prevent it from happening again.

In 2017, there where 47,173 Americans that died by suicide. These campaigns aren’t being allowed to prevent 47,173 people from committing suicide next year because the campaigns are not the problem. According to the 2017 Youth Risk Behaviors Survey, 7.4 percent of youth in grades 9-12 reported that they had made at least one suicide attempt in the past 12 months. Going by those statistics, 126 out of the 1,700 people in our school have attempted suicide.

Chances are we know someone who has attempted suicide. With this knowledge, it’s hard not to wonder why we don’t openly discuss the causes and warning signs of suicide, or even how to get people effective help if they need it.

Although these campaigns have good intentions, they can’t have a conversation about suicide for us, and we still have done little to talk about suicide itself.

In society people often avoid conversing about suicide, because either they are afraid to draw attention to something so horrible, or because of any other excuse they created in an attempt to avoid confronting the problem. Thus, we refuse to acknowledge problems that are prevalent within our society, and in doing so, allow myths and stigmas of suicide to continue only perpetuating the problem

While it is crucial to break the taboo of talking about suicide, we cannot allow ourselves to oversimplify a matter such as this, as we often do. The oversimplification of suicide and its causes can even make people who are suicidal trivialize their very real mindset, further isolating them.

When we discuss suicide, we are also able to break the taboo of someone asking for help when they need it and inform more people on how to help people who are suicidal. Having these discussions can allow more people to understand suicide and not think of it as wrong but as an action that has many causes which aren’t usually in the person’s control. We are also able to better understand its warning signs and the ways to deal with it no matter how complicated it may be. If we have open discussions, people can learn how to better help someone who is suicidal as well as those around them.

No matter how awkward that conversation may be, we need to break the loop of talking about suicide only when someone commits it, so that maybe instead of mourning a death, we can save a life. We need to let people know that they can ask for help if they need it. It’s time to stop beating around the bush. It’s time to start a conversation about suicide.