Together For Hope: Suicide Prevention Month 2020

We are teaming up with our community to spread awareness of mental health resources and suicide prevention efforts this September, for Suicide Prevention Month 2020.

We are Together for Hope because it will take all of us to solve the challenge of suicide in our communities. Each one of us is affected by suicide, and it is only through connecting with each other – personally, professionally, organizationally, and more – that we can prevent suicide in our communities and move toward a culture of hope.

Throughout the month, we hope to highlight these connections in our region, break through stigma and shame about mental health struggles, and promote services that are ready to help.

Amid these tumultuous times, we want to acknowledge that suicide is more than just a public health issue, it is also a racial justice issue. Too many in our community are attempting suicide at disproportionately high rates. Too many are unable to access adequate mental health care. Too many are left misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. Suicide prevention must be understood through a racial prism.

Now is the time—not only for racial justice, but for ending the stigma around mental health. Now is the time—not only for Black Lives Matter, but for Black Minds Matter. Now is the time—not only for difficult conversations on race, but for difficult conversations on suicide.

Join us as we stand Together for Hope. Now is the time.

Tyrone Allen Shares His Story of Struggle and Hope

We believe that through coming together to share stories of personal struggle we can begin to normalize conversations about suicide. Today we are giving voice to Tyrone Allen. Tyrone wants to help break the stigma around suicide by helping inspire an honest discussion that challenges this silence.

Tyrone’s mother was murdered when he was seven. This tumultuous event caused considerable disruption in Tyrone’s life and eventually Tyrone found himself drawn to the gang lifestyle. Tyrone realized that he had a lot of trauma to deal with, so he said, “Okay, I’m going to deal with it the way I want to deal with it.” This led Tyrone towards a lifestyle of selling drugs and gangbanging. He says, “When you are in that lifestyle you don’t care, you’re playing Russian roulette with your life.” Tyrone was eventually incarcerated and while incarcerated his ten-year-old son died by suicide. Tyrone says he never got closure with his son. “Was I a bad dad?” he asked. “It makes me feel like you never know what someone is going through.” As an adult, Tyrone would experience these same feelings of hopelessness and was ready to take his own life, but people were there to talk with him. “I had so much pain inside of me and felt I had no one that I could talk to that would truly understand me as a human being,” he said.

From an early age, Tyrone felt called to help others. Tyrone seeks out young African Americans males who are struggling and he just talks to them. Tyrone recognizes their hurt as his own and believes that through sharing his own personal struggle with suicide it might inspire more African Americans to talk openly about mental health and suicide. “The best thing that I was able to do was to open up and talk to someone about my suicidal thoughts,” said Tyrone. However, Tyrone wasn’t always open to talking about his mental health and much of that hesitation stems from the times he grew up in. “You just didn’t talk to white people about this stuff,” he said.

Like many other African Americans at the time, Tyrone had a warranted distrust of white clinicians and the inability to see a therapist of color increased the stigma in his community. Unlike the white community, previous generations of African Americans were unable to chip away at the stigma associated with seeing a therapist because of their reluctance to trust a white clinician. Even today there are still few therapists of color and the reluctance to see a white clinician remains. Thus, Tyrone sees the importance of sharing his story with others in the African American community to encourage them to reach out to a professional when it comes to mental health and suicide. Tyrone says, “I truly felt the day that my ten-year-old son committed suicide that I had nothing else to live for, but today I’m living for my son and speaking out for him [and others] because he was not able to speak out for himself.”