Be One Increment More Kind

Advice to those who lost someone to suicide.

I got a phone call last night from a very good friend. The number was listed as unlisted on my phone. This was not a choice my friend had made. She lost someone in her life to suicide today. Or maybe it was overdose? In 2025, it's hard to know the difference. It is harder to know if it matters.

As a psychiatrist who works with suicidal patients, I spend time, regularly, almost every day, with people who are thinking of ending their life. That is my actual job.

I can usually do something about it— I'm a physician with access to extra extraordinary tools. Most people thinking about suicide don't complete suicide. Most people who attempt suicide don't die by suicide. That having been said, death by suicide is going up.

Fittingly, when I looked up a statistics for my readers, I got a study from Rochester New York, I went to medical school:

This observational retrospective-prospective cohort study using the Rochester Epidemiology Project identified 1,490 (555 males/935 females) Olmsted …