Staying Connected: A Personal Reflection During Suicide Prevention Month
Posted by Maria Droste Counseling Center on Sep 11, 2026 in Uncategorized
Trigger warning: This post discusses suicide, suicide loss, and suicidal thoughts. Please take care of yourself as you read.
September is Suicide Prevention Month. For me, this is not simply an awareness campaign or a collection of statistics. It is personal. My stepfather lost his life to depression through suicide.
I also know what it is like to love someone through years of chronic suicidality. Living with the fear that someone you love may not always want to stay alive is its own kind of trauma. There can be hypervigilance, exhaustion, helplessness, anger, guilt, hope, and fear, sometimes all in the same day.
Those experiences have shaped me as a person and as a mental health professional. They have also taught me something I believe deeply: We need to be able to talk about suicide. Not sensationally or fearfully, and not as something that happens only to other families. We need to talk about it with honesty, compassion, and the belief that people can survive periods when staying alive feels impossibly hard.
Here in Colorado, the need is urgent. In 2024, 1,306 Coloradans died by suicide, an age-adjusted rate of 20.83 deaths per 100,000 people. Colorado continues to have one of the ten highest suicide rates in the country. Importantly, those numbers do not affect every community equally. Suicide prevention also requires us to acknowledge the effects of discrimination, racism, rejection, poverty, trauma, barriers to health care, and other forms of systemic oppression.
The Trevor Project’s national 2024 survey found that 39% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered suicide during the previous year and 12% attempted suicide. Among Native and Indigenous LGBTQ+ young people, 24% reported a suicide attempt, compared with 10% of white LGBTQ+ young people. Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Middle Eastern/North African, and multiracial LGBTQ+ young people also reported disproportionately high rates of attempts. These disparities are not evidence that LGBTQ+ young people or young people of color are inherently more vulnerable. They tell us something about the environments people are being asked to survive. The Trevor Project’s research consistently links discrimination, victimization, rejection, housing instability, and other structural inequities with increased suicide risk. It also shows something hopeful: affirmation, family support, belonging, and accepting communities can be profoundly protective.
Research has shown that counseling can absolutely help. Sometimes therapy helps people stay alive long enough for life to change. A large systematic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Psychiatry found that psychotherapy interventions were associated with meaningful reductions in suicide attempts. Direct suicide-focused psychotherapy was associated with about a 28% reduction in the relative risk of suicide attempts, while other effective psychotherapies were associated with a similar reduction. In another randomized clinical trial, brief cognitive behavioral therapy specifically designed for suicide prevention was associated with a 41% lower risk of suicide attempts compared with the control treatment over 12 months.
Counseling cannot fix every painful circumstance. It cannot promise that someone will never experience suicidal thoughts again. But it can create a place where someone does not have to carry those thoughts alone. Therapy can help people build safety plans, identify reasons for living, strengthen relationships, address underlying mental health concerns, develop ways to survive overwhelming moments, and begin imagining a future that may currently feel impossible.
And sometimes prevention is much simpler than we imagine. Don’t be afraid to ask the question and listen to the answer. Take your loved one’s pain seriously and help them find support. Keep checking in, reminding them that needing help is not the same thing as being a burden.
I wish my stepfather were still here. I wish no family had to experience the unique grief that follows a suicide. And I know that loving someone who lives with chronic suicidal thoughts can be frightening and exhausting in ways that are difficult to explain unless you have lived it. But I also know this: People survive suicidal crises, and people can and do recover. People move through crises and then build incredible lives they once could not imagine living.
This September, perhaps suicide prevention begins with our willingness to see one another clearly, to ask harder questions, and to stay connected when someone is struggling. Sometimes hope is not something a person can find inside themselves, and for a while, we must hold it for each other.