Be The Change - Part III

Some moments from our day on Capitol Hill:

 

Russell Senate Building

 

All six of us Ohioans met with legislative aides to our two United States senators, and then we broke into pairs and met with five or six aides to our representatives.  In one case, the Representative himself joined his aide for a meeting with us.

 

 

 This one was fun!

 

 

Some of the aides are outstanding.  Health care clinicians in the case of both Senators, and one other knowledgeable, interested, and articulate aide - background unknown - to a representative.  All the aides were attentive and open to hearing from us, although one young man was clearly unsettled by the word "suicide."  I figure that it was a public service on our part to force him to listen to it, over and over again.

 

We told our personal stories, those also over and over again, and pushed our legislative agenda, over and over again.  Most of us had prepared one page vignettes (mine is a few blog posts back) to leave with the legislators.  It's a difficult moment, to push that picture and bio across a table and think, "It should be a wedding picture, or a photo with a new baby, or a picture taken ten years from now and marking a professional achievement -- all things which will never happen."

 

With United States Representative David Joyce of Ohio

 

I was paired with a dynamite young woman named Emily, about to graduate from college and begin graduate school in the same master's program in social work which my daughter completed a year ago, plus a certificate program in nonprofit management.  Emily's life trajectory was changed when her uncle died two years ago.  She makes a compelling case for the Mental Health First Aid Act when she describes his last hour on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, his only companion a young police officer who had no crisis training and did not even think to call for back-up.

 

As we talked to our legislators and to each other over the course of the nine-hour day, Emily and I found ourselves repeatedly expressing our astonishment at finding ourselves where we were.  From lives devoid of knowledge about or interest in suicide, to months of immobilizing shock and pain, to new priorities, to the halls of Congress.  Who could have imagined?  But there it is, as the quote that probably isn't Gandhi's at all says,

 

Be the change you want to see in the world.

 

Be The Change - Part II

"All you have to do to effect change is get 535 people to do the same thing at the same time."

So said the lobbying expert who offered us tips and inspiration for speaking to our congresspeople.  We would be on the Hill the next day to get 535 legislators to do the same thing: to listen and read our stories and to support the many legislative proposals now before or en route to Congress which affect mental health.

On Wednesday afternoon we gathered to introduce ourselves (quickly), learn about lobbying, and learn about legislation.

Ourselves: The most recent loss was three months ago.  The most distant: Over twenty years.  Lost to suicide: sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, uncles, aunts.  All kinds of people there, all kinds of ages and occupations and sorrows and hopes.  (One other pastor, an Episcopalian priest.)  I was in awe of the mother who lost her son three months ago.  I remember the three months marker, because that was when I went back to seminary.  I remember the fog, the searing pain, and my bewilderment at the utter ludicrousness of what I was trying to do.  I remember my daughter saying, "Mom, you have got to get out of bed."  I remember the couple of friends who became my armor, accompanying me everywhere, trying to make sure that I wouldn't fall down and die.  How did that woman get on a plane and fly to Washington?  How did I get in a car and drive to Pittsburgh?

 

There are a lot of really strong and brave people out there who could have been dining with their families and watching television on Wednesday night, but chose otherwise. Some of them are truly heroic.

The legislation: Full funding for the National Violent Death Reporting System, currently only accessible to 18 states.  The System would further comprehensive and accurate reporting of violent deaths, data essential to research and policy development. 

 

(It was to prove extremely fun the next day to calmly tell a member of the House Appropriations Committee that I wanted him to vote for $25 million dollars for this System.)

 

The Mental Health First Aid Act, which would funnel funds to states for mental health training for first responders.  As was pointed out to us, some decades ago, people thought it would be impossible or difficult to help those suffering from heart attacks -- and now CPR training is common across the country.  Wouldn't it be something if basic mental health first aid was as accessible?

 

And other legislation related to mental health and safety issues for schools, Indian reservations, and young people, and legislation designed to promote the development of medications.

 

After dinner we gathered in our state groups to figure out and practice how we were going to present ourselves and our issues.  We were well prepared and, I gotta tell you, Ohio was the last to leave the conference room!

*****

The quote comes from a Native American artist whose work we were to see at the American Indian Museum on Friday.  It seems appropriate to the entire enterprise in which we were engaged.

Be The Change - Part I

Two hundred people.  Some of them staff from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, most of us volunteers from 48 states -- and yes, including both Alaska and Hawaii.  We gathered in Washington, D.C. for three days of conversation, bonding, learning, and visits to Capitol Hill -- to all 535 legislative offices!  Those are the stats.  The experience was something else.

For me, this leg of the journey began a couple of months ago, when I received an invitation to attend the Annual Advocacy Forum.  I've only been a volunteer Field Advocate for AFSP for about a year and one-half, but I've fired off a number of emails to state and federal legislators, and I've been to Columbus to testify on behalf of state suicide prevention legislation.  A start. So I decided to go to Washington.

Next came a request that I set up the appointments with legislative offices (mostly with staff aides) for our state.  A thankless task if ever there was one.  It was a contribution I thought I could make, given my fairly easy schedule this past month (I didn't know about the upcoming parish funerals, of course, or the heart surgeries), but, oh! 

The phone calls and emails, the repeats, the lack of responses that required as many as five emails, the confirmations suddenly un-confirmed, all to get six of us into eighteen offices in five buildings over a six-hour period.  Some of our legislative aides were easily accessible and responsive, some not so much.  Only one of the eighteen simply refused a meeting, even with an aide -- her office agreed to an appointment, and then when I sent out my last round of confirmation emails, re-neged and said she only meets with constituents.  (She's a United States representative; believe me, if she ever runs for the Senate or for a statewide office, I'll do what I can not to become her "official" constituent!)

 

How many times did I groan to myself, "You know, you could be doing something else right now!"?

 

I held my breath Monday, spending hours at the hospital as a church member's fifty-year-old son had heart surgery while another member, ninety years old, headed to Columbus with his wife and daughter for tests for his own upcoming heart surgery.  I presided over a meeting Monday night with a disappointing attendance of two, at which a most disconcerting conversation developed.

 

And then, finally, more or less organized, I was off in a jet plane with two new friends and a bag full of schedules and hopes.


 

Suicide Prevention Advocacy

 

I'm off to D.C. tomorrow for the annual American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's advocacy event -- per FB post:

 

"Tomorrow more than 200 AFSP volunteer-Field Advocates from across the country will be heading to Washington D.C. for our annual Advocacy Forum. On Thursday, they will be going to Capitol Hill to meet with their members of Congress to urge more support for suicide prevention and mental health care."

 

I feel as if I should have something profound to say in advance of this trip.  But I have only a few observations to offer:

 

We're staying and working in the same hotel in which our young family stayed on two trips to Washington when the kids were small.  Not so easy.

 

I called the local county-seat-city newspaper for Small Church Village and environs yesterday to suggest a story. Pastor-Goes-to-Congress sort of thing.  No response.  I think the topic is too scary. I don't have a  lot of patience for that kind of apprehension, you know?  I'm going to write my own article for the community-produced newspaper in my home town, which is an edgier kind of place, and send it to county-seat paper.  We'll see.

 

Last month I went to a suicide prevention workshop for clergy and mental health professionals.  As far as I know, I was the only suicide survivor in the room of about one hundred people.  The tenor was quite different from what I've experienced in the presence of survivors.  I'm realizing that we've become pretty fierce people.  We are way beyond "let's help people and do good."

 

I'm not taking my computer, so look for me on FB and Twitter.  Being fierce.

Suicide Prevention Advocacy

Next week I'm off to Washington, D.C. for the Annual Advocacy Summit of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  We'll be meeting people from all over the country, learning a lot, and spending Thursday on Capitol Hill meeting with our senators and representatives.  (I agreed to co-ordinate the scheduling of that effort.  We have eighteen of  'em, in five different buildings, and six of us from all over the state. Remind me not to do that again.)

 

We were asked to supply "vignettes" for the packets we'll be delivering to the Hill.  Here's mine:

The photo was taken on the morning he graduated from college.  Honors at the University of Chicago.  A beautiful girlfriend and a great circle of friends.  A job and a new apartment lined up.  Nothing could have prepared us for the fact that one and one-half years later he would be gone.

Our son, Josh Williams, was a patient and loving brother to his twin brother and their younger sister.  He had always been ready for adventure – all-day kindergarten;  summer camp in North Carolina, 600 miles from home; his full junior year of high school spent in France; a college road trip to Idaho and back over a holiday week-end.  He enjoyed photography and played soccer; he canoed in Canada with his grandfather and visited Montreal with his French brother and lots of Europe with his twin brother.  His loved his whole extended family and looked forward to creating one of his own.

We saw no signs.  In retrospect they were there, and we were to learn, when it was too late, that he had probably been suffering from a serious and desperate depression for at least the last couple of years of his life.  Unrecognized, unacknowledged, untreated.  Depression is a vicious, deadly illness, and yet is so easily concealed by those determined to do so, by those who do not realize that their lives are in jeopardy. 

I never planned to become a suicide prevention advocate.  How could you prevent something you had no idea was headed your way?  But as the years have passed, I have learned that much might have been done to alert us and our son to the danger he was in, to address his illness, and perhaps to save him to become the husband, father, and multi-gifted contributor to the world whom we had imagined he was becoming.  To continue his life as our beloved and treasured son.

The turning point for me came when I was diagnosed with breast cancer three years after Josh died.  I quickly saw that, whenever I mentioned my diagnosis, other women would step forward with support, encouragement, advice, and every possible kind of help – whereas, if I mention that my son died of suicide, I can clear  room in a matter of seconds.  The topic of suicide, I saw, occupied the position that breast cancer had when I was a girl: stigmatized, unmentioned, poorly researched or understood, little publicized. 

THIS.MUST.STOP.   We cannot continue to allow individuals to suffer such despair that death seems preferable to life.  We cannot continue to allow the lives of families and friends to be altered beyond recognition by unnecessary deaths by suicide.  We must find ways to identify and care for those whose lives are threatened by mental illness and other forms of anguish.  We must fund the research and the treatment and the education programs that will end this terrible scourge.   We must bring this subject out of the darkness and into the light, and end the suffering that leads to suicide and the suffering caused by suicide.

Help Prevent Suicide ~

. . .  photographer . . .  soccer player . . .  funny . . .  brother . . . canoe-er . . . computer programmer . . .  grandson . . .  camp counselor . . .  brilliant . . . writer . . .  kind . . .  nephew . . .  board game enthusiast . . .  fluent in French . . . cousin . . .   well-traveled . . .  beloved son . . .  lost to this world but never to our hearts . . .

 

 

From my FB page:

This September will mark the 5th anniversary of our loss of our Josh. Given that it's one of those significant anniversary years, I've set a higher than usual goal of $3,000 for fundraising for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  [My daughter] Marissa is on the Walk Committee this year, and I'm on the Board of the soon-to-be chartered Northern Ohio Chapter of AFSP. We are strong and hopeful supporters of AFSP's work in research, advocacy and education. Please join us for the Walk if you're in Cleveland on October 19. And wherever you are, please make a donation. 300 x $10 = $3,000!

 

And, last year, with almost no notice and no "team" beyond ourselves, Ris and I raised over $1,000.  We're trusting all of our friends to help us do better this year.

 

Thanks!

My Fundraising Page.

Suicide Prevention Legislation

 

 

Here's the testimony I presented this morning to the Ohio Senate Education Committee in support of legislation that would mandate suicide prevention education for Ohio school teachers, counselors, and administrators.  (I have some more pictures but they are on the phone of my brother, who came up to Columbus to surprise and support me, and I'm waiting . . . ).  My small contribution to a large group effort:

 

Madam Chairwoman and Committee Members:  

I want to thank you for this opportunity to speak in support of House Bill 543, the Jason Flatt Act.   I am a Volunteer Field Advocate for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which is working with the Jason Foundation to support this legislation in Ohio.  My husband, son Matt, and I are residents of Cleveland Heights in Cuyahoga County; I serve as the pastor of Nankin Federated Church in Ashland County; and my daughter lives and works in Warren, in Mahoning County.  My father and my brother and his family are residents of Warren County; my niece is a teacher in the Little Miami School District in Warren County.  I share those “family facts” with you as an indication of how the consequences of one suicide, that of my son Josh, reverberate across our state.

I hope that the statistics presented to you in connection with this proposed legislation are shocking to you.  They are shocking to me, and I have now lived with the reality of suicide as a devastating and life-altering experience for over four years.

Why am I here today?  I am here for both professional and personal reasons.

·         From a professional standpoint, in the years before I was ordained to ministry, I was an attorney, practicing family law, and an educator, in a Jewish day school for six years, and on and off as an adjunct instructor at the college level.  Never in all of those years, years in which I met all of my continuing education requirements in my fields, some of it in child and adolescent development and psychology, did I receive or know to seek training in suicide prevention.  As a family lawyer, I often served as a guardian ad litem, charged with representing the best interests of children in juvenile and family court.  As you can imagine, many of the children and adolescents whom I served lived difficult and troubled lives. But had one of them attempted or died of suicide, I would have been dumbfounded, as I surely would have recognized no advance warning signs.

·         As an educator, I have worked primarily with middle and high school students and young adults.  Again: no training, no knowledge regarding the signs of suicidal thoughts or plans.  Today I know that treatable mental illness, the leading cause of suicide, knows no boundaries: students across the spectrum in terms of gifts, achievement, income brackets, and family background are victims of what has become a mental health catastrophe. 

·         My friend Jean Reinhold, a gifted enrichment educator with twenty-five years of experience in the Shaker Heights school system in Cuyahoga County, tells me that she has  “seen/heard/known of increasing numbers of students facing insurmountable stresses without coping mechanisms [and that that situation], tied with any propensity toward mental illness, is scary.”   Indeed it is.

My niece, Bethany Beebe, teaches language arts to eighth-graders.  She wrote the following to me last week: “I can't say that any other teacher I with whom have spoken about the issue of suicide and prevention of such has any real idea of how to 'deal' with it. It is something that is always on my mind when I see a student who is going through a hard time. I know I may be more sensitive to it because of Josh, but I could not imagine how I would feel if it were to happen to one of our students. Having the tools to know how to identify the symptoms (for lack of a better word) is crucial.”

We have tremendous expectations of our teachers.  We expect them to teach our children how to write and how to understand algebra.  We expect them to prepare our young people for a fast-paced, multi-cultural, globalized society.  We expect them to grade papers and manage lunchrooms and recess.  Can we also expect them to be mental health gatekeepers?

We already do.  Many of our young people see more of their teachers and school coaches and advisors than they do of other adults in their lives, including their parents.  Young people write papers and create art that reflect their deepest feelings.  Young people often behave in ways that offer clues to what they may be experiencing in the form of sadness, of frustration, of drug and alcohol use, of relationship challenges, of family situations, and of depression and other disorders and illnesses.

How critical it is that we offer their educators and administrators and counselors the tools they need to respond appropriately and effectively to what they, and often they alone, observe!

Now, a personal note: Our son, Josh Williams, died in 2008, the day after his 24^th birthday.  At the time, we, his family and friends, believed that there had been no warning signs. We were in a state of complete shock for months, and often likened his death to his having been run down by a train.

·         As the years have passed, however, and we have learned more about Josh and more about mental illness, it has become apparent that the signs were there.  Many of them were extremely subtle, and many would have remained unknown to us had we not found writings and journals of his that indicate that he had suffered from depression for at least two years before his death, and perhaps much longer.

·         You may ask, “How could you not have known?”  You may want to believe that anyone who takes such a drastic measure to relieve his suffering would surely have been broadcasting his feelings and his intentions loud and clear – but in fact, people often conceal depression and its associated thoughts, believing them to be signs of failure.  Young people in particular, not wanting to disappoint their parents, or feeling alone and misunderstood, may fail to reach out to the people who would do anything to help them and to save their lives.

·         However, people contemplating suicide do, in fact, frequently shed clues, leaving them behind like faint and mysterious footprints in the paths of lives unnecessarily destroyed. Clues that might be recognized by a teacher, a counselor, an administrator, a coach, a parent – if any of us but understood what we were seeing.  Clues that might result in action, if those who see or hear them are trained to respond with compassion, knowledge, and courage.

 

I believe that the passage of the Jason Flatt Act will offer school personnel an indispensable tool in saving students’ lives.  Thank you for your time this morning.

All In One Day

A first meeting with a new directee, someone who is training to become a spiritual director herself.

Three meetings with state legislative aides to explain why I think legislation mandating suicide prevention education for teachers is important.

A long afternoon at the hospital supporting two daughters through the decision to allow their mother to die peacefully, and the final vigil at her bedside.

Telephone conversations with my children, one just returning from a conference and one working on his job search.

The tail-end of a Bible study I am supposed to be co-leading.

I've been absorbed with a lot of my own stuff lately.

But some days I really do get to do things I've been called to do, all day long.

Sacred moments, all day long.

Suicide Prevention Education ~ AMDG

Read about it here.

Suicide Prevention Activism

I am so not an activist. Other than a few walks for peace and hunger in my high school years, I've been more focused on small arenas of activity: family, friends, church, the kids' schools.  

And yet, here I am: a volunteer advocate for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  It's not a big deal, and I have no illusions of grandeur.  Mostly it means that I introduce myself to our representatives and senators, which I've done via email, and keep in touch with them when issues warrant.  There's a local chapter forming, and perhaps I'll become more involved with education and public speaking as opportunities arise.  We'll see.

As I've already said, I haven't been much interested in suicide prevention activism.  I've seen suicide primarily as a personal and family tragedy and, even if there were more to it, I haven't had the inclination to do more about it than write in my little blogs, and make the occasional presentation on care for grieving parents.

But my breast cancer experience has changed my attitude.  I've experienced firsthand what the publicity and funding efforts of the past few decades have accomplished.   When I was a girl, furtively reading my grandmother's women's magazines, I understood that breast cancer was a matter of such embarrassment, and the usual surgical treatment so extreme, that many women ignored their symptoms until their survival was unlikely.  And if they were treated and survived, they seldom discussed what had been done to their bodies.

How times have changed!  The world as we know it in October is PINK.  No secrecy, no hesitation.  We are far from a cure, but the research has come a long way, and treatment is dramatically different than it was 30 years ago.  

And then there's suicide prevention.  Little money, little publicity.  Little knowledge. Great stigma. 

My great-grandmother Robin Anderson, the woman for whom both I and my son Josh were named ~ Josh's middle name is Anderson ~  suffered from bipolar disorder, and attempted suicide at least once.  (I learned the latter piece of information only recently, although it was no surprise to me.)  Her daughter and only child, the beloved grandmother who played a huge role in my life until her death a few years ago, almost never mentioned her mother, and never described her challenges except to refer on occasion to her frequent hospitalizations at Johns Hopkins, where she was cared for by a college classmate of my grandmother's who had become a psychiatrist.

I am certain that Josh suffered from what was, to us, completely disguised severe clinical depression.  And it killed him.

What if my grandmother had been more open?  What if bipolar disorder had been discussed as freely then as breast cancer is today?  What if mental health  self-examination cards had been available to hang in the shower?  What if colleges and clinics offered routine mental health screenings?

Would we have known what we were seeing?  Would Josh have known what he was experiencing?  Would someone among us all have known to seek help?  Would there have been effective help?

Those left behind after a suicide face a lifetime of "What ifs?"

Maybe we could eliminate some of them.

I don't think that breast cancer activism has much need of me.  And frankly, breast cancer has had little effect on our family, relatively speaking.  But suicide has left a deep and terrible gash across our lives, one that will persist and will affect my grandchildren and then their children. 

Maybe I could do my small part to stop it from doing worse.