Monthly Archives: August 2014

Shaming Our Allies in Suicide Prevention

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It’s been a couple of weeks since Robin Williams died. I’ve written a lot about suicide and suicide prevention during that time, and there’s been a lot of discussion in the public forum about suicide and what we can do about it. This is really good. We’re making progress on turning suicide into something people can talk about.

Those of us who work in suicide prevention, intervention, postvention, and research have an obvious leadership role for starting and guiding those conversations. We’ve learned a lot about what works, and we’re also learning how to talk about suicide openly. People (rightly) look to us for help in knowing what to think.

I’m concerned about some of what we’ve chosen, as a field, to say. I’m worried that, in preaching the gospel of what we’ve learned about suicide, we’re alienating more potential allies than we recruit. I’m worried that we may be choosing battles that end up losing ground in the larger fight.

As an example, please check out this opinion piece in CNN, written by Bill Schmitz, Jr., current President of the American Association of Suicidology. It came out on August 14th, three days after Williams’s death.

These are my main concerns:

  • It sharply rebukes The Academy and the grieving people who forwarded the tweet of the genie from Aladdin
  • It blames Williams and, effectively, perpetuates the stereotype of calling suicide a selfish act
  • It criticizes media for failing to follow our (somewhat obscure) guidelines rather than encouraging them to partner with us in future
  • It denies the lived experience of people with mental illness who find treatments ineffective

Much of what appears in Schmitz’s piece is good, and I want to be clear that I’m not saying he shouldn’t have written it. (Bill, if you’re reading this, I particularly appreciate that you chose to share some of your personal story and reactions even though you were speaking from your official position as AAS President. I think human stories are really valuable in helping people to process and hear our official recommendations.) I believe that all of the people who’ve written suicidology perspectives have done so out of good intent, and I want to make sure I start by saying that.

My point is that I think that piece, and others like it, didn’t play very well outside the suicide prevention community. The way we chose to frame our recommendations and comments had some problems, and that’s what I want to talk about. I think we can do an even better job next time. I think we can still say the important things about safety and prevention without pushing people away and shaming our potential allies.

The “Genie, be free” tweet

First, the line in The Academy’s tweet, “Genie, be free”, is a direct quotation from Aladdin. The genie was one of Robin Williams’s most-loved roles, and I know—because people told me—that the tweet helped a lot of them feel a sense of closure about Williams’s death. It was comforting to them.

In the film, it’s a scene when Aladdin frees the genie from the lamp in which he’s been imprisoned for years. It is a literal and metaphorical unshackling of the spirit, a hand extended to release a tormented spirit from bondage.

Should we be surprised that people found it a compelling message for talking about Williams’s death by suicide? I know the media guidelines suggest that we not talk about suicide as an escape or a way to get out of pain (Schmitz writes “Suicide should NEVER be presented by media as a means to resolve or escape one’s problems“), but I also know that many of the suicidal people I’ve talked to in 15 years on the suicide hotline do think of suicide that way. We can talk about ways that viewpoint can hinder suicide prevention efforts, and we can talk about ways to shift the dialogue, but I think that we’re denying people’s lived experience if we expect them to completely extinguish the “freedom” concept.

I’ve been to a lot of funerals lately. People say, overwhelmingly, that the person who died is “in a better place now”. Isn’t that basically the same message as The Academy’s tweet? People try to make the best of it when someone they loved has died, and I think we’re treading on thin ice if we expect people to behave in a radically different way when someone dies by suicide.

If there’s research supporting the idea that portraying suicide as freedom or escape in the media tends to increase suicide deaths, let’s talk about that. Let’s give people suggestions for what to do instead.

But calling people out for getting it wrong makes enemies for us, and given that most people seem to have found the tweet comforting, I think it runs the risk of painting us as out-of-touch academics muttering about a tempest in the proverbial teacup.

Put differently, calling out the Academy is a war of choice. We’re on totally solid ground to pick that fight, but I don’t know that it was good strategy. It irritated people (many of them just regular folks who read CNN) without gaining much ground.

Effectively calling Williams selfish

I’m really bothered by the line in Schmitz’s article that includes this parenthetical:

“(contrary to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ twitter post, the genie is not free, the genie’s pain has now been dispersed to a very large audience).“

The genie’s pain has now been dispersed to a very large audience. Yep, that’s true. So what?

The argument seems to be that, by killing himself, Robin Williams shared his suffering with a huge number of people across the world, effectively traumatizing them and exposing them to risk. Because Williams was so well known, his death—by any means, not just suicide—was bound to be big news. Celebrity deaths always touch a lot of people. And therefore, Robin Williams should not have killed himself.

But the thing is, Robin Williams didn’t really have any choice about whether his death would be big news. It wasn’t under his control. If you’re a celebrity, people write stories about you.

I feel like this kind of statement is, somehow, sending the message that Williams owed it to all of us to stay alive because, otherwise, his death would traumatize a lot of people. It’s the “suicide is selfish” argument in other clothes. Keep yourself alive because other people will be hurt if you don’t.

My problem is that people struggling with suicide are already carrying a huge burden, and explicitly loading them down with the weight of duty and obligation to other people is unlikely to help. It’s likely to make things worse.

I don’t want to live in a world where Robin Williams owed it to us to stay alive. I think this kind of statement makes it harder for people with thoughts of suicide to ask for help because it sets up a duty/blame dynamic that gets in the way of supporting them. And, again, what does it gain us in our larger campaign to prevent suicide?

Media guidelines

We need to partner with media if we want to affect the course of reporting on suicide. Now that there are millions of blogs in addition to traditional media, this is a big job. We should expect that most journalists have never seen or heard of the media guidelines for reporting on suicide.

It’s ironic, perhaps, that Schmitz’s op-ed piece links to an American Association of Suicidology media guidelines page that doesn’t exist. In fact, I can’t find a single link to “media guidelines” anywhere on AAS’s main webpage. It’s there, if you mouse over “Resources” and then scroll down to “Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide”, but I missed it the first four times I went looking for it, and it’s not labelled “media guidelines”. If I were a reporter writing on a deadline, I’m pretty confident that I would have missed it and given up.

The tone of the statement, “clearly, not all professional journalists have read or follow the media guidelines regarding the reporting related to suicide and suicidality” feels reproachful. Yes, it’s true—most of them have neither seen nor followed the guidelines. But framing this in negative terms, by critiquing their past failures rather than asking them to partner with us in the future, buys us little but enmity.

Probably most journalists have never heard of our guidelines. They’re decent people, and I’d bet that most of them want to keep their readers alive (even if it’s just to keep buying papers). Let’s give them credit for good intentions and work with them to reframe the message, instead of criticizing their failure to follow the rules they didn’t know about.

In the end, I found the guidelines, at http://www.suicidology.org/Portals/14/docs/Resources/RecommendationsForReportingOnSuicide.pdf . That’s long and challenging to type, and it’s the sort of link that seems likely to break when the recommendations get updated. I’d like to propose two things: one, put a symlinked page at http://www.suicidology.org/media/ and another at http://www.suicidology.org/reporting/ that point to the current guidelines, and just redirect the link when the guidelines change.

Two,  put a link to “Media Guidelines” in the topmost menu bar on every page of the AAS website, in the line that has Login and My AAS and Shopping Cart. Journalists are always going to be pressed for time, and we are more likely to get them to help us if we make it really easy to do. Don’t make them hunt for the guidelines. Make it easy.

Denying lived experience by calling treatments effective

I’ve heard so, so, so many people saying variants of this: “mental health treatments are effective“.

It’s true. Mostly.

A lot of the causes of suicidality are eminently treatable, whether by medication, therapy, or a combination. I know hundreds of people who’ve had episodes of thinking about suicide, have gotten treatment, and have found that the thoughts left and never returned. That’s FANTASTIC, and that’s what we want to hear. If people are struggling with thoughts of suicide, we want to drive them toward treatment, because it works really well for a lot of people. It’s a good bet.

But there are a lot of people for whom the treatments are not effective. I talk to callers who’ve been in intensive treatment for multiple decades and still aren’t better. They’re still here, still fighting to stay alive, but they’re not better. We deny their lived experience when we imply that treatment always works. For goodness sake, Robin Williams was receiving mental health treatment when he died.

I know people who’ve started treatment and found that it made them worse. Different medications affect people in different ways, and some antidepressants make depression worse, which is why medication management and active physician supervision is so important. Prescribing psychiatrists tell me that treating this stuff medically is challenging and complex. The outcomes are usually good, they say, but it takes work.

Many others have told me they went to a caregiver who had little experience with suicide and said hurtful or unhelpful things. Our own field frequently touts the assertion that most social workers and counselors in the US have had less than eight hours of training on suicide! We’re taught to use that statistic as part of how we encourage people to come to trainings on suicide intervention.

And, in any case, suicidal thoughts sometimes come back. Schmitz says “suicidal thoughts, by their very nature, tend to be time-limited — though they may regularly recur.” There’s hope in that, because we really can help people through the tough times, but also despair: treatment doesn’t always make thoughts of suicide go away forever. In this context, it’s reasonable to ask what “effective” means.

All of this leads back to my conclusion that making absolute blanket statements like “mental health treatments are effective” is unhelpful. It denies the lived experience of a significant group of vulnerable people for whom treatment has not helped that much, as well as silencing the experiences of their friends and families who’ve worked to support treatment that didn’t always do much.

Let’s encourage people to seek treatment. Let’s talk about how it can often help, and how medications or therapy help many—even most—people to survive their thoughts of suicide and never look back. But until we have treatments that always work, could we let go of the black-and-white encomia of treatment?

Conclusions

When highly-visible suicide deaths occur, we have a hard choice. We need to do our best to minimize the risk to vulnerable people, and that means encouraging them not to kill themselves. We also need to care for the people who are grieving for the suicide loss.

But much of our work on a national level falls more into the public health sphere than the individual intervention one. Given that, I think it’s important to talk about how our responses to suicide deaths gain or lose ground in the larger campaign against suicide.

Respectfully, I feel that a lot of what I saw coming out of the suicidology world after Robin Williams’s death backfired. I’ve talked about Schmitz’s article because it offered concise examples of things that worried me, but there have been many more articles and interviews. I don’t really want to talk about the specifics of any one article; I want to talk about how we can address these concerns next time.

Most of the points I’m making here came from people who’ve talked to me in the past two weeks, since I’m known in my community as “someone who knows about suicide”. I found myself left without answers for why our field responded in these ways, and I found myself working—particularly in regard to the Genie tweet—to comfort people who felt that they’d been shot down for sharing an image they thought would help.

So let’s talk about this stuff. We need lots of allies in this fight. Let’s show them what we hope they will do, praise them for doing it, and avoid shaming them.

(If you’re here because you’re struggling with thoughts of suicide, I hope you’ll consider reaching out for help. 1-800-273-TALK is free and confidential anywhere in the USA.)

Lean Optimization and Automation

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I don’t know about you, but my life is really busy. Seems like I’m always trying to juggle a million competing tasks and commitments, and keeping track of them is challenging. I use Remember The Milk Pro for to-do lists, but I have lots of them and they’re overflowing. I know a lot of folks in similar situations.

I’ve started trying to pay attention to what I’m calling lean optimization, by which I mean two things:

  • Small changes that don’t take a lot of time to implement
  • Changes that reduce waste: of time, of resources, of money

I studied performance improvement in grad school, and I found compelling evidence for the idea that a lot of our ability to perform well in life and work comes from environmental factors rather than personal ones. Basically, you can often make small changes to your workplace or workflows that give you free performance boosts forever with almost no effort.

As I’ve worked with this concept with people over the last few years, I’ve noticed something else, and I’d like to introduce a term: microaggressions. I learned it in discussions about oppression and privilege, and it originally described the way that little things like women feeling slightly unsafe when walking alone at night can add up to make people feel really bad—even though each individual episode is small. That’s the sense in which I’m using it here: the sort of occurrence that seems benign when it happens once but becomes overwhelming when it happens often.

I think most of us have microaggression triggers in our personal and work lives. It might be the sense of dread you feel when you open your inbox and find 700 unread emails, or it could be the feeling of shame from paying a bill late. Maybe you beat yourself up for missing an appointment or forgetting a visit with a friend. Maybe you drop your groceries while you hunt for the light switch after work.

None of these things is huge. But add them all up, and they make a big difference. Most of them are so small that traditional time management techniques don’t bother with them. I’m arguing that these areas are low-hanging fruit and deserve our attention first, to clear them out of the way and leave capacity for dealing with bigger stuff.

Lean optimization

Thus lean optimization. Find the psychic leeches that bleed your attention every day and pour salt on them. Look for small actions that give measurable improvement and try them for a while. My point is that these are small things that carry wildly disproportionate negative effects on happiness, creativity, and productivity. Every item you can optimize or automate leaves your brain more free for dealing with the big stuff.

Hunting microaggressions

Here are some ways to find the things that might be ripe for lean optimization or automation.

Look for things you do frequently

Start by looking at things you do most days. If you add up their time costs, it can get big pretty fast.

I bought a new computer this year. I use a computer 10+ hours a day, and my old laptop was five years old and slow. It had some hardware malfunctions and a bunch of software issues that multiple OS fixes hadn’t improved. It would take 10 minutes to wake from sleep, and its battery life on a full charge was 19 minutes. I finally bought a new one, and it’s been astounding to see the huge effect on my life of not having those microaggressions—maybe even macroaggressions!—from a slow computer. I hadn’t noticed how furious it made me to wait five minutes for a web page to load.

Perhaps more important, I hadn’t noticed the ways my bad computer was destroying my creativity and productivity. I stopped writing music because my notation software took 15 minutes to load. I stopped recording music because the computer was so slow that my recordings would glitch and fail. I stopped working with photos because the software was too slow. A bad computer was the bottleneck that trashed a lot of what I valued in myself. Look how many articles I’ve written since getting the new one compared to the months before.

First Alert Motion sensor light socket
First Alert Motion sensor

I started installing motion-sensing light sockets in places like my basement and the hallways at work. Initially this was to stop wasting money, because people were leaving the lights on all night by accident. But it turns out that having the lights come on automatically is a huge boon when I’m carrying stuff in both hands, which happens all the time. These are First Alert Motion Sensing Light Sockets, and they’re $20. They can install into almost any light socket, and they work with regular light bulbs. Huge improvement.

I had never noticed the small amounts of effort I spent on finding light switches in the dark. Now, I don’t even think about it.

It doesn’t have to be about stuff—this can be process optimization too. I used to let my desk get totally clogged with receipts waiting to be entered into my finance software. A few months ago, I bought a file folder for organizing all receipts by month once they’ve been entered, but the important point was the rule I set: receipts are only allowed on the desk when I’m actively entering them. Otherwise they have to stay in my wallet or in the file folder.

This means that I no longer think about where to put receipts. They go in my wallet (or in my in-basket if they’re too big for the wallet). Once I’m ready to enter them, they’re allowed on the desk. As soon as they’ve been entered, they go immediately into this month’s space in the file folder. No thought, no microaggression. I was surprised by how much energy a glut of receipts could steal from me.

Look for things you worry about

Worries are really high-strength psychic leeches. People in the mental health world are saying that anxiety disorders are the fastest-growing category of complaints among new patients, and I believe it. Anything you can do to cut chronic worries out of your life is going to have great effects.

Floor sucker pump
Floor sucker pump

Our basement leaks a lot when it rains, and I used to come home and find water pooled on the floor, several inches deep. We don’t have a sump, so we can’t have a standard sump pump. So it used to be manual pumping, every time. I noticed that I was worrying about it every time it rained.

So I put some effort into finding a creative solution. I learned about floor sucker pumps and automatic pump controllers that would work without a sump. I built a system, tweaked it a little, and now it works perfectly. It has a hose that runs into our set-tub, and it automatically pumps out all the water as soon as there’s more than 1/2″ of water on the floor of the basement. It works really well. (If you’re interested, Superior Pump 91250 and Basement Watchdog BWC1.)

An $85 one-time expense and that worry about the flooded basement is gone.

My band, Frost and Fire, put out a new CD this year. (It is super-awesome and I would love to sell you one. They’re $15 and you can get them at our website.) I’ve been the person in charge of packaging and shipping all those CDs, and thanks to Lyme disease I get scared about forgetting stuff. So I was worried about taking people’s money and forgetting to mail their CDs. Low-grade anxiety, but it was there.

So I built a system where most people buy their CDs via PayPal, and I included a unique product code in the receipt. All the receipts get emailed to me, and I have my email set up to automatically flag anything with that code as important and bring it to my attention. It took seconds to set up, but it’s really helped me to let go of worrying about the CDs.

Worried about forgetting to pay your credit card bill on time, getting hit with late fees? Set up an automatic transfer from your bank that makes a minimum payment for you each month a week or two before the due date. Then you pay your bill as normal, subtracting that amount. The point is that if you miss it, you’re still covered, and you never have to worry about it again.

Look for things you need to do fast

If you rely on speed for certain tasks, it’s worth optimizing them.

In a hurry in the morning? Pick a place where you always put your keys, so you can stop having the microaggression of hunting for them.

Look for things that waste resources

This is where I started with the lights thing, although that ended up improving other areas too. It’s why I changed banks, because the old bank’s fees were wasting money and my irritation about it was staining the rest of my life.

As a starting point, you might look for ways your life is squandering:

  • Money
  • Time
  • Food
  • Gas
  • Personal connections
  • Opportunities for future growth
  • Intelligence
  • Drive and motivation
  • Goodwill
  • Happiness

The last one is important. I’ve found it really valuable to prune things that used to thrill me but are now sapping my happiness. This is obvious but worth repeating.

The takeaway

We often think that big changes are necessary if you want to see big results. I’m arguing that small changes, if you make the right ones, often have huge effects in how your life works.

Think of a lean optimization approach whenever you repeat a task or feel irritated by it. Is there a way you can try a small change and see how it affects things? Can you automate the task, make it atomic and uninterruptible, or change it somehow to get it out of your headspace? Can you neutralize its microaggressions?

Fixing this stuff really pays.

Got examples of how you’ve used this approach? Leave a comment or ask a question!

Censorship of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy’s Body

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If you aren’t familiar with ISIS*, check out their Wikipedia page or your favorite news organization.

Several days ago, an Egyptian activist named Aliaa Magda Elmahdy (@aliaaelmahdy) posted a very provocative photograph in protest of ISIS’s actions in Iraq. To protest their legacy of “violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment, and hypocrisy”, she and Inna Shevchenko crafted an picture of desecrating ISIS’s flag by smearing it with menstrual blood and feces. It’s a powerful image.

The original image, posted on Twitter by Shevchenko, came with a quotation attached: “ Animals, our execution of your ideas looks like that! Watch it well! & “. From that, it seems clear that Elmahdy’s piece is intended as ideological and cultural warfare against ISIS’s control and policing of women’s bodies.

Like I said, it’s provocative. It’s an effective piece of political art because it makes you stop and think.

A host of liberal, conservative, and feminist bloggers and news sites (of which these are only a smattering) picked up the story and have been running with it. The general tone seems to be a kind of in-your-face laughing rebuke of ISIS in particular and radical Islam in general. “How hilarious is it,” the sites all seem to say, “that ISIS is really big on controlling women and then there are women desecrating their flag by bleeding on it”. ISIS is probably not thrilled.

Kate of Victory Girls Blog writes, acknowledging the danger Elmahdy may face, “And whilst I am of the mindset that many fundamentalist Islamic men like to cover their women with as many layers as possible to minimize their very existence, this kind of protest on that issue may not be the best tactic right now with ISIS rising.” Indeed, Elmahdy has received death threats from all over the world because of the image and the intention behind it.

Not everyone loves what Elmahdy did. Briana Ureña-Ravelo writes a ton of really good things about how problematic it is that the West is jumping on this when we’re largely ignorant of the cultural context and are habitually appropriating the lives of Muslim women and using them to paint a picture that suits our narrative.

Censorship and the female body

I don’t really want to talk about the picture. I don’t even really want to talk about ISIS, per se, because I don’t have much to say about them that hasn’t been said a thousand times before, better, by other people.

But something has been really bothering me about these blog posts, and the Facebook/Twitter conversations that surround them as they’ve been showing up in my feeds. It’s a subtle thing that plays into the larger ideological issue.

ISIS is bad because they exert violent control over women’s bodies and police them heavily, decreeing how women are allowed to live and very sharply circumscribing their rights. Right? That’s kind of the thrust of the argument, and Elmahdy’s image stands opposed to all that: naked rather than clothed, bleeding rather than clean, utterly defiant rather than deferential, literally smearing shit on ISIS’s flag,

And we, the readers, rightly perceive ISIS as the bad guy here.

But I’m troubled because we often take it further, assuming our own moral superiority. Nothing like that could happen here! Victory Girls smugly opines “I am of the mindset that many fundamentalist Islamic men like to cover their women with as many layers as possible to minimize their very existence“, and we’re meant to roll our eyes along with them. How provincial and embarrassing, this alleged Muslim fixation on covering up female bodies. Thank God we’re not like that over here!

But here’s the problem.

In every one of those sites I linked above, they’ve censored Elmahdy’s image. Black boxes over the vulva, white boxes over the groin, black circles, you name it. Elmahdy was naked in the image she chose to post, but these sites have all chosen to clothe her electronically, perhaps out of the desire to make their posts more “appropriate” for their viewers.

In case that’s too subtle a point, I’ll say it differently: pot, meet kettle.

If we’re arguing that ISIS restricts how women express themselves and controls their bodies, and we’re using Aliaa Elmahdy’s image to make that point, shouldn’t it seem a little troubling that so many of our people chose to plaster their own fig leaves over her nakedness? Isn’t that kind of ideological kin with the idea that it’s okay to control women’s bodies?

I’m not saying that it’s equivalent. Raping and murdering and coercing women is obviously very different from Photoshopping in a black circle. But if the larger point being made is one of contrasts between freedom and oppression, between self-expression and repression, and between openness and control, we would do well to keep our hands clean.

Calling other people out for censorship and control while censoring and controlling the tools we’re using for the call-out? Not cool. If we’re going to demonize one side for doing repugnant things, we’d be wise not to be doing them ourselves.

Put differently: it’s ironic that we’re protesting ISIS censoring and policing women’s bodies by… censoring and policing women’s bodies.

So why does it matter?

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy took a big risk in posting that photo. ISIS recently beheaded a journalist just for being in “their” territory, and you can imagine that Elmahdy’s fate would be pretty bad if she fell into ISIS hands. She took that risk knowing what it might cost.

There’s honor in that. Let’s not diminish it by covering her up just to feel more comfortable. Present her image as she made it, or ignore it, but don’t change it or sanitize it.

*: ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIL (“… and the Levant”), shortened its name to The Islamic State when it proclaimed a caliphate in June, so it’s properly called IS now. However, for clarity, I’m still using the ISIS name.

**: Okay, apparently they’re also bad for a host of other reasons too.

RF Interference Testing the Naiant X-R Hypercardioid Mandolin Mic

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After I posted my report on the Naiant X-R hypercardioid mic, which I’m using as a mandolin mic, my friend Dan Richardson wrote in to ask a question about how well it handles RF interference.

Dan’s a great audio engineer whose domain name, www.NotTooLoud.com, encapsulates much of what I appreciate about his work. Let’s do another gig soon, Dan!

Dan writes:

I’d be interested to know how it fairs hanging out near an iPhone that’s pinging a tower. grounding & rf shielding is a hard part to get right. Listen to the mic at performance volume while you take a cell phone out of airplane mode & send a text.  [snipped by me] listening somehow, just get a sense of the relative level of any interference you might pick up.

I don’t have an iPhone, but I decided to try it with my Android phone. I set the mic with the same gain settings I used in the tests I posted in the main article, and I placed the mic parallel to the long axis of the phone with the windscreen touching the phone. In the real world, I would never have a phone that close to the mic, but it seemed like a good idea for a “torture test” to see how much interference we could pick up.

Microphone test parameters

  • Phone: HTC Rezound
  • Location: Potsdam, NY
  • Mic: Naiant X-R hypercardioid
  • Audio interface: Presonus Firestudio Mobile
  • DAW: REAPER64
  • Audio processing: normalize track volume.

I started the recording with the phone on Airplane Mode. When I spoke, I was about a foot behind the mic, so my voice was in a pretty weak part of the mic’s pickup pattern. I turned off Airplane Mode (turning the phone’s radio back on), let it negotiate a signal, then sent a text message.

When it’s normalized, there’s definitely some interference going on there. Looking at the VU meters in REAPER, I found that the voice peaks at -1 dB, the Airplane Mode interference hangs out around -38 dB but spikes briefly up to -24 dB, and the sending-text interference averages -32 dB but spikes up to -23 dB.

This is a “torture test” in a number of ways, so I’ll bow to others’ experience on what these sounds and numbers mean in real-world effects on stage.

Mandolin Mic: Naiant X-R Hypercardioid

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My Naiant X-R mandolin mic just came in the mail! Here’s a quick overview, a lot of pictures, and some sound files.

2014-08-28 00.22.11 edited

 

Mandolin mics

Mandolins are challenging to mic for live sound/stage performance. They’re pretty quiet as acoustic instruments go, so they don’t put out a lot of signal. They also have resonating sound boxes that pick up and amplify feedback frustratingly well. In combination, these factors often make mandolins into feedback nightmares on stage, especially in challenging amplification situations like where Frost and Fire often finds itself. I’ve had several gigs where I had to stop playing mandolin because the sound tech couldn’t stop the feedback.

Which is frustrating!

It seems as though the mandolin world doesn’t have a “go to” mic setup that everyone likes. Some people prefer playing into a Shure SM57 on a stand, some like acoustic transducers glued to the soundboard, there’s a Fishman piezoelectric bridge you can try, some like onboard mics… you name it, there are people advocating it.

I’ve been using a Naiant X-X omnidirectional condenser mic on my wooden flute for a year or so, and I love it. Good signal, great tone, easy to use. And at $44, the price was right. I decided to contact Naiant’s proprietor, Jon, to see about mandolin mics.

After some emails back and forth, I decided to try one of his Naiant X-R mics for the mandolin. The X-R is a really versatile mic system, and I encourage you to check his site to read more about it. I ordered the remote mount (which puts the mic at the opposite end of a thin cable from the XLR connector) and the hypercardioid capsule (also available in cardioid, cardioid low-sensitivity, nearfield cardioid, omnidirectional, and omnidirectional low-sensitivity options). I added the viola/mandolin mounting bracket, and the whole setup cost $125.80 USD after shipping.

I picked the hypercardioid capsule reasoning that its highly directional pickup pattern would help to isolate the mandolin from other sound sources on stage, maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio for this quiet instrument and helping to prevent feedback. There can be a degradation in purity of sound with hypercardioid mics (at least, some people think so), but I was willing to take that chance if it let me play without feedback.

As it happens, I really like the tone of the mic. I haven’t had it in a stage environment yet, but I’m excited.

The mic

If you take a look at the picture above, you’ll see that the X-R comes in several pieces. The cable that’s connected to the large XLR connector is called the “remote mount”, and the smaller piece at the bottom right is the microphone capsule. There’s also a foam windscreen included in the package, and the whole thing comes in a nice velour bag.

The remote mount and the mic capsules connect to each other with gold-plated RCA plugs, which are a clever way of allowing a single amplification circuit to work with a variety of Naiant capsule options. Swapping them out is easy and quick; if I wanted to, I could order an omnidirectional capsule and have this mic do double duty between mandolin and flute.

Here’s the system with remote mount and capsule connected.

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The mounting bracket

I ordered the viola/mandolin mounting bracket, which is similar to the standard “carpenter jack” mounting brackets used by many fiddle players. There’s a top (black) apart that holds the mic with a friction fit, and then the rest is a clamp with two turnbuckle-style screws for adjusting the fit. The bracket appears to be 3D printed out of some form of plastic, with foam on the bottom surface and cork facings on the metal parts.

I was initially concerned that the bracket might not fit given that my mandolin (an Eastman MD-504) has a Tone-Gard attached to its back. The Tone-Gard does make the placement a bit more tricky, but I found that it was still possible to attach the bracket in several places.

If you imagine the mandolin standing straight up with the neck pointing up toward 12 o’clock, I tried the mic at 1:00, 1:30, and 4:00. My friend Jeff has written about mic placement on mandolins, and you might find his work interesting. You can get quite a range of different sounds depending on how you position the mic.

Here’s the bracket without the microphone in it:

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And a side view, showing the turnbuckle-style screws and the proximity to the Tone-Gard’s plastic-covered attachment (the vertical white thing to the left of the bracket). Again, there is foam or cork protecting the bearing surfaces, so I don’t expect to have problems with the finish on the instrument.2014-08-28 00.49.13 edited

 

Here’s the mic installed, without the windscreen attached. 2014-08-28 00.49.50 edited

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And here’s the mic with the foam windscreen attached. I plan to play with the windscreen on, partly because the dances I play often have fans and breezy windows, but also because the windscreen will provide a gentle “early warning” if I’m getting close to hitting the mic with my picking hand.

I haven’t found that I hit the mic with my picking hand when the mic is mounted in either the 1:30 or 4:00 positions. I did hit it with the mic mounted at 1:00. 2014-08-28 00.50.46 edited

 

With the whole instrument in view, the mic remains fairly unobtrusive even with the large windscreen in place. If I were concerned about the look, I could just leave off the windscreen.
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Sound samples

This is an Eastman MD-504 oval hole mandolin with a maple 11-hole bridge that I made from scratch. I’m playing with a Dunlop Primetone 3mm sculpted pick; to hear the instrument with other picks, check out the huge pick comparison article I did.

These are quick-and-dirty recordings right after work. The signal path is the Naiant X-R hypercardioid into a Presonus Firestudio Mobile into REAPER64 running on a MacBook Pro with Retina. After rendering each take, I ran them all through MP3Gain Express to set them to a nominal level of 89 dB. Other than adjusting volume, none of the tracks have any sound processing.

Mic comparison: K&K Silver Bullet

In my mandolin picks comparison, I used a K&K Silver Bullet through a Shure X2U interface. I played my jig tune, Equinox, for all of those samples, and thought it would be good to compare the sound of the K&K Silver Bullet to the sound of the Naiant X-R hypercardioid.

The whole setup, with its bracket, fits easily within my mandolin case. It’s possible to leave the mounting bracket on when you’re not using it, but I’ll probably take it off just to protect it from accidental damage or loss.

If you decide to order one of these mics based on my report, say hi to Jon for me!

By request, I tested how the mic responded to RF interference from being placed next to a cell phone that was transmitting data.

So far, I really like the mic. I prefer the 1:30 mic position. What do you think? Tell me in the comments.

Why you shouldn’t share videos of suicide death

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Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out:
So where there is no talebearer, there the strife ceaseth.
— Proverbs 26:20

I have some things to say about how we can make communities safer from suicide, and about how we can take better care of people who are suffering grief and loss. I want to talk about what happens when we share images of how a person died by suicide, and about the effect it has on survivors of suicide loss.

But suicide is such an emotionally-charged issue that the underlying factors can be hard to see. So I’d like to start by telling you a story about a different kind of loss—and then we’ll come back to talking about pictures of suicide death.

A parable of loss

When I was in middle school, I had a friend who was killed in a road accident. As I recall, he was out riding his bike one day, wearing a helmet, doing everything right, but a big tractor trailer came by, didn’t see him, and killed him.

I remember getting the news and being shocked and pretty scared: I spent a lot of time riding my bike, too, and I became painfully aware that luck was the only thing that had protected me. I had been lucky, and he had not. I didn’t ride my bike for a while because I was too afraid of trucks on the road, and when I did eventually get back in the saddle, I was pretty nervous.

Time went by, and eventually his death started to fade. I got back to feeling confident on my bike around town, and my friends and I started riding in groups again. But I noticed, after a while, that some of my friends would always lead us away from the spot where our friend was killed. That if we were on that street, they would always head off in a different direction. That, basically, something about the street where he died was still excruciating to them, months and years later.

I’m sorry to say that I didn’t think about it a whole lot more. I paid attention to other things and moved on, as people do. We grew older, made it to high school, got drivers’ licenses and access to cars and the freedom to drive around.

And I noticed that some of the same people still wouldn’t drive past that intersection. It just hurt too much.

Reminders of death

When you’ve lost someone you care about, reminders are everywhere. Every Episcopal church reminds me of my grandpa George, who was an Episcopal rector. Every tune Gordon Duncan wrote reminds me, a little bit, of how sad I am that he killed himself and that, seemingly, none of us could do enough to help him stay alive.

Often these reminders of death are pretty painful at first. I believe that it’s part of the grieving process to engage with them and find ways to make peace with the fact that a person we loved is gone. But whether you’ve made peace or not, the reminders are still there, and the grief response to seeing one can be immediate, overpowering, and totally involuntary. (You might find the Grief Closet to be a useful metaphor here).

So people develop coping mechanisms. I stayed off my bike for a while because I was scared of ending up like my friend. Eventually I made it through that fear and managed to get back onto my bike, even though I was watching like a hawk for any trucks nearby. My friends found it too painful to use the intersection where he died, so they didn’t go there. They planned routes that didn’t take us past it.

And once the rest of us understood that that’s what was happening, we didn’t try to force it. We picked alternate routes too. We did our best not to throw the painful thing in their faces, because we knew they were hurting.

Talking about suicide death

I’ve written a lot about Robin Williams’s death and how we should talk about it this week. I want to help people see that there’s no magic in suicide intervention and prevention—most of it is common sense—and to encourage the idea that suicide prevention is a mission in which everyone can play a role. We are strongest when everyone pitches in.

Once people understand the reasons for guidelines, they often don’t need to memorize the specific rules anymore. That’s why I started this article with a story that isn’t about suicide: because most of us already understand what happened, and we get why and how our community quietly worked to protect the people who were still hurting.

My friend’s death in the truck accident was a traumatic loss for our community. Most people here were affected in some way. Early on, pretty much everyone had a hard time with that intersection, and most of us were shaken and scared. Some of us processed that quickly, although fears of being hit by trucks were common for a while. But others took much longer to return to “normal” after the accident, and some people still can’t drive through that intersection without thinking about what happened there.

This is exactly the same as what happens when someone dies by suicide. For a while, everyone is shaken. Most people begin finding coping mechanisms that work for them, and fairly quickly, most of the population starts moving on. This is good.

But there are still some people in the community who are really hurting. For them, any mention of the person’s death brings them straight back into the worst of their own pain. Images are particularly hard; what has been seen cannot be unseen. These survivors of suicide loss have a longer road to walk before they can make peace with the person’s death, and we make it harder by showing them pictures of deaths.

Pictures and videos of suicide death

There’s a video going around that purports to be a surreptitious view of Robin Williams’s body after he died. I’m not going to link to it, but I’m sure you can find it if you must. People have been posting pictures on Facebook and Twitter that are, allegedly, pictures of his body depicting how he died.

In the aftermath of a suicide death, people often want to talk about the “how” of the death. Maybe it’s because talking about how the person died feels easier than wrestling with why the person died. We have a difficult cultural view of death, and that can often lead to morbid fascination with the mechanics of an ending life.

It’s not my intention to ask you to stop having those conversations.

But please, as you talk about suicide deaths, be aware that you are surrounded by people for whom these images are profoundly painful. Remember that, when you talk about Robin Williams’s death, some of your listeners will also hear the story of how their son, or husband, or mother, or sister, or friend died.

Most of the time you won’t be told that this is happening; people tend to keep their grief on the inside, especially when dealing with traumatic deaths like suicides. People mostly won’t say “hey, my uncle died by suicide; could we talk about something else?”. But there’s a lot of research and a whole boatload of anecdotes suggesting that how we talk about suicide has a big effect on how survivors of suicide loss can heal.

If you think about it, social media has the power to really hurt vulnerable people. Before social media came along, when my friends couldn’t bear the thought of driving through the intersection where our friend died, they had the ability to take another route and, in doing so, control their exposure to the trigger. They could make sure it didn’t bite them out of nowhere.

But with social media, you can’t control what shows up in your news feed. You can’t protect yourself against those triggers because you have no way to know when they’re coming.

The saddest part is that, because of this uncontrollable flow of trigger images in social media, people who are grieving a suicide loss often feel that they have to isolate themselves, for self-protection, when they most need to reach out for support. 

The same is true for people who sometimes think of killing themselves. Talking about how a person killed himself isn’t really helpful to anyone, and for vulnerable people the research suggests it can push them to think more concretely about killing themselves. Being flooded with images of death is really dangerous for people who are considering suicide.

What to do instead

I’d love it if you would skip forwarding the videos. Don’t tweet that picture from the Coroner’s office. Don’t share the article in which an unnamed official tells the gory details about what really happened. Choose not to speculate about the method. Don’t be a talebearer, and choose not to put wood on the fire; help the fire to go out and the strife to cease.

Let’s stop focusing on how people died, and talk about why they died instead. Let’s start a real discussion about depression and mental illness, and then let’s put some time and money into providing meaningful care for people who want it. Let’s talk about how to help the people who’ll have thoughts of suicide tomorrow instead of focusing on how someone died last week.

If you want to forward something or share it on Facebook, share the article you’re reading right now. Or this one.

Suicide has been a taboo subject for too long. We need to talk about it, but we need to do so in a way that’s respectful and that avoids triggering the many people in our communities who struggle with their own thoughts of suicide or who’ve lost loved ones to suicide.

Remember, we are surrounded by people who are vulnerable, for whom images of suicide are horrible reminders of a loved one’s death. For others, videos of a dead person’s body trigger their own thoughts of suicide. So let’s keep the pictures off of Facebook and Twitter, and let’s make the conversation more about how we can prevent harm in future. These people are all surviving, but they can only do that if we leave their coping skills intact.

They can’t control what shows up on their social media. But, together, we can. Let’s do it.

If you need to talk to someone about your own thoughts of suicide, please do. Anywhere in the USA, you can call 1-800-273-TALK and get the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Many other countries have similar programs. Please call. 

I suppose it goes without saying that most of this also applies to the videos of James Foley being beheaded by ISIS militants. Jim Foley’s beheading isn’t something people need to see. Let’s choose to keep that off Facebook, too. People who want to see it will go looking, but let’s not forcibly expose everyone else, eh?

Melting and Metamorphosis

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This post came from nowhere while sketching on an envelope. All of a sudden, there it was. A melting, a metamorphosis, a meditation on the nature of change and our resistance to it. 

Originally, I framed the vessel as being filled, from the beginning, with a layer of ice, but I found myself wanting to point out that life has a way of freezing things up, not that we start that way—and that, once formed, the ice tends to crack and chip and break. And that our goal is to find ways of returning ourselves to the earlier state. 

It came out of the pen with the ice already present, but on reflection, I felt like it needed the change. So, metaphor metamorphosis! When you’re melting, when metamorphosis starts, you don’t always get to choose in advance what’s going to happen. Thanks for reading.

(I typed “meltamorphosis” a lot of times by accident while writing this. Huh.)

We start as beautiful vessels, filled with a glistening pool of perfect blue water that’s wonderfully clear. But over time, we freeze and move and take on new shapes, and as we do, the ice bends… then snaps… until eventually we’re left with ice cubes that don’t fit well at all, any more.

Because of time, and change, and spiritual frost heaves.

We need to remelt the ice. Let it thaw, let it start to run, and like springtime maple sap, re-take the shape of its container. The brokenness comes when the ice tries too hard to hold onto the old shape of its container.

But the new shape can be lovely.

So call it therapy, or prayer, or acceptance, or whatever. But if you’re feeling broken, see if you can find some sun to help you fit your new shape.

How to ask about suicide

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I’ve been writing a lot about suicide and how to talk about it since Robin Williams’s death. I’m also, coincidentally, teaching a two-day suicide intervention course today and tomorrow.  

People often ask me how to talk to friends and family about suicide. They recognize, especially at times like this, that most of us are surrounded by struggling people every day, and that it would be good to be able to listen and offer help. These people care really deeply already, but they’re acutely conscious of wanting not to make things worse. Maybe you feel that way, too.

I hope you’ll start asking people about suicide.

It doesn’t have to be hard. You’re talking to them already, right? And you’ve got some sense that they’re really having a tough time right now? Say “It seems like you’re really struggling. Is it bad enough that you think of killing yourself?“.

Or maybe “I hear that things are bad. Bad enough to want to die?“. Or “Hey, you seem really down, and that makes me wonder whether you’re thinking about suicide“.

The specific words aren’t that important, although it’s best to use clear, direct language like “killing yourself” or “taking your own life” instead of vague words like “doing something to yourself” or “hurting yourself”, and you want to be as non-judgmental as possible (so, “do you want to die?” rather than “are you going to do something crazy like kill yourself?”). I like to ground my question in something I’ve observed, like “I’ve noticed that you seem really sad lately“, before asking the question.

Do your best to be clear, direct, and non-judgmental. And then stop worrying about the words and just ask the question.

It’s surprisingly hard to make yourself actually say the question when you’re talking to someone you care about. I’ve been teaching this stuff professionally for a decade and my heart still leaps into my throat every time I ask someone, and my voice chokes up a little bit. That’s okay. It’s okay if it happens to you. Swallow hard, take a deep breath, and ask the question. You can do this.

You might be worried that, by asking directly about suicide, you’d be making things worse. That you might push a person to do it. That’s a reasonable fear, but both the research and our experience say that it doesn’t happen. Mostly, people are relieved to be asked, and they’re often really glad that someone finally noticed.

If they say yes, get them talking about why. What makes them feel this way? Start with the feelings, listen to the hurt, and steer toward the pain. Help them to talk. Do your best to spend most of your time listening instead of talking. Care.

It may feel awkward, and you may not be sure you’re doing it right. Listen anyway. It starts with asking the question. You can do this.

You can do this.

You might also like my article about suicide and Robin Williams, or the one about the “permanent solution to a temporary problem” language. I welcome comments on this article. Please stay safe—if you’re here because you’re thinking about suicide, I hope you’ll reach out and talk to someone. Try the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-TALK) anywhere in the USA.

Why you shouldn’t say “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem”

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I write a lot about suicide. If you’re interested, also see my articles about talking about suicide (especially after Robin Williams’s death) and about suicide-related terminology. If you’re struggling with suicide, please tell someone—you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline for free anywhere in the USA. 1-800-273-TALK.

People love the phrase “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem”. It appeals to something deep within us: our legitimate desire to have something valuable to say about the terrible cost of suicide. It feels like a good way to express our understanding that suicide is often a choice that only seems like a good idea for a brief moment, and that if you can just get through it things will often look better in the morning. The shaping of the phrase also has an appealing prosody to it, and we like the way it weaves and contrasts the  ideas of what is quick and what is lasting. Many of us feel like, if we can just “shake people out of it”, their feelings of wanting to die will go away.

All of those feelings and ideas are legitimate.

There’s nothing wrong with you if you’ve said that suicide was a permanent solution to a temporary problem—it’s one of the coded phrases society has taught us for dealing with the mass of emotions that surround suicide, and it’s worth remembering that almost nobody is neutral on suicide. We all have a lot of feelings, and this phrase feels like a useful way to be able to say something when we’re confronted with a person who’s contemplating death.

But I’d like to encourage you, gently, to find another way of saying it.

It’s not effective

The Hippocratic oath that doctors take includes words like “first, do no harm”. It’s a good statement of principle that, when we’re trying to help someone, we should do our best not to make things worse, right?

People thinking about suicide hear the “permanent solution to a temporary problem” very differently. In my post about suicide and Robin Williams, people wrote some wonderful comments relating to this phrase.

One, Joanna, wrote (emphasis mine):

“Good piece, Hollis. As a survivor of chronic depression who had suicidal thoughts, I would like to say that for me when someone suggested that suicide is a “permanent action to a temporary problem,” it caused me to not act on those thoughts, in the hopes that somehow, sometime, the depression would lift and I could begin to live again. The idea that the pain of my depression, which seemed interminable, could have an end without my having to take such a drastic action to end it myself, actually did help me defer action and try other tactics until I found something that worked. The other piece of counsel that was particularly useful was not to take irreversible action when I was at my lowest. It took a long time, with baby steps, to regain hope and even experience joy again, but it did happen for me, and could be possible for others, too. I pray this will be the case for others struggling right now.”

Joanna found it really helpful to be reminded that suicide lasts forever. I really like the other piece of counsel she mentions: “not to take irreversible action when I was at my lowest”. I’ll come back to that. But anyway, Joanna found the phrase helpful.

Anne wrote (emphasis mine):

“When my psychiatrist told me that ‘suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem’ I thought, yes, that is what I want. A permanent solution. No more trying different meds, talking about what I’m sad/anxious about, appointments, groups, etc. Permanent. Yay.
The words really didn’t help, they almost encouraged me to do it. It also felt like my feelings were being minimized.”

I really appreciate the bravery both of these people showed in sharing these thoughts.

Anne’s post underscores why the “permanent solution to a temporary problem” language is dangerous: it can backfire.

If the purpose of saying the phrase is to comfort a person who’s hurting and, ideally, help them choose to stay alive, it’s counterproductive to use language that some people perceive as encouraging them to die by suicide. First, do no harm.

It sounds judgmental

I’ve known people whose thoughts of suicide came as a result of temporary life changes, like a bad grade in school or a fight with a spouse or co-worker. But many, many more of the people I’ve know who struggle with thoughts of suicide do so because it’s their experience that the pain goes on and on for months or years or decades. Maybe the specific reasons change, but the suffering is often endless.

Yeah, that’s indicative of depression, and yeah, there are treatments that often work for that. But until you’ve been there, I think it’s hard to understand how exhausting survival is.

People often think that thoughts of suicide arise because of a single critical event, and it’s true that there’s often a precipitating factor—but most of the time, it’s been building for a while. Saying that the problem is temporary is judgmental and dismissive of the fact that the problem often isn’t temporary.

A friend shared some words from David Foster Wallace that expressed some of this stuff really well:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of  ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.

The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.

And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” — David Foster Wallace, source unknown. Used without permission.

I’ve known people whose thoughts of suicide come because of terminal cancer, where pain and decline are a virtual certainty. Because of the death of a loved one. Because of rape. Because of criminal convictions, or because of pending charges. Because of lots of things that, while you can learn to live with them, don’t necessarily get better.

That’s my biggest problem with this phrase: it judges the person’s situation and invalidates the person’s judgment. It says “Even though I don’t necessarily understand your problems or why you’re considering this option, I know enough to say you’re wrong.”

Minimizing another person’s struggles is a really effective way to alienate them and make them feel alone. Nobody likes feeling that their thoughts are pathologized or disrespected. And by relying on catchphrases, we give up the opportunity to stay in relationship and really connect with a person—and it’s good rapport that has the greatest success in suicide intervention.

That’s the risk of using language like the “permanent solution” phrase, because you don’t get to know in advance whether you’re talking to a person who’ll want the permanent solution.

So what do we say instead?

Try to avoid giving advice. Focus on listening instead. Start with the feelings that the person has, and go from there.

Give them space to talk about why they’re feeling so down, and why death feels like their best option right now. Give them time to tell you about it. Don’t try to force them to feel cheerful by focusing on all the reasons they have to stay alive.

Most people, if you give them space, will start to convince themselves that they’re less sure about suicide than they thought. They’ll find ambivalence. They’ll talk themselves into being open to staying alive. That’s when you support their desire to stay alive.

I liked something Joanna wrote: that it can be helpful to ask people “not to take irreversible action when they’re at their lowest.”

I kind of like that, actually, because staying safe right now is a temporary solution to a more permanent problem. It recognizes that we need to help people get through this moment, and that if we keep doing that, the future will turn out okay.

But really, just do your best to be direct in listening about suicide. Avoid catchphrases and pat advice, and just listen.

Make it less about what you say and more about what they say.

This post is in response to comments on my article about suicide and Robin Williams. Please stay safe—if you’re here because you’re thinking about suicide, I hope you’ll reach out and talk to someone. Try the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-TALK) anywhere in the USA.

Talking about suicide and Robin Williams’s death

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Robin Williams died today, at 63. The Marin County Sheriff’s department released a press statement saying they suspect it of being suicide by asphyxiation, and there’s other news on their site.

There will be a media frenzy about this for the next little while, and a lot of people are going to be talking about it. I want to help people talk about it in a way that’s as respectful and safe as possible for vulnerable people, so here are a few thoughts and requests.

Be respectful about thoughts of suicide

Wherever you are, there are people near you who are struggling with their own thoughts of suicide. Some of them are going to feel strongly affected by Williams’s death, and the research shows that a small subset of that group will find that this news pushes their own thoughts of suicide into the forefront.

Please be careful how you talk about what happened with Robin Williams, because these folks will hear your words and may apply them to their own situations. Do you feel that he was a sick or weak person because he had these thoughts? How would that thought sound to these other folks? Did he “lose his battle” by acting on his thoughts of suicide? Be aware that, in the ears of a vulnerable person, you may be calling them weak too.

In particular, please don’t call suicide a “permanent solution to a temporary problem”. Whether or not the problems really are temporary, it doesn’t help the person at risk to have their troubles minimized—it just paints us as being out of touch. You don’t actually need to do that much talking about suicide itself; instead, get the person talking about what they’re feeling and why they’re considering suicide. It’s fine to help them see that these feelings may not last forever—but the “permanent solution” language is really toxic for a lot of people. Leave the labels behind and get the person talking.

Research suggests that about 5% of people (1 in 20) report thinking about suicide in any given year. That makes having thoughts of suicide seem pretty normal, but only a small group of people will act on those thoughts. If you look around, you will see people who are fighting—and winning—their own battle with suicide every day. Be respectful about how you talk about the issue.

People who’ve never struggled with suicide often seem to think that considering suicide is a choice. That, if only they knew how stupid it was to consider suicide, people would just stop thinking about it. I’ve worked on a suicide hotline for the last 15 years. Believe me when I say that most of the suicidal people I’ve talked to would have given anything to be able to make those thoughts go away. Be kind.

If you’re a person who has thoughts of suicide and the news about Williams is pushing your buttons, please reach out for help. If you live anywhere in the USA, you can dial 1-800-273-TALK and get the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which is free and confidential and open 24/7.

Talk directly about suicide

It’s okay to use the words. Suicide. Killing yourself. Wanting to die.

We don’t need to be afraid of the words, and using clear language helps us communicate better. There’s no evidence to suggest that talking directly about suicide hurts vulnerable people, and there’s a lot of it showing that direct talk helps to reduce stigma and help vulnerable folks feel like they can talk openly about how they’re struggling.

“Committed suicide” isn’t great because it feels pretty judgmental (we commit sins). “Lost his battle” feels like it’s labeling him as weak.

So use the other words. It looks like Robin Williams died by suicide, may have killed himself, may have taken his own life. It’s okay to use the words. If you want to know more about the terms we use in the suicide intervention world, check out my guide and my other guide.

If you’re worried about someone you know, ask them whether they’re thinking about suicide.

Remember the whole person

Williams’s wife has asked that we remember Robin Williams primarily by honoring the man he was, not merely by examining the way he died.

He lived a life that meant a lot to us. He was a brilliant comedian whose imitations inspired me as a child, whose ability to improvise staggers me with its breadth and clarity. He knew timing. He did good work and helped us to look at some important, difficult things in life, and he helped us do it with a twinkle in our eyes. Turns out that he was also struggling with depression, possibly bipolar disorder, and thoughts of suicide.

It’s important to talk openly and honestly about suicide, and to grieve for the loss we feel. We feel hurt by his death, and feel that he was taken from us too soon. That’s real, and that’s fine to talk about. But let’s refrain from making Williams a caricature of his own life. Suicide was a part of it, sure, but let’s not reinvent his whole life in this context.

Avoid assumptions about Williams’s treatment history

A lot of the initial stories have focused on Williams’s alleged history of struggling with bipolar disorder, and I’ve read a ton of Facebook statuses and tweets saying “if only he could have gotten treatment” or “I wish he’d known there was help available”.

This is well-intentioned but not really that helpful. We don’t know whether Williams was receiving treatment or not, but the sad truth is that treatment doesn’t always work. Medicine is imperfect. People react to different drugs and therapies differently, and there’s no magic solution out there. The field of psychiatry is getting better at treating bipolar disorder, and there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful, but it’s not anywhere close to 100% yet.

Remember, most people with thoughts of suicide want to stop having them. If treatment were easy and fully effective in all cases, don’t you think most people would have taken that option already?

If it helps you to understand why this sort of statement is unhelpful, imagine that Williams had died of cancer. Would it feel useful to say “oh, if only he’d known that treatment was available!” or “he should have fought harder”?

Would it help his family to hear that people made those assumptions about how easily Williams could have gotten better? Remember that the survivors of suicide loss are all around us, too.

Do encourage people to seek help

For a lot of people, talking about their thoughts of suicide helps them to go away. Some people need the help of a trained professional, and some people need drug treatment or hospitalization. But a lot of people just need a caring person to listen. If someone starts telling you about their own thoughts of suicide in the aftermath of this, stay present and listen.

Ask them why they’re feeling that way. Let them talk about the reasons for it. Start with the feelings. Don’t try to shove reasons for living down their throats—they won’t be able to breathe. They know there’s stuff worth living for; let them talk about the reasons they’re thinking about dying.

And encourage them to keep talking, to you and to others. As I said above, invite people to talk to the NSPL at 1-800-273-TALK or call a crisis line or reach out to other caregivers.

Avoid assuming it’s suicide

We know that Robin Williams has died, and the coroner has preliminarily ruled it a suicide. That said, we still don’t know for sure—they’ve also said that the investigation continues and there will be a press conference tomorrow. There can be benign (non-suicidal) reasons for a person dying by asphyxia at home. Let’s do our best to refrain from contributing to the frenzy about suicide until the professionals have reached their conclusions. Actually, let’s do our best to hold back the frenzy even afterwards.

Edited to add (2014-08-13): the Marin County coroners have released information saying that they’re pretty sure that Williams’s death was suicide, and that there’s no reason to suspect foul play. They’re still checking for other possibilities, but it looks like suicide at this point.

Talk about suicide and mental health

This is a big one. This is what we need to be doing if we want to prevent deaths by suicide in the long term. There remains a huge amount of social stigma around thoughts of suicide and mental health concerns in general, and it’s still hard for people to get help.

Tons of our hotline callers tell us they feel they can’t talk to their doctors or families about the way they’re feeling because they fear people won’t understand, will judge them, will label them, will lock them up, or simply won’t listen. We can and should do better.

So let’s talk about it, and not just in the gossip-ridden aftermath of a celebrity’s death. Let’s talk about expanding access to health care for all citizens, and then let’s make sure that we train health care workers about mental health AND build systems that give them enough patient contact time to have these crucial conversations.

Let’s make it easier to get access to mental health care, and let’s fund agencies that do the work. Let’s have the hard conversations about how we care for people who struggle with suicide in our communities, and let’s actively seek the voices of the people who struggle so we don’t make too many assumptions about what would help.

There’s a whole group of professionals who’ve learned a lot about how suicide happens and what we can do to prevent it. I’m one of them. We’re doing our best to get the messages out, but we need help. Will you help us? Join a suicide awareness group or help out with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Talk to your legislators about securing funding for mental health and crisis organizations, and ask them to help make that funding a lasting priority. Talk to your family and friends about suicide, and let’s start treating it like a public health topic rather than a sin.

Most of all, let’s keep talking—and do it with respect and kindness in our hearts.

(My background: I run a suicide hotline and served for years on the national governing board for crisis hotlines. I teach several different suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention curricula, and if you’d like more information, please ask. Remember that if you need to talk to someone about thoughts of suicide, there’s probably a crisis hotline near you. 1-800-273-TALK is a great starting point anywhere in the USA.)