12 People: One Family's Story and Why Massage Therapists Need to Start Talking About Suicide

June is Men's Mental Health Month, and that felt like the right reason to finally do this episode.

So I'm going to start with my own story.

I'm in what I would call the unenviable position of having known 12 people who have died by suicide.

I think most people know maybe one or two, if any, but for me, it's been a recurring part of my life since I was a kid.

And here's something I've never actually said out loud before.

Of those 12 people, every single one of them was a man.

I don't think that's a coincidence.

Men are statistically at significantly higher risk for suicide, and I think a big part of that comes down to the same thing that I experienced as a teenager.

We don't talk about it.

We're not supposed to.

We're supposed to just push and get through, and that silence costs lives.

My first exposure to this was when I was around seven or eight years old.

A man in our church took his own life.

Now, I don't remember his name, but I remember the funeral, and I remember being genuinely confused.

Not sad in the way that I understood sadness yet, just confused.

Why would someone do that? Then came 1988.

I was 12, turning 13 that summer, and that year our family went through something I can only describe as a perfect storm of tragedy.

My one grandfather had a stroke.

I had a cousin in his late teens that was diagnosed with cancer, and then an aunt and uncle that were killed in a car accident while their two kids were traveling in the car behind them with another aunt and watched it happen.

My other grandfather, who was my absolute hero, died of a heart attack.

And my mom's brother, well, he took his own life.

All of that in one year.

At 13, I didn't have the language or the framework to process any of it.

But the other losses, the accident, the health conditions, they, they made a certain kind of sense even then.

Suicide didn't.