It Affects Everyone: How to Talk about Mental Health & Suicide

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we’re going to focus on the really difficult but important topic of suicide in children. This is an issue that most people are aware exists, but it tends to get avoided because it feels too big and too scary. There’s a lot of stigma and misunderstanding around suicide and suicide attempts. So it generally doesn’t get the attention it deserves. We are seeing rates of mental health problems in general, and suicides specifically, increase significantly since the pandemic, and that’s true for both children and for adult populations. In recent years, suicide has become a top 9 cause of death for people ages 10 to 65, and it is the second leading cause of death for people ages 10 to 14 and 25 to 34 in the United States. This issue needs to be on everyone’s radar so we can support struggling children and young adults appropriately. While it can be an anxiety-provoking thing to think about, I also want to focus on the tremendous amount of hope we should have for kids who are struggling in this way. Parents and professionals can play a key role in providing proactive support, as well as effectively supporting survivors. When I thought about who I want to have this discussion with on the show, there was no question that it needed to be my dear friend Erin Matlock. She’s going to share her personal experience around suicide, as well as insights from supporting so many individuals and families around this issue. I want to tell you a little bit about her.

Erin is the founder of Brain Summit, and a globally recognized coach and advisor in the health and wellness markets. She is the author of Worth It, a book of her viral poetry and essays, a life member of Mensa, and a conceptual artist whose paintings hang in private and public collections in the United States as well as internationally. Named one of the top 50 human behavior experts to follow, she’s a popular International and TEDx speaker who boldly challenges the stigma of suicide through deeply personal accounts of survival and public recovery. Erin, thank you so much for being with us today. It’s an honor to have you here.

Erin Matlock

Thank you, Nicole. I’m so grateful that you’re open to this conversation, that you serve this conversation daily in your professional and personal life, and I’m grateful for your friendship.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Same, and you and I have been talking about having this conversation on the show for quite a while, and I think the timing of this is perfect because this is an issue that is coming on the general public’s radar in a much bigger way right now post pandemic, and it’s something that individuals and families are dealing with a lot more. We’ve had many more requests in the last six months from listeners of the show to cover this topic. And I’m curious about your take, in the intro I said that I think this issue of suicide doesn’t get the attention that it deserves because it feels too big and scary for people. That’s my perception as a clinician, as somebody who talks to people around these issues. I’m curious about your thoughts on that?

Erin Matlock

No, definitely, I get it. Suicide is a scary issue. It is scary to talk about. When parents come and ask me for advice on that, it’s the same question. “I don’t know what to say” is one, and then “I don’t want to put ideas in their head.” And we know that yes, when we talk about suicide, we make that a living thing. We make that an option. But we have to because if we don’t, somebody else is. Somebody else probably already has. And so in being open and speaking about that, and opening up a household to using the word and talking about it, and talking about feelings and sadness and anxiety and depression and all of these things, is in my opinion, the only way that you’re going to be able to monitor, to assess, to be able to intervene. Otherwise, we go back into where you and I are, Gen X. We didn’t talk about this in my family, I hid it. And I think there was that belief that, oh, she’s fine, schools great, she’s an all-star athlete, all of this stuff. We don’t have this family history of it, and so we don’t need to talk about those things. That’s for other people. And here it was in my own home, I was an actively suicidal teenager. And that’s where it gets scary to me, when we don’t talk about it, and then there’s a child hurting and performing to a point where the parent doesn’t realize what’s going on.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s such an important thing for parents to hear what you’re saying around, by concealing it, by acting like this isn’t a thing, by not talking about it, there can be a good intention there of not planting seeds of saying, “Well, if we don’t talk about it, then it’s not something we’re going to have to deal with. My child won’t know about it.” But what you’re saying is so profoundly true, and the data backs this up: When we don’t talk about these things, it ends up creating more problems. And in today’s world, where kids are exposed to all manner of information, content, perspectives around things like suicide, sex, abuse, relationships, drug use, whatever it might be, these sort of secret of topics that we immediately think, “Let me protect my kid by not raising these”, guess what? They’re being exposed to all of this. And you so perfectly said, if we’re not raising it and being supportive around it and giving good, factual information around it, they’re getting information and perspectives from somewhere else. And I think that is one of the things that has fueled this, especially what we’re seeing in today’s kids, because of social media, because of some of the really problematic and dysfunctional things on social media, it can serve a good purpose, and there’s good information on it, but boy, are we seeing some real issues with kids being exposed to stuff that they can’t begin to understand. And if we as parents and other adults in their lives aren’t broaching those topics, or acting like these aren’t things that we should be talking about, it leaves kids in an even more vulnerable situation.

Erin Matlock

It absolutely does. They’re just not equipped. And I wasn’t equipped, and they’re not supposed to be equipped. And my goodness, you and I didn’t have the pressure that they have, this generation of kids and millennials who went through it and in or out. It’s increasingly tough on them. I think part of it too, is when you think about okay, well, how often do we have to have this talk? How often do we talk about it? And what is enough? And what should we say? And I’ve never thought it was so much about what we say. It’s more about how do we create an open place in our household about awkward conversations, where the children are going to feel safe talking and expressing, and not having to worry about comforting mom or comforting dad or not scaring mom or scaring dad, because these kids now, they’re so smart. I think they’re smarter than we were. They tune in to their parents, and they’re so skilled at it. And these are the things that ongoing when you look at children and athletics, we often have someone in a football team or soccer team who will die by suicide, and then the school will contact, and what do we do? How do we talk to the children? And the thing is there are two ways: After the fact, which is a lot of understanding about why someone might do this, and also that it’s not the other children’s fault. They can’t save their friend, but they can help and love and support their friends who might be hurting. The other piece is how do we prevent that? And I think these are ongoing conversations, and really instilling it. I would have always wanted my family to be like, “Okay, what happens if you fail that test?” Because the grades were huge, the pressure to get into college? Are you going to college? Can we afford college? And what happens if you get the F? Instead of “You better not get the F” or “We’re not going to talk about it because we don’t want it to happen.” It’s like, what happens if you don’t get into the college of your choice? What happens if we don’t get the scholarship? Can we start to have those conversations? What happens if you don’t want to play football anymore? And what happens if you don’t want to play lacrosse, but that was your ticket to college? What happens if you’re in college and we’re seeing that, these kids who cannot handle the stress of their sport, but that is the scholarship they’re on. And so can we create a pathway where that child can always call back and say: “I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I’m going to disappoint you, the coach. I don’t know how I’m going to afford college”, and those kinds of conversations. And so I think it’s a little bit of anticipating the catastrophe, that is the parents job, which that’s a huge job for parents, right? All the parents are already stressed and tired, we’re just coming out of a really difficult couple of years. But those are the things, when we see the impulse of suicide with young people. What happens if your girlfriend breaks up with you? What happens if someone sends an inappropriate picture to all of your friends? How are we as a team unit at home going to handle that? So that when it happens, because one of these things is going to happen to your child, there is something in their mind that is going to be catastrophic, it is going to happen to them during school. And if you can start to address that at age appropriate moments, then they know that they have an escape route that isn’t suicide.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So, so powerful, and I think how you’re framing this is so helpful for parents, because what you’re saying is you don’t have to worry about having the right way to talk about suicide or any other difficult topic with your kids. You just have to be open to having tough, uncomfortable conversations and to helping kids think through what their options are, when inevitably tough things happen to them. And that, I think, is a relief, actually. Because I think you’re right, that what stops people is “I don’t know the right thing to say” or maybe even more so, “I don’t want to say the wrong thing.” And what you’re saying, and I have found this to be true as well, is we just need to be willing to open up the conversation. “Hey, did you see that article, about what happened in the high school in our community this week?”, or “Hey, I wonder if you saw this on social media. It’s been in the news”, or “Hey, I have been thinking about X, Y, or Z issue or thing.” Just raising those things, if nothing else, it lets our kids know that these are things we’re all thinking about. It’s not just them. And that these are things that are okay to talk about. Because when we don’t talk about something, the message, the story that kids create, is, “This is not an okay thing to talk about because nobody else is talking about it. Therefore, this is probably really awful of me to even be thinking about, and there’s something bad and wrong about me.” Now, as adults, we go, “Well, of course, that’s not the case.” We don’t want kids thinking about that. But we have to put ourselves in their position, and in their developing brains, kids create stories about all kinds of things. And when adults aren’t talking about something, whether that’s something is suicide or mental health more broadly, or how do we handle it when we fail at something, or what happens in XYZ situation, or sex, or whatever it might be, when we’re not talking about it, kids then get the message that this is not something that is okay to bring up or to be thinking about, and it creates this wall, then, where they suffer in silence. And that’s not what we want to have happening for them. So I’m so glad that we started there, because I think actually, if people take nothing else away from the conversation that is so key. You’ve alluded to it in our conversation so far, but I love to have you share your story around this, because one of the things that I so appreciate about you is your willingness to share your experience, because you are committed to helping other people understand and to break down the stigma around this. Again, and one of the things that happens when we don’t talk about things is we create the stigma around it, that then makes it so that people can’t get support. And you’ve kind of made it your mission or one of your life purposes to use the struggle that you went through to be able to open up this conversation and help other people, and I think it’s such a tremendous, tremendous thing. And so I’d love to have you share, to the extent that you’re willing in this conversation, what your experience around this topic has been.

Erin Matlock

Thank you for asking. Yeah, I have always been a pretty shy kid, although no one from the outside would agree with that. Highly introverted, and I always said I came out of my mother’s womb a giant. I’m 5’10”. Now then, as a grown woman, I don’t think too much about the height, and you’re tall too, but I mean, by the time I was 10, I was probably 5’5”, which is the height of an actual adult woman. And so for someone who never wanted to be in the center and in the front, I always stood out, I was always bigger than the other kids simply because I was taller. And that, I noticed from an early age, I just wanted to disappear. I was much happier on my own and by myself and in my head, whether I was writing or in my own imagination. And then I loved the solitude of the outdoors. I was born in Ohio, I spent the first 10 years there, where you have a lot of forest around you and just really beautiful escapes. It was the 70s where you could leave and then you didn’t have to be back till dark, and there was no supervision. And so you had freedom as a kid. But I put a lot of pressure on myself, and I know that that’s most kids these days, there’s just so much internal pressure. Things really bothered me, I would get embarrassed easily. I had a lot of anxiety, I didn’t know what that word was, we didn’t call things that, and you will look at this sensitive child, but really, it was a depressed child. And again, the 70s, and nobody was looking and I was this overachiever, performer, loved my parents, they are still alive, they’re still together. And we just had a high functioning family. I happened to be born with a pretty decent IQ, and so academics was something that I was interested in and came easy to me for quite a while throughout my life. So I learned that I could really just perform in any aspect of the things I needed, whether it was athletics or academics, and be able to normalize myself, and perhaps just be approved of, and I felt like I spent my whole life seeking approval for this deep seated self-hatred, for feeling like I didn’t look like any of the other girls, I didn’t feel like I fit in, I got teased a lot for my height. And thankfully, I went to a parochial school. I was in Catholic school, so it was small, it was tight. And so I did well with that, I had lots of friends. That was never a difficulty. But I just never felt… It is that old phrase, I’ve used it before, I felt alone in a crowded room, always. And as a child, when you can’t express that, and you don’t understand why, you start to just hate yourself, you have so much shame for yourself just for existing. And so I overcompensated with being very good at anything I went after. But that kind of child, and the child I was, you drive yourself to exhaustion. There’s nothing that ever is perfect. So nothing is ever good enough. And both my parents were brilliant, and so living up to that standard was difficult too, and my mother was one of these types, everything flowed off of her, she was naturally skinny. I always had to battle weight. And then my brother was very outgoing and kind of hyperactive, but just very busy and all over the place. I think I’m more like my father. So those things, now, I think if a parent saw a child like that — because you can see that they’re withdrawn, you can see that they’re struggling, I would already have been in therapy as a young child, and that would have helped me understand more about what I look like, and why I look different from every other kid, and why I was taller than the teacher, and what that meant for me, and how I was going to process that. And this feeling of being embarrassed for just being alive. That is a hard thing when you think about a child feeling like that, when it’s such a free time in life to just explore and giggle and laugh and learn. So yeah, we didn’t have the internet, obviously. And I didn’t know what suicide was, probably just what I saw in a movie, you got HBO or something like that. And I wasn’t feeling that. So I think sometimes we have much younger children attempting or even succeeding in suicide, which is horrifying and heartbreaking. I didn’t really become actively suicidal until I was about 15 when I knew that, that was it. And what had happened between the lead up of that, of course adolescence plays a part, but it was this pressure of not feeling like I could talk to my parents about it, not wanting to disappoint them, not wanting to break this image that they had of me, and not feeling okay at school, even though in my elementary schools, there was nothing wrong with those schools. When we got to high school, I definitely should have been removed from that school. And that’s another piece, is looking at, now we have options, the child doesn’t have to stay in school. Maybe they’re getting bullied, maybe they’re dealing with gender issues, and I mean, there’s just so much there with children and how they gang up on each other, and where school maybe isn’t the safest place for them. But back then, we didn’t have options: You went to school or your parents went to jail. It was like, “You gotta go.” And it was just so all of that stacked, and it’s the silence, it’s me as a child trying to deal with emotions that were bigger than I was, not having the proper tools, my parents having no clue that there was a problem in the house, or even that I would be that child in the 70s or maybe early 80s on the street that had a therapist, because that would have been gossip back then. It’s not now, and so this is so good, and it’s what you do, is you help these children where I needed help. So getting to adolescence, then you add on hormones and changes and boys. And we weren’t so sexualized back then, but it was still liking boys, and did they like you? And did you get your heart broken? Trying out for sports, did you make cheerleading? And the social classes? So those kinds of conversations are the ones that I talk about, telling these parents, they are a soft place to fall. And that’s one part, right? The other part is they are sturdy boundaries for safety. But I had, and I still do to this day, loving, supportive parents. But I did not feel like I could just come and fall into them and collapse. And that’s what children need all through and into young adulthood, to be able to express the thoughts in their head or their fears without a parent having to solve it or know what to say. And yeah, I’m a big proponent of not worrying about what you say. If you’ve got teenagers, you’re already saying the wrong things anyways, that’s just what happens. That’s going to happen.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

All the time.

Erin Matlock

Right. But looking at these things, what happens if you don’t get to be a cheerleader? What happens if you’re a cheerleader now, and when you get to high school, you don’t make it? These are the types of conversations we have to look at to structure the falls, to support the falls, because that’s the impulse that a young person has. Maybe an adult who is suicidal tends to, not always, but tends to grip on longer because there’s more tools built up to cope with the horrifying thoughts. A child thinks that if a boy broke up with them or something, their life’s over. they didn’t make the baseball team, life is over. They can’t see past that. And I know, that’s what you know, you’re an expert at that. But that’s where the parent comes in to say, “Okay, I need to start looking at all of these things that could cause my child to fall. How do I make sure there’s a softening of the fall? And what are our options for coping? And how do we do this as a unit?” Even if you’re a teenager and you think that I’m a dorky parent or whatnot, still, this is us against the world. And we are going to get through it as a unit.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

That message is so important. I want to touch on what you said about the impulsive nature of it, and I want to make a couple of key points for all of you listening. What Erin just said about that adults tend to hold on longer, yes, because as adults, we have a more fully formed or hopefully fully formed prefrontal cortex that allows us to have executive functions that regulate our emotions better, that allow us to think things through more, that allow us to not as impulsively react to things. When we think about children, teenagers, even young adults, because the prefrontal cortex of the brain continues to develop through the mid 20s, of course, they are more prone to what you describe there, Erin, just that impulsive responsive of “This terrible thing happened, I see no way out of this, I’m forever going to be branded as the loser”, the whatever, and they are more prone to an impulsive self-harming or impulsive in whatever way response to that, literally because they’re still in a developing brain. And so I think that developmental aspect is key, and then recognizing that if you’re a parent of a child who has one or more disabilities or brain-based challenges with executive function, those kids are at higher risk. We know that from the data. Our kids who are diagnosed with or who have symptoms of ADHD, kids who have other types of executive function issues, their brain struggles even more with regulating those strong emotions with stopping and thinking things through. And so I say this not to scare anyone, but awareness is important, because when we understand some of these risk factors and we understand developmentally, and from a brain standpoint what’s going on, it allows us to be even more proactive and intentional around doing what you’re talking about, which is skill building. What do we do when these things happen? How do we problem solve? How do we deal with big overwhelming emotions? When we know that our kids may potentially be more at risk for those things, it allows us to be more proactive in modeling and building those skills, and that, I think, is so critical.

Erin Matlock

And it goes into adulthood. I mean, how many of us have met or lived with or have lived with or have neighbors of adults who clearly didn’t get that education and do not have good problem solving skills, and they don’t see their options. So if we look at that, we can help that child through that. It’s just an enormous relief for them. But even, I think about my dear friend who thought she was having a stroke, it turned out to be Bell’s Palsy. So a bunch of us girls rushed to the hospital. And we were all in, there were a whole bunch of moms, and I’m the only one who was not a mom. And once we realized what it was and that she was going to be in there a few days, but it was going to be fine, it was a treatable thing. We were all just laying around on the bed with her, and one of the mothers was having just a devastating moment because the child liked a girl, he thought the girl liked him. The girl did not like him. The girl and some guys decided it would be fun to ask for an inappropriate pic, and this is a very innocent young man who just really thought that he was in a one way conversation with the girl. She got the pic and distributed it around school. And that is not the only time we’ll hear of that today. I mean, this is just something that’s happening. And I think of these types of things that you and I never worried about. I mean, that stuff wasn’t happening. They are now. And I can see where I would have thought my life was over when that happened. And so those kinds of conversations of like, “Hey, you know what? Let’s not do that. But if you get into that situation and that happens, you come to us. Call us immediately. And if we need to change schools, we’re going to change schools.” And I would probably do it with a joke, I would say, “If we need to move cities, we’re going to move cities.” And the thing is, you may be thinking “We can’t move cities because of the job,” it’s not necessarily that you have to, it’s that all of a sudden they see and feel that mom and dad, or mom, or dad, or grandma, whoever is in charge, when they’re saying, “Okay, I feel like the world has ended, I’m not going to get through that, but mom and dad are going to get me through it. Somebody here is going to protect me and we’re going to figure it out.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And that peace of knowing that they can come to us, because part of the obstacle, or the main obstacle for some kids, is not seeing how they will be able to go on. But sometimes it’s such a concern about disappointing the parents, “What will my parents think?” It’s the devastation of what will happen when the family finds out or how the parent will react that can then lead to those suicidal thoughts and impulsive, suicidal or any type of self harming behavior. And of course, no parent intends for that to happen, but we have to be intentional about making sure that our kids know that nothing they’re ever going to do or say to us is going to cause us to stop loving them, to be disowning of them, to not think that they’re good people. They need to know that they can trust us in those hard moments, that they can come to us, and that we’re not going to further heap on shame, embarrassment, all these things that they’re already feeling. If we are parents where they’re like, “I can’t tell my parents this because it’s just going to make it all worse”, than that compounds it, and some kids then get to the point where they really feel like “There is no other option for me here”, and so I’m so glad that you’re spotlighting that. Let’s continue on with your story a bit. You shared sort of how you came to the situation that you were in at 15. Then you haven’t had any therapy, no real support around this, and you became actively suicidal and self harming, right?

Erin Matlock

Right. And it’s amazing that I didn’t die. I look back and I think, how on earth? Because there was no option. No way out. And I always think to myself, we were a tight family unit, we were not a perfect family unit, we definitely had dysfunction, like I think any family does, or most families do. But there was enough structure in there, and I think that was that my need to please, that I was going to white knuckle it through. And if your child has attempted it at a young age, or a teenage age, or if you are watching this and you’ve lost a child, it is not because you didn’t have a loving household, and I really want to make that clear. I always talk about this with my parents, there’s nothing more they could have done. They didn’t know any more to do. And the thing about a parent is you cannot follow your child around 24 hours a day, and so anything could take them. And it’s a horrible thing to think about. We see drownings, we have car accidents, there’s all kinds of things that can happen. It’s the worst nightmare for a parent. And so we have to look at releasing the parent from that kind of just extreme guilt, a prison in their life if they’ve lost a child. And I’ve spoken to so many of them, I know you have too, about how much of life they lose going forward because they’re in that place of “I could have saved them, I should have saved them, what could I have done differently?” And we can all do the most that we can do, just like with cancer, we can treat them with everything we have, and sometimes cancer still takes the patient. And I get it as much as I can get it, not being a parent. It has to be difficult to forgive oneself if your child dies by suicide. But I also really encourage people to look at it as: Suicide is going to take some people each year. No matter what all of us do, no matter if you’re in therapy, you’re on meds, whatever your beliefs are about meds, you have structure, you have a loving household. And so we can all do our best, but also parents have to really give themselves a break to know that there is that chance, that we can’t save everyone all the time. And so I look back, it was really tough. We had moved from Louisiana to Texas, and that did it. That was the break for me. That doesn’t even faze a lot of kids. Or maybe they have a tough time or they’re nervous about who their new friends are. And then they’re fine and they’re thriving. I did not thrive. I moved to a large public high school in Texas, and I had come from very small Catholic schools, and I did not adjust. That was something my parents missed. And I think they would tell you, if they could go back, they would have ripped me out of the school. And I do believe that would have changed the trajectory of my life. So I can tell you, as a family, we would have done that differently. But that also would have taken more communication and understanding and living in a different time. Now there are options. So I’m always an advocate of, if the school is causing the problem, if it’s the mean girls, whatever it is, get them out of there. They don’t have to stick it out. This thing of “Oh, we’re not a family of quitters.” Or “You have to learn to toughen up because the world is hard.” They are not ready for that kind of hard.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

No, I’m so glad you said that. Because there are parents that I’ve talked to who were like, “Well, they have to learn how to handle this stuff.” No, actually, we’re not, as humans, meant to handle that. And even as adults, children don’t have the agency that we do as adults. As adults, if I am in a toxic workplace environment with people who are verbally abusing me and denigrating me and treating me poorly, I can leave. Children don’t have that level of agency, they are where we put them in school and sports, whatever. And so we need to advocate for them in that way and realize that this argument of “Well, the world is tough and you have to learn to deal with it.” No, that’s actually not true. It’s not true for us in adulthood, and it is profoundly not true for children, especially in the cases you’re raising them not adjusting well to things, being bullied, being abused in some way. Or even if it’s just a toxic learning environment for them. Whatever it might be, we have options and we need to exercise them. And I think the point you’re making for parents here is we all do the best we can with what we know and understand at the time, right? And it’s easy to look back and say, “I would have done this, I would have done that.” We do have to give ourselves grace around that with every aspect of parenting, we’re doing the best we can with what we know at the time. And it’s why I think conversations like this are so profoundly important, because you learn more and you can understand things in a new way that then allows you to move forward doing something differently, but we’re all doing the best we can. And so I appreciate you saying that, and for your parents too, like you’re saying, okay, this move at high school was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. In hindsight, your parents are able to look back and say, “Boy, we would have done that differently.” And we recognize they were doing the best with what they knew and understood at the time.

Erin Matlock

And I can see that too. And that’s the beauty about being an adult and being able to look at your parents in that way. Because as a young woman, I remember, because this went on until I was 30, and being so angry. And that happens with mental illness. If we’re talking about specific cases of mental illness, you may be the target of your child’s anger, they may blame you for decades. And that is heartbreaking, that is difficult for parents too. What helped me was therapy, was processing, making sure I had a neutral therapist who was able to gently guide me through this peeling back of the onion layers, but also holding a space, that in order for me to heal and move through life as an adult — we’ll go back, I know I skipped, but I couldn’t continue to blame one or the other parent. This happened. And so the one thing that helped me, especially if you have parents who are still blaming their parents, the thing that released my family was me choosing to look at, let’s take one parent, my father, through the lens of what was his upbringing like? And I happen to know what it was. And they are private people, so I will leave their story private. And being able to look at them through a parent’s eyes, even though I was the child, and think, “How can I show compassion to people who, as a teenager, or a 20-year-old, I would have thought were completely responsible for everything wrong in my life?” Because that happens with kids without good coping skills, we blame the parents or one parent. And sometimes there is abuse in the home. But until you let go of that and try to make peace and find forgiveness, and for me, it was understanding: They did the best they could. They thought they were protecting me. They thought they were strengthening me. They taught me my whole life, “We don’t quit. You start soccer, you end soccer.” There’s such a good intention in that, but we also have to look deeper at: Is that coach an A-hole, right? Is he being abusive? Then you’re quitting soccer. And that’s called taking care of your health and being safe, not necessarily quitting. Things like that. So, as an adult, I will tell you, the most freeing thing to me was to look at my parents with such compassion, and that comes with the wisdom of being an adult, saying, “I’m not perfect. They’re not perfect. I still make bad choices to this day, and I would hate to have someone holding me accountable for 20 years”, and it has released me to understand that this is something my family journey through. We all were hurt by mental illness, we all suffered, even my brother, and we all came out the other side bruised, scarred, and we’re all doing the best we can, still.

So going back to being 15, I wrote a lot. So that helped me with expressing myself. Having something that the child feels passionate about, that is theirs when they’re home. And I do look back and I don’t know how, and I almost think I had to grow into the courage, and this is going to upset some people, but I do find there’s a courage that comes with ending one’s life, because if you’ve never made a true attempt at looking at end of life choices, you don’t know what that’s like to build up to that. It can get to a point where you believe that is the only way you will find peace and relief. And that’s a difficult conversation because I understand those who fear that someone will die by suicide. A parent, a sister. That phrasing that it’s selfish, it’s a really hard thing. I understand now. I’m way past this, although I still deal with suicidal thoughts. I do get that fear of “How could you leave me like this? How could you do this to our family, to our friends?” These things. The issue is unless you have been in that much pain for that long, and we’re talking it ended up being 15 years until my last suicide attempt, in a coma. And there were doctors, there was medication, all that, and we’ll get to that. The pain that people feel, especially adults — and thank you for letting me jump around a bit. I’m sorry, to build a timeline in here. But you know, if you’re here looking for answers, because I get that a lot, if you’ve lost a parent, maybe to suicide, I want you to know how sorry I am that you’ve lost your parents, and that they struggled for years. That’s typically and almost always never an impulse. They held on for you. They held on for everyone else for so long, and it is excruciating to hold on. A human can only hold on like that for so long. And so I feel for wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, anyone who’s left behind from someone who’s died by suicide, because we don’t talk about it, because we haven’t had these type of conversations, there is a lack of understanding of how hard they battled to stay on this planet, and what a difficult decision it is to leave, and how sad it is, because we want to heal them. We want them to be okay. And we don’t have perfect treatment yet. You know, going back to that piece of being in high school, I think what it is, is I would, and I still do this to this day, this is one of my coping mechanisms: I set a timeline goal. I knew High School was only three more years, and then two more years, and then one more year, and then I would go someplace else. And I thought if I could just get there, maybe it will be okay. And that is a long time for a kid because it’s a long time to hurt as an adult, but as a kid, it might as well be three decades. And then I started making some friends in the second year. That first year was just brutal. That helped. A friend with kids, that’s so important, that friend circle, that peer circle, and making sure that that’s intact. I would be very concerned about a child who does not have any friends, because that peer social support is one of those pieces that does help keep them alive. It can be the opposite. Even one, just one.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Even one key peer in their life that they feel understood by and connected to, is so critically important.

Erin Matlock

I’m curious too, I want to ask you about something. What helped me, I’m going to skip again just into my early 20s, I was moved back home. I was not functioning, and I moved back home a few times, I think. And I did not have friends then because I pushed them away because I’m so embarrassed about what happened to my life, and everybody was out getting married or getting promoted at work, and I was living at home with my mom and dad. I was online, it was pretty big back then, not like it is now, I went into message forums back then. That was a community. And I found community and strength in message forums of people who are battling a number of things emotionally. Now, I do know that sometimes those can go down a dark path too, but I’m curious about your thoughts on these children who maybe cannot fit in, and maybe there isn’t any money, or there isn’t a place, or insurance doesn’t cover to send them to a school that’s away, like a boarding school, a really therapeutic one. What do you think about these online communities where children can find peers, friends, and an identity that is away from the physical self?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I think it can be really positive and impactful for many kids who are feeling isolated, who are in communities or schools or whatever the situation may be, or maybe have a brain where in person social kinds of situations are really challenging for them, I think it can be really important. It’s one of the real benefits of online communities, support groups, and forums. So I think it can be really important, I think it needs to be coupled with in-person supports, via family, via therapy opportunities, whatever, that also are containers for that, because there can be a double-edged sword with some of those online pieces, and it can become an avoidance, it can it can become a path of taking kids out of their real lives or making it more difficult for them to function away from the computer, away from the online pieces. So I think there needs to be a balance there. I think parents need to be aware of what kids are accessing, what kinds of support groups are getting involved in. I’ve had young people who have come to see me who got involved with certain forums and groups online, and initially, it seemed good, only to discover down the line that actually, these were really manipulative, toxic, problematic forums or groups that they’d gotten involved with, and I think that kids can’t be expected to parse that out. That’s where as adults, we need to be involved with communicating with them about how that’s going, what they’re learning, what they’re doing. Not constantly micromanaging and hovering, but aware so that we can help them think through those things. Their brains are still learning how to do that. But I think the power of community in whatever way that shows up, whether it’s in person, whether it’s online, it’s profoundly important, because the one way to make sure that someone feels continuously depressed, hopeless, isolated, like they have no options is for them literally, to be isolated and without community.

Erin Matlock

Yes, yeah. 100%. Yeah. Thank you for that, because I am curious, I know how helpful it was for me when I was in my 20s. I was at a dinner with another mutual friend of ours, and a conversation came up about these meta worlds and virtual worlds, and there was a gentleman, a very brilliant gentleman there, an engineer, who was trying to understand. “I don’t understand this, I can’t see it lasting. I don’t understand the purpose because it’s not solving a problem.” And I looked at him and I said, “Of course it’s solving a problem. People who don’t feel as though they belong in this world can easily blend in and belong and thrive in that world.” And unless you have felt on the outside, and I know what that’s like, then it wouldn’t seem to pull you in. And then there lies the problem for our youth is yes, I think for some of them, they will thrive there. But how do we police that? How do we parent that? How do we make that safe for them? I don’t have that answer.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Right. And I think what you’re saying around all of this, which is something I really want listeners to hear, is the importance of us taking the perspective of what is going on for the child or the other person, or our partner, whoever is struggling, right? We look at it through our own perspective of, “Well, I could never”, or “Well, you should just”, but this perspective taking, you’re sharing the perspective of someone who has been there, and we need to hear that and say, it doesn’t matter whether we understand it, whether it’s what we would do. We need to understand the profound pain, struggle, and suffering that persists to the point where someone would feel like “This is the only option for me.” And so if you’re someone who has thought of suicide as selfish, or “I just don’t understand how anybody could do that.” I really want you to hear this, because it’s not about your perspective or my perspective, it’s about what’s happening for them. And that perspective taking piece is so important. We don’t have to agree with it, to seek to understand it. That happens a lot with kids, right? I can understand where kids are coming from, I can empathize with them, I can problem solve with them around it, but it doesn’t mean I agree all the time with what they believe is true. But I don’t have to agree to understand, to perspective take, to empathize and support. And that is key with any kid struggling with a mental illness issue, especially when we’re talking about suicidality.

Erin Matlock

Yeah, thank you for that. It’s my hope in sharing, that I only want to ease someone’s pain that has been left behind. Because the thing is, as you know, our feelings are our feelings, and we’re free to have them. And if you’re mad at someone, you’re mad at someone. The issue is that it becomes a prison for your life, because your life then becomes about someone abandoning you. And that’s understandable, that there’s a freedom that comes with building and understanding to a point where you can have compassion for them needing to end the pain because they couldn’t, they could not be here any longer. And that is a very difficult ask, I know, but I think that it will help to ease up life and your relationships and your ability to bond in relationships and thrive and have peace, and depending on your beliefs, because we all have different beliefs. I know this is our life. I believe we’re going somewhere. I can’t tell you what that is, I have no data for you. It’s just my personal belief. But you know, when I work with parents, again, it’s just my belief, so I get it if it’s not yours, but I believe they’re trying to reach you. And they’re trying to love you and they’re trying to connect to you, because I believe our love is eternal. And if we’re in a place where we’re seeing the abandonment and we’re seeing the hurt and the pain, I don’t believe that the heart can be open to receive the love that they are sending you. And I don’t say that as a fairy tale to make you feel better. It’s just a belief I have, but I have witnessed it in people who have lost those close, whether suicide or not, and that heart has to come back open, which is a scary thing to do because if you open that heart back up, it could get hurt again. And none of us want to get hurt again, especially after a loss to suicide. So on those communities, that’s a really interesting piece, and I’ll be watching that because I agree with you, Nicole. I think all there’s so much pain in the world right now, and disconnect, and people do need to feel like they belong. And I am concerned about how isolated even people who haven’t identified as having any kind of mental health issues or really mental illness, which is separate from just affecting the mental health, now all of a sudden feel like “I don’t fit in this world anymore.” And that’s a dangerous thing to be hearing.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Right, and there’s a lot more of that post pandemic. There’s a lot more people feeling like “ I don’t know where I fit anymore”, and human connection is a fundamental need. It’s not a nice to have, it’s a need to have. It is right up there with food and water and shelter. And so what you’re sharing is really important for adults listening to hear, that one of the most profoundly important things, both proactively, as well as reactively, if a child has made attempts or is in the midst of struggling with that, we need to seek to connect to them. Not shaming, blaming, not even just focusing on what are all the treatments we need to do? I mean, yes, there’s a time and a place for that, but on a fundamental level, focusing on that human connection, that empathy, that love, that understanding, because that, in my experience, is ultimately, along with whatever therapies and other things need to be in place is what helps people move through this and become in the category of survivor from this, because we know that we actually have a pretty terrible track record if we just look clinically at the interventions that we have historically used for children and adults who are struggling with suicidal ideation, suicide attempts; our standard methods and treatments for that have shown to be pretty poor. And again, I don’t say that to say that it’s hopeless. No, I’m saying that to emphasize that if we’re just focusing on what’s the medication or the combination of medications, or what’s the rehab facility, or what are the types of talk therapy, or whatever, we’re missing what I think is a profoundly important foundation there, which is making sure that people feel heard, connected, and that we are embodying that for them and really striving to have that as a foundation. And yes, sometimes that’s present. And of course, we need lots of other things. I would argue that we miss the boat nutritionally with these people, we’ve got data around that. Many, many young people and adults who struggle with suicidality, we can see in the research data now, have nutrient deficiencies, have infectious issues, have things that we need to be assessing and treating from a physiological standpoint. The fields of mental health and medicine have completely missed the boat on that, and we’re just now starting to look at those pieces. So there are a lot of reasons to have hope. If you know someone struggling with this, if you yourself as a parent have a child who’s struggling with this, but I think we have to start with that connection, and that sense of, like you said so well, so many times now, “We’re in this together. We’re going to figure this out. This isn’t just a you problem. It’s not that you need to go to a residential treatment center to figure this out. It’s we are in this together, and we’re going to figure this out.” And I just think that’s so important for kids to hear.

Erin Matlock

Yeah, from all of us. I remember my neighbor in Houston, after one of the attempts, I had come back home from the hospital. And of course, she didn’t know what to say, but she invited me over to give my mom respite because they were surveilling me 24/7, to knit. I didn’t know how to knit. And she goes, come sit back by my pool and I’m going to teach you to knit. And it did not cure anything for me, but what she was doing is showing love and support from my family, without knowing how to support, and sitting in community. And that’s all it was. I never became a knitter. But the thing was I always remembered that act of kindness of just trying to show that “We’re here for you.” And so those things do help, they stack. So I made it through high school. When I look back, I have no idea how. There’s no reason for me to have made it through that. But I did. And college was much easier because I went to the University of Texas at Austin. Austin’s an amazingly open-minded town. And what happened in college is you can kind of hide mental illness in just looking like a normal college student. You’re sleeping late, you’re missing class, you’re drinking, you’re trying other things, you’re going through partners, and so it just looks like you’re a college kid, for a lot of college kids, not all. And again, I had the structure, I had a goal in place: “I’m just going to graduate”, then I was going to finally make my own money and make my own rules. So I did not do well, though I was always a scholar. And I know that was difficult for my parents. I knew they were frustrated and disappointed at the grades in college, and I believe they felt at that time that I just lost my mind and was partying, and what this is, is mental illness in my case. For someone else it might be a learning challenge. There’s a number of things that can go on. But for me, it was just being masked. And they missed it. And I missed it too. Because I remember I had a friend, and she came home and she had like this — when you went to the pharmacy, they used to put it in a bag. I think they still do. but I was like, “What have you got?” and she was like, “That’s Prozac.” And I was like “What?” I remember thinking, “Oh my God, someone I know is on Prozac!” I mean, this was the 90s. I should have been in treatment at that time, whether it was meds or not. They ended up not working for me, they work for others. So it was interesting that I missed all of that during college because I could distract and dissociate with what was going on in college. And I wasn’t in athletics where I didn’t have that pressure. So I got through, and it was about three months after graduation that I was in the hospital with my first suicide attempt. I lost the structure and was in a freefall, complete freefall. So then to fast forward, there were three more attempts over the next eight years. And I will say that first one, when you ask, a cry for help, that’s exactly what that was. That was a young woman who had no idea how she was going to tell her parents that she needed therapy. So this is how I chose to do it. They escalated. And in between there, I got jobs, I left jobs, I got apartments, I moved states, I moved back home, it was just a really irregular life because I was not stable. I just could not do the adult thing for longer than a few months at a time. So if you have kids, if it’s like a failure to launch kid, I am living proof life is not going to be easy for them because they’re just some things that they have that are challenging that others don’t find challenging, but they can have all of those dreams and go after things and really live this incredibly interesting and curious and unique life. They may always need a soft place, and that’s important too. I have an open line of communication as my parents approach 80, and while I’m not living with my parents anymore, there’s still that family unit. Not everybody has parents, they might be estranged, that kind of thing. That’s that community, a sense of support. So those last two, I hung on. I hung on as long as I could. I was 30, so we’re talking 15 to 30. We’re talking about three pages of medication, wonderful therapists, wonderful psychiatrists, people who were working as a team, we were trying different things. My parents were paying for it. Insurance was awesome back then. So it was like we were as a family, going at this and trying. And it just was one of those instances where I was not getting better. And if I would, then I would crash. So by that time, I had moved back home, and my father was traveling a lot at that point for work. My mother is an educator. And I picked a time when they were away. They were in Hawaii. And again, this was not to hurt them or to blame them for going to Hawaii, because I think they lived with a lot of guilt, that how dare they go on vacation? Well, they should have gone on vacation, they deserved to go on vacation. And I made a very significant attempt that was calculated. I had bought a book, How to Die by Suicide. I don’t think they sell that book anymore. So this was not a cry for help. This wasn’t a “Let me just stop whatever’s going on.” This was a “We have tried everything”, that depression was so bad. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I had no favorite food, no favorite flower, no favorite color. I couldn’t process any love for anyone. And when you look at major depressive disorder, it is unrelenting. And it’s a word that we don’t have. It’s just so much deeper than consistent sadness. We don’t have a way to label it. So if you’ve experienced it, you know what I’m talking about. And the psychic pain throughout the body is so miserable, then the guilt and the shame of being a disappointment and a financial burden on the family. Every little thing is amplified. So if you’re taking care of someone with mental health challenges, are they sensitive? Yes, they’re sensitive. It makes them so sensitive that you have to make sure you have respite, because otherwise it can feel a little abusive towards you, and you really have to watch as a caregiver, that piece. And I just felt, and I really did believe, because it robs you of your ability to rationalize, that everybody would be better off, including the family dog, without me. And I knew, and I understood they would be sad and they would grieve, even as parents, and got that, but I knew that they could get on with their lives. It is a huge financial cost to have a 20-something who is severely mentally ill because you’re not covered by insurance. I mean, now we have different insurance coverage for people who are not working, all kinds of things. But at that time, it was really difficult. So the bills that would come in, and we were a middle class family. So I watched that, I saw that stress, you know that you are stress. I also felt like what kind of life my parents were having when they were worried, always. So if you’re wondering if they think about who they’re leaving behind, yeah. They do. And I thought for a long time, and I fought for a long time. And just… nothing worked. So that’s where I talk about the courage, and I get some of you, that’s going to rub you the wrong way, and I understand it. But it was not a quick decision, it was just the end of fighting for so long, and nearly destroying my family. You get to a point where you just can’t. I woke up from that and was livid. And this is also hard for people to hear, because there are people who are dying from cancer, who would love to live. And believe me, that weighed heavily on me. Why couldn’t I be that person, and they could then live? And it’s not what we’re given in life. I hear stories of people, there’s a wonderful man, I forgot his name. He speaks and lectures about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge and surviving, and you just don’t survive that. And he’s an advocate for suicide prevention. And he talks about how the minute he jumped, he knew he had made a mistake. I did not make a mistake. I was so upset and devastated that I was still living, because it took so much to work up to that point. So yeah, I was taken to the hospital, and I was put into psychiatric and all these things that happen, by law, and came home, and I knew that I was trying again. I knew I was out. There was no, “Okay, thank goodness, I was saved, we’re going to do it.” It’s only because we had spent from 15 to 30 trying. And so you look at that, and that’s why I have so much compassion for people who, who tried to stay alive for so long. They’re so tired, and it’s really dangerous. And so three months later, again, this one, I ended up in a coma, I think because of my youth. I don’t think I would survive that. This body can’t handle that. I remember waking up in the ICU, livid, still just devastated and I was on life support. And when you are unconscious, and they have you intubated, and you come in from a suicide, they strap you down. And they do that because there’s a reflex. First of all, they don’t know if you’re going to try to kill yourself in the hospital. So legally, they have to. And it’s very disorienting because you don’t know. There’s a lot of dopamine pumped in you for the coma. The coma is induced or continued, to allow the body to try to heal while everything else shuts down, to hopefully let you live through the attempt. And so all I could do for a long time was sit there with my legs and my arms bracketed in, on a tube, and stare at the wall. And growing up, I grew up in Catholic school, I grew up in a Christian household, dad’s Lutheran, mom’s Catholic, so I had a belief in a God at that time, and I remember thinking, “Okay God, you win. You’re not going to take me.” And I was mad. That was difficult, because that challenged my lifelong childhood belief in an all-loving God and an all-knowing God who was meant to protect you and to take you home, and doesn’t. And I was still very young. I have a different perspective on everything now, as I’m approaching 50. So I will tell you that was tough, but I also made a decision that saved my life in that bed. And I remember having this conversation with no lips. What scared me was I couldn’t do it again because I believed I was going to survive again, and I believed I was going to start to lose organs or the ability to walk or, or even something where then it was going to be even harder on top of living with mental illness. And a conversation for another time, and perhaps maybe with clinicians is why we choose the methods we choose. I think that might be outside of the scope today, but you tend not to jump around in methods, and there’s a lot of data, and it’s an interesting conversation, which also can be highly triggering. So I want to be really sensitive and let Nicole take the lead on that. Because I know that’s a question, you’re kind of bad at doing that. Why wouldn’t you choose a different way? There’s a whole conversation in itself. And I will tell you, so I thought, okay, well, I’m not going to be able to do this again. So I’m going to have to live, and I’m not going to get married, because who’s going to want to marry me? I’m not going to have a white picket fence, because I’m living at home with my parents, I can’t hold a job. And so all those things were in my head. But I still said, “No matter what, I’m just going to live, no matter how bad it gets.” And I had completely surrender to my circumstance, probably for the first time in my life, to any circumstance, to just say “I am no longer in control”, and even if life, excuse the word, sucks, that I have to live it, and I’m going to live it. And I made that choice. That was 2004.

And I still make that choice today. And I will tell you, I still deal with challenges with suicidal thoughts, not all the time. And Nicole and I were having a conversation before we got on, I am in that place where I’m nearing menopause. So a lot of these challenges come back in perimenopause for some people, especially if you have a history of suicide. And on one hand, that gives me peace knowing why. On the other hand, I have to use every tool I have and every promise I made to still live a very highly productive and visible live, high functioning life with suicidal thoughts. I’m not alone in that. So I think the world of you for allowing me to have this conversation, because you’re going to have parents who are feeling suicidal right now and are functioning beautifully to the outside world. So from that, I learned that medication wasn’t going to work for me. So I started to come off of that because these are serious medications. I was on high doses, you don’t just pull off, you can have seizures. And I went to my therapist and made some switches in my care. My dad had just retired, and my mom refused to retire until my dad learned how to be at home alone without her. So it was me and my dad. And it was already a tense situation with my dad and I, but it was probably very therapeutic for both of us, because I was unwell, and he was learning how to be a full partner in the family. Back then, men went to work, and women also went to work, and then she did everything else, all this stuff, right? So it was an interesting time, but I had lost use of my hand and arm for about a year, just due to being pinned on the ground. My dad had to drive me places, he had to brush my hair. I couldn’t button anything. I couldn’t sign documents. It was really interesting. So he had to be that for me. So it’s funny how life forces you, forces people to work together, who probably thought they could never work together. I will pick this up because this is the question people always have, especially if you have those who have made attempts or who were struggling, who are feeling suicidal right now. I had left the hospital with blood clots all through my lungs. This happens with overdoses and with suicide, and about 30% of us walk out of the hospital. 70% of us die from blood clots. So it was scary, because you feel like you have ticking time bombs in you, which again, I get the remark of “But you wanted to die”, but it’s just very different. It’s controlled. And the pain is different than walking around waiting to kind of blow up inside. And that is a difficult thing for people to process if you haven’t been through it, but there is a difference. I wouldn’t have known. You would, this is what you do. But I would have been like, “What’s the difference?” There’s a difference. And so I was prescribed two minutes on an exercise bike. Two, because I had to start to rebuild. I had to relearn how to walk, all this kind of stuff. And that two minutes turned into 10. And then that 10 got boring for me. But I still wasn’t leaving the house at that point. This was early on. So it was a recumbent bike, and I read a book called “Spark” by John Ratey. It’s wonderful, it’s classic. And it’s about the benefits of exercise within neurogenesis, regrowth.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

We’ve had John on the show, actually, if you missed that episode, it’s from a couple of years back, you can catch him talking about that.

Erin Matlock

Yeah. I highly recommend anything he’s done. And I talked to my therapist, and I was like, “Well, I’m going to do this. I’m going to start this process”, because the meds didn’t work. And something’s got to work. So at that time, there was a Sudoku craze. Everybody was doing Sudoku and everything. So I was like, “Okay, I’m bored on this bike, but I’ve got to go longer. I also had a lot of weight to lose from just being in bed for a couple of years. And I read about interval training through John, and what that did, and the growth and stimulation, and I was like, “Okay, I can do that.” So it was 9 minutes of just regular biking, because I was not in any shape, and then a minute of full-outs. So that was the interval. I printed off these huge Sudoku, put them on an old clipboard from the 80s and got my pencil, because I was so bored. There was no Netflix or anything back that. There was nothing on TV in the middle the afternoon. I had to make the time go by, and I worked up to an hour doing the puzzles, which again, was another thing to help just rebuild that critical thinking thought processes, and actually success in getting that dopamine from finishing the puzzle, doing the bike, to the point where I started watching The Biggest Loser. It was big back then. It’s been around forever. And it was the first time I ever saw someone lose about 20 pounds in a week. Not healthy. At that time, I was like “How do you lose 20 pounds in a week?” I had put on all this weight from these antipsychotics that they put me on to try to just sleep off the depression. These were extreme measures that we could take four days to go through. I wanted it gone because I just was embarrassed to walk outside, and I started to want to go outside. So I saw that, and it just captured my attention. And I thought, “Well, I’m just going to up my exercise.” I upped it to two hours, to three hours, to four hours a day. Now this was not something that became an addiction for me. It was planned. I got a planner. I started tracking my calories, I learned about nutrition, I learned what I was putting in my body, I learned about B vitamins and supplements. And I didn’t have any money at the time. I wasn’t spending. This wasn’t like biohacking where all of a sudden you’re up thousands of dollars. This was just drugstore, clipboard, an old recumbent bike, no peloton, and I went to an hour on the bike, and then I started doing weights from my dad, and I had these routines. And then I moved to outside and started walking down to Lake Houston and back through the forest. I had no idea what forest bathing was, but that’s what I was doing. And we have known since then, probably a decade ago, when that big craze came out about the benefits for mental health of forest bathing, just walking in the forest. And so these things were naturally calling us, and I do believe we have that innate knowledge, that your answers will show up when you’re open to receiving them. And I’ll tell you I’m not always open to receiving them because I still beat my head on the wall sometimes, but right then I was like a fresh slate, completely surrendered and open. And so the walking became interval, run/walk, and then it became running. And then my therapist had been trying to get me to do hypnosis forever, and I just was like, “This is such a farce.” All I knew about it was stage hypnosis. And I remember thinking “This is a joke. I’m not one of those people.” And she’s like, okay, you don’t have to do anything. And then one day, she’s like, “Do you want to try hypnosis?” And I said “Sure”, because I came in at a 10 on anxiety. And she did the hypnosis with me, and I left at a 7. And while that doesn’t sound profound, for me, non-drug, nothing used to move the anxiety. To move from a 10 to a 7 with simply 30 minutes of her talking to me like that in hypnosis, a script. I remember driving home thinking, “Oh my gosh, there’s something to this.” So she encouraged me to find meditative scripts, things like that to begin meditation. I had a Walkman, because that’s how long ago this was, a yellow Sony Walkman, and I got tapes. And then I moved to iPod Shuffle, whatever that was. And I started loading guided meditations to take, because I would now run all the way to Lake Houston, and then I would walk around like Houston and I would listen to the guided meditation because I still couldn’t be alone with my own thoughts. My thoughts were not calming, they weren’t. And then I would run home. So I was working up, and I probably lost well over 60 pounds in a little under three months. And so yes, it wasn’t 20 pounds a week, but what it showed me was that I can take this and I can take my health back, and I can become strong. And in that, it built mental strength for me. And my therapist built good habits for me and we journaled, and she taught me how to catch the automatic thoughts that were in my head. And that was huge. That is one piece. It’s not the only piece. But it was such an important piece to me still standing. I had no idea that my brain was just in a constant negative, critical, doom state. And for her to teach me even to catch a few a day and have the energy to write them down without countering, because we had to work up to countering. And she helped me with that. I was astounded at the time about what was going on in my mind, my brain, without me even knowing it. And of course, someone would be ill, of course, they would be depressed with those type of thoughts. So this journey, and I’ll close it here and throw it back to you, Nicole, was there was a point she would ask me along the way on those walks, “Are you noticing the flowers yet? and I remember I said, “Roxanna, my favorite flower is a tulip, and I don’t have that feeling yet.” And it’s a slow process to rebuild, it’s going to be at least a year. And then you’re looking at building recovery. And so we kept waiting. And then I remember one day I saw flowers, and I remember thinking, “I noticed the flowers” because I wasn’t even noticing them. So even though I didn’t love them again, I noticed them. And then it hit me, and it was almost a year out, we got the IKEA catalog, and in the back, there’s all these photography canvases that you can buy, this big, beautiful large photography you put up in your room. And there was one with tulips. Tulips are my favorite. And I saw it and I had to have it. And I recognized it immediately, because there was nothing I had to have, because depression will rob you of wanting anything, even your children. I mean, it robs you of everything. And I remember thinking, “Oh my God, I want this. And I love this,” and it came back. And that was a year of work to get that back. And so the next day I got in the car. It was about 50 miles on the highway to get to IKEA, and I drove, which I don’t know if that was the best idea. That was a huge drive for me. But I drove early in the morning so I could get there right when it opened because I knew I couldn’t handle a busy IKEA. And IKEA makes you come in and they make you go upstairs and all the way through, and I knew where the photography was, if I could just get in and go back. So I was power walking through the whole upstairs, and I went downstairs and I found it, I got it, and I power walked, I paid for it, and I got to my car. I put it into my trunk, and I got in there and I locked the door, because it was still a lot for me to be out in the world. And I put my hands on the steering wheel and I just cried because I knew that I was going to be okay. I did not think that I was going to have the white picket fence or the husband or any of that. It did not jump like that. It was “I’m going to feel things again, I’m going to drive a car again. I’m going to want things and I’m going to be able to take myself and do things for myself.” And that was the beginning of where I am now. Lots of tears. Thanks for getting through that with me.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I so appreciate you sharing all of that because each person’s journey with this is their own unique journey, and yet, this arc of where you start and where you get to is so profoundly important to understand the thread that runs through everybody’s story who I’ve ever heard share that, but it looks different. And what I think you’re offering is insight into the process of this, that most people don’t ever have the opportunity to understand. And you’re offering a tremendous amount of hope that despite how long things might go on, how difficult they might be, if you have a child for whom it seems like nothing is working, to stick with it, you do have to surrender as a parent too, to the process of this and to continue to do what you can and know that this is going to be your child’s journey. And for you, it was a 15-year journey. And I just thank you for being so transparent about that, and being willing to share. It’s not an easy thing even now. And I want to touch on one other thing before we close, and that is that you talked about how you still struggle with suicidal thoughts at times today. And I want to really spotlight that, because I work with a lot of adults who have a similar story that started at some point in their childhood, it’s continued through their adult life, or it’s something that came to them in adulthood. I think there’s this idea that the goal is to overcome this. Somebody is suicidal. You treat them and they’re not suicidal anymore. And I think it’s important to understand that this tendency, this mode of coping, or this default to this idea of, “I’m going to take my life/I’m going to harm myself”, is a part of some people. In some ways, I would say it’s a part of all of us. I would argue that nobody gets through the human experience without having at least some fleeting thought of something along these lines. But that aside, for people who struggle with suicidality, it’s not that we make that go away. This is a part, just like we have lots of parts to us, Internal Family Systems is a great theory and therapeutic approach to understanding us in this way, there’s lots of parts of us, and some people have a suicidal part of them. That in and of itself is not a problem, that is a part of who you are. The key is to help continue to give people support and resources, and for people to develop skills and tools for living safely and in harmony with that part. And I think that’s really important for people to hear, especially if you are a person listening who struggles with suicidality, who has made attempts or has had ideation, there’s nothing wrong with you or inherently broken about you that you haven’t fixed this or made it go away yet. This becomes a part of who you are, that you learn how to coexist with in a way that is safe and healthy, and utilizing support and strategies. I just think that’s an important thing for people to understand, and that’s why I’m glad that you were open about that.

Erin Matlock

Thank you for that. It’s more people like you, Nicole, validating that, especially because we’re hearing a lot of bypassing these days, like “Depression really isn’t depression.” We are so far from knowing what depression really is, and all the many things that we’re calling one word. You know, and to tell someone it’s a weakness of character, or that they’re not fulfilling their duty on Earth, I think all of these things play into it. But it’s just acknowledging that we all carry something, and for millions of us who are into adulthood, we carry this with us. And yeah, I always liken it to my friends who are in recovery from addiction. They’re in recovery for life, they commit to life. I have committed to a life of recovery. Sometimes it’s bumpy. And I suspect as I get closer to 50, 51, and that menopause hits, it is going to be a bumpy road, and I’m going to be seeking support for that. And there’s been times when it has been a piece of cake. All in all, I understand that this is what I was given, and it is mine to make use of, and that’s the best that we can do.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And that you’re making use of it not only for yourself, but in support and service to others, and I’m profoundly grateful to you for that. I want to make sure as we wrap up here — you even I can have a conversation that goes on for many, many episodes. But as we wrap up I want to spotlight your book of poetry called Worth It. It’s beautiful, it will speak to so many of you listening. Tell people where they can find out about the book, where they can access your TEDx talk, and where they can just learn more about you for those who are interested in that.

Erin Matlock

Well, thank you, the book is called Worth It. It’s in stores. And you can go to Goodreads, Amazon or your local bookshop. And it’s in their computer if it’s not in their store, and then they can bring it in. And I will tell you, I hear from people when they read it, and it’s not completely about — It’s about love and loss and self-worth, and there’s some parts about depression and suicide, but it’s really about learning to love who you are and what you’re here for. If you’re not a poetry lover, it’s short form poetry, so it’s a little bit more like self-help poetry. I find that people tell me they read it very quickly, and that it helps them feel understood. And then yes, I have a couple of talks that go more into what we just talked about today, and the full talks are on the website. So it’s just my name, erinmatlock.com/speaking, you can go straight to the page, and the videos will be right there for you. And yes, one is a TEDx talk and one is the talk on our mutual friend, Jim Kwik stage, and both are about surviving and overcoming suicide.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Thank you, I know many people are going to go and check those out. And probably many people will be sharing this episode and listening to it many times. You have provided so many important insights, practical strategies, and hope. I just appreciate you, and I appreciate you spending time with us to have this conversation. Thank you.

Erin Matlock

Thanks so much. And for all you who are watching, if you put this on YouTube along with the podcast, I probably got mascara all over half my face. So thanks for bearing with me today. I am a highly emotional creature. But yeah, I should have put on waterproof mascara. And to all your parents, I just want to end with this, if you’ve made it through this, because this was tough, and I know this is triggering and scary to think about with your child. And also, if you are exhausted, like every adult is, to think about this lasting for 15 more years or the financial aspect, everything of it, I just want you to take some time, and really carve out time to be very kind to yourself and to be around, like Nicole and I talked about earlier, at least one person with a regulated nervous system. I have that one person in my life, he happens to be my ex-life partner, he’s my best friend. And he is so steady. And the thing is you have that steady friend because you cannot be there right now for other people. You need to be there for your child, for yourself, for your marriage, for your work, but to make sure that you are able to remove yourself from the situation and care for yourself. And be very loving to yourself during this, because it is a life journey.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Thank you. Thank you for that. And thank you to all of you, as always, for being here and for listening. We’ll catch you back here next time.