Denver, Colo., Dec 28, 2019 / 03:02 pm (CNA).- On Monday of National Suicide Prevention Week this year, popular evangelical pastor and mental health advocate Jarrid Wilson, 30, reportedly committed suicide. Just hours prior to his death, Wilson had posted a message on Twitter about Jesus’ compassion for the depressed and suicidal.
“Loving Jesus doesn’t always cure suicidal thoughts,” Wilson wrote. “Loving Jesus doesn’t always cure depression. Loving Jesus doesn’t always cure PTSD. Loving Jesus doesn’t always cure anxiety. But that doesn’t mean Jesus doesn’t offer us companionship and comfort. He ALWAYS does that,” Wilson tweeted.
Wilson had been a long-time advocate for mental health, and founded “Anthem of Hope,” a Christian outreach for the depressed and suicidal, with his wife. His death this September followed that of Pastor Andrew Stoecklein, another young, vibrant evangelical pastor and mental health advocate, who committed suicide last year.
In the span of just 16 years, suicide rates among working-age Americans (aged 16-64 years) spiked 34% between 2000 and 2016, according to data from the Center for Disease Control. Among Americans aged 10-24, the spike was even more dramatic – CDC data shows a 50% increase in suicides among this group between 2000-2017.
The suicides of these two pastors highlight this concerning upward trend in suicide, especially among young people, even among those who are part of a Christian community.
CNA spoke with three mental health professionals about why suicide rates, particularly among young people, are increasing, and what the Catholic Church and other faith communities can do to help.
Overconnected, and under pressure
Deacon Basil Ryan Balke is a licensed therapist at Mount Tabor Counseling in the Denver area, and the co-host of the podcast “Catholic Psyche,” which aims to educate people on the integration between the psychological sciences and Catholic spirituality, philosophy and theology. He is also a married deacon with the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church.
Balke told CNA that he thinks one of the driving factors of an increase in suicide among teens and young adults is their constant connectedness to the world through mobile devices, coupled with a lack of greater meaning in their lives.
“When I was in high school…I would go home, and I wouldn’t really have any contact with my friends unless I wanted it,” Balke said.
“And now with the saturation of the iPhone…you get the communication that is constantly there and constantly moving and so you can never unplug, and you can never continue on with life outside of the image you have to put out into the world (through social media),” he said.
“They’re always distracted, always moving forward. I was a youth minister for many years as well, and it was just – these kids never had a moment’s peace,” he added.
Tommy Tighe is a licensed marriage and family therapist in the Bay area in California, who also hosts a podcast on Catholicism and mental health called “St. Dymphna’s Playbook.” Tighe told CNA that despite having more connections, young people today are more isolated than ever.
“There’s so much more pressure…there’s so much more of a drive to be popular,” Tighe said, but social media connections often do not equate to “a close-knit community of close friends.”
According to a 2015 article from the peer-reviewed research journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, frequent social media use in children and teenagers is associated with poor psychological functioning, as it limits their daily face-to-face interactions, impairing their ability to keep and maintain meaningful relationships.
The study found that students who reported using social media for two or more hours daily were more likely to poorly rate their own mental health, and experienced high levels of psychological distress and suicidal ideation.
“There’s a trend towards superficial relationships, and of course you don’t post on Instagram ‘I’m depressed’ or something like that, so I think people don’t know who to reach out to,” Tighe noted.
Furthermore, Balke said, “I think what is also happening is the younger people have lost meaning in their day-to-day lives as well. I think all of us have lost meaning as a force in our lives.”
Balke said especially for young people, there is an increasingly intense pressure to perform academically or athletically that has replaced the things that used to bring people a sense of greater purpose, such as faith or virtue or close familial connections.
“Whether it be sports, they have to be track stars, they have to be in all AP (advanced placement) classes, they have to have like 30 college credits before they graduate high school, a 4.0 is not good enough anymore it’s gotta be a 4.3 or something,” he said. “I don’t even know how you do that. They’re pushing themselves so aggressively to the point where there’s no meaning behind it all because they don’t have an overarching purpose. These things are substitutes for that.”
“You might do something stupid like literally eating a tide pod, laundry detergent, and you become world-famous for thirty seconds. It’s so crazy,” he said. “It’s like these kids are just waiting for their next big break.”
The lingering stigma of mental health care
Another driving factor in the spike in suicides among young people and other populations is the lingering stigma of seeking out therapy or other mental health interventions, Tighe said.
“I think we try to act like we’ve really changed (as a society) in our perception of mental health, but I don’t think that’s really true,” Tighe said.
“Especially…it seems like every time there’s one of these mass tragedies in our country, mental health gets brought up and I think that pushes people even further away from wanting to reach out or identify as having an issue,” he added.
Additionally, Tighe said, not only do young people today have a harder time making meaningful relationships with their peers, parents are also often afraid to broach the subject of suicide and mental health with their children.
“I’m hoping that the younger generation of parents will be a little bit more willing, but it’s scary, right? That’s super scary to talk about.”
But talk about it parents must, Balke said, and the more specific they are, the better.
“You want to use that exact phrase: ‘Are you thinking about killing yourself?’ Or ‘Are you thinking about suicide?’ You don’t want to use the phrase ‘self harm,’ or ‘Are you thinking about hurting yourself?’” he said. “You want to be very clear.”
Some people fear that bringing up suicide may plant the idea of suicide in their child’s head, or may worsen their depression, but Balke said that studies show that these fears are unfounded.
“Statistically speaking – you can’t catch suicidal thoughts,” Balke said. “You’re not going to be pushing kids to become suicidal by asking, ‘Are you thinking about suicide?’ That’s actually… helping them come out of that isolation.”
The Soul Shop movement: helping congregations prevent suicide
In 1999, Fe Anam Avis was the pastor of a Presbyterian church in a small suburban town in southern Ohio when the suicide of three students within seven months rocked his community.
Searching for help and resources for his grieving congregants, he found that there was little to nothing when it came to faith-based resources for suicide prevention and mental health. He started traveling to speak about suicide, but noticed that clergy and church leaders weren’t among his audience members.
“He said, ‘I would go to these towns and they would have me in a fire hall and I would give a presentation about suicide and a hundred people would show up in a small town. And not one of them would be a clergy person,’” Michelle Snyder told CNA. Snyder is the director of Soul Shop, an organization founded by Fe that trains clergy and congregations in suicide prevention and interventions. Fe has since retired.
“(Fe) said consistently it felt like people in the church were not connecting this issue of suicide prevention with faith, and pastors were just not showing up to engage with this as an issue as a matter of faith.”
That’s what spurred Fe to found Soul Shop movement, a group which now travels the country to give workshops to congregations on how to speak about suicide, how to prevent it, and what the warning signs are.
“I’ll often say to a group of faith community leaders, if you’re asking yourself the question, ‘Is anybody in my parish thinking about suicide?’ you’re asking yourself the wrong question. Because the right question is, which six people out of the hundred here are thinking about suicide right now?” Snyder said.
Part of the training consists in simply raising the awareness among clergy and church leaders that there are people in desperation within their own congregations who are at risk for suicide and need help. Snyder said they also train congregations on how to support people who have been impacted by the suicide of a family member or friend.
In addition, they study the stories about suicide, or suicidal ideation, found in Bible passages.
“There’s quite a few,” she said. “We’ve got Judas, the story of Judas, and that’s a suicide. But you’ve also got stories like Elijah (who was) praying to die. You’ve got Saul, who fell on his own sword and killed himself…you’ve got Job, who said death would be better than what I’m experiencing. You’ve got lots of heroes in the Bible who thought about (it) or else just said, ‘I’m in so much pain. Death would be better,’ but who didn’t attempt (it). So you’ve got lots of suicide – you’ve got suicide attempts, you’ve got suicides, you’ve got suicide intervention.”
They also train church leaders in spotting some of the warning signs of a person who is at risk for suicide.
Tighe said some of those warning signs include people who have been noticeably depressed for long periods of time, social withdrawal, talking about suicide or self-harm, or the giving away of prized possessions, among other things.
A warning sign that might seem strange, Tighe said, is when someone who has been depressed for a while is suddenly and inexplicably happy again.
“If someone’s been super depressed and then all of a sudden they’re sort of feeling really good…that makes us very nervous, because sometimes it’s because they’ve made the decision like, okay, on Friday, I’m going to do it. And they feel like a burden lifted off their shoulders, because there’s an end in sight,” he said.
When those risk factors are spotted, those are the times to specifically ask people if they’re considering suicide, Tighe added.
During the Soul Shop trainings, Snyder said, the group takes a public health approach to suicide, meaning that they train faith communities to take a collective responsibility for the health of their own people.
“We spend a whole day equipping communities of faith on how to be communities of faith in relationship to this issue,” she said.
One of the biggest suicide prevention tools that communities of faith can provide, Snyder said, is being “soul-safe” communities of faith, where people feel connected and valued as whole people, and not just for one aspect of their identity.
People who are more resilient to suicide are those whose don’t have all of their “eggs in one basket,” Snyder noted.
“If every egg is in the basket of being on a full scholarship for football, and then I get injured, every egg was in that basket. I have no Plan B, and so that becomes a risk. And helping our people in our congregation become well-rounded people with lives that are full and rich and diverse can be a suicide prevention initiative.”
At Soul Shop, church communities that are trained in suicide awareness and prevention are called “soul-safe communities,” Snyder said, which are “communities where people are intentionally connected to each other…communities where everybody knows what to look for. Communities where we are aware of our tendency to shun when we get uncomfortable and are challenged to not do that.”
What else can be done?
Besides hosting a Soul Shop or other suicide prevention training, what else can pastors and parishes do to help prevent suicide?
Balke said he would encourage all pastors to meet with their staff and frequent volunteers in order to familiarize them with locally available mental health resources. They should know the location of clinics, the hours of those clinics, and what crisis numbers to call, he said.
“They need to have quick access to them, so that when someone is coming in their office, or after a bible study or whatever it is when this kind of conversation comes up, they have it on their phone ready to go and they won’t have to go searching for it,” he said.
Tighe said he recommended that parishes have flyers posted on their bulletin boards with information on local mental health resources, as well as local crisis hotlines to call or text. In the United States, texting “741741” will connect users to a crisis text line.
Text lines get great response rates, Tighe said, because “everyone’s like, okay I would send a text, because it’s easier. And they’re incredible. We get people who come to our clinic who are like, ‘I was driving to the bridge, (because that’s a very popular thing here in the Bay Area for people who are suicidal), and for whatever reason texted these people and they told me to come to your clinic before I went.”
Pastors and clergy should also make it a point to build a personal relationship with the mental health professionals in their congregation, Balke said.
“Someone that they can just phone and say, ‘Hey, what do you think about this? What should I do in this situation?’” he said. “I have a number of priests and deacons who have phoned me on a regular basis and say, ‘You know, someone came into my office and said this this and this. What’s going on here?’”
Pastors and other church leaders also need to treat suicide and mental health issues with the seriousness they deserve, Balke said, and not treat them as something that is either not a serious issue, or something that can be solved solely by prayer or spiritual direction.
“Mental health in the Church is a real problem, and…it’s not necessarily being addressed with the seriousness, from an institutional level, that it deserves. People are committing suicide in our parishes and in our churches.”
Snyder said that she is confident that, if properly trained, churches and parishes have a key role to play in preventing suicides in their communities.
“We talk a lot about putting your seatbelt on before the accident happens. And that’s kind of what we’re describing here, is how do we do that in faith communities long before crisis strikes,” she said.
This article was originally published on CNA Sept. 15, 2019.
[…]
“Contrary to reports among activist groups and some media outlets, the vote is not a referendum on whether President Joe Biden, a Catholic whose public positions on abortion, euthanasia, transgenderism, and the death penalty contradict Church teaching, but on the creation of a document to catechize American Catholics.”
Really! Then I guess then pope was just as confused as many of us were in that regard inasmuch as the Vatican essentially warned the bishops not to take it up.
It sounds to me like his warnignwas headed.
Lord have mercy.
Item 2 if correctly interpreted by CNA as an instruction on the Eucharist rather than a referendum on coherence is a contrived betrayal, a dereliction of the bishop’s Apostolic duty to defend the faith. “Sixty-nine percent of Catholics that Pew surveyed reported their belief that the bread and wine used during the Eucharist are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Most Catholics do not know the Church teaches that transubstantiation occurs” (CNA citing Pew 8.5.19). Archbishop Cordileone lamented we’re far behind in catechizing the faithful. The term faithful has lost its meaning because of lost faith. Bishops took doctrine for granted, priests simply declined to be pedagogical from the pulpit, turning to endless assurance that God loves us. Moral dissolution the logical outcome when priests rarely if ever spoke of serious sin, requirement to confess, the possibility of Hell. Surely the Church at large is doctrinally bereft. But the Vatican had warned of discord if the bishops sanctioned recalcitrant politicians. That is what’s behind the change of agenda, the literal betrayal of their Apostolic commission. As if ruffled feathers has any relevance. As if exercise of the faith in sanctioning the unrepentant is not teaching, is not guidance, witness to the truth. The shock of a formal sanction withholding the Eucharist from recalcitrant politicians is exactly the needed disciplinary therapy for both recalcitrant and uninformed.
Avoidance of defining Eucharistic cohesion, and the refusal to prohibit communion to recalcitrant politicians, especially Biden sends the message to the Church, that whatever the bishops may say regarding the Real Presence it makes no difference for anyone within the Church if they choose to support and even practice abortion, transgenderism, all the variants of homosexual depravity – because politicians including Biden may continue to receive the Eucharist. It’s a self defeating policy that will further compromise, discourage practice of the faith. A veritable Judas like betrayal of Christ.
I hope the bishops boldly stand up and teach “eucharistic coherence” and deny communion to politicians who scandalously and publicly oppose Catholic teaching. They must be consistent too in its application of this to all Catholics, not just politicians. There must be side by side an “application coherence.” To be coherent, this teaching if ever proclaimed must be applied not only to politicians but to all Catholics, even clerics and religious. And the public sins considered for this communion ban must include not only abortion but also same-sex marriage, not caring for and helping the poor and immigrants, white supremacist racism, climate change denialism (against Laudato Si), promoting and perpetuating Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election as well as Q-anon conspiracy theories (against the 8th commandment) as the most notable ones.
For a half century, most American Catholic bishops have been hunkered down in a “see no evil, hear no evil” crouch. And the faithful have had to wage the culture war unsupported.
Now, our children have rejected the faith, our grandchildren have barely heard of it, and most of the few who are in the pews don’t believe that they are receiving the living Jesus in the Eucharist.
The family has been undermined, young people are not getting married, and the birth rate over a cliff.
And the bishops think maybe now they’ll say something? Really?
Hah!
Why bother, bishops? What’s your hurry?
“…when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Doesn’t look like it.
Brineyman,
Well said!
BINGO!
He will certainly find the cult of “The McCarrick Establishment.”
A parasite cult eating the Catholic Church alive from the inside.
The USCCB will publish a “three-part document will focus on the mystery of the real presence and its reality as a sacrifice that heals…”?
What?!
Is it the case that the apostate Bishops of Germany are world-wide represntatives of all Bishops everywhere, even in the United States? Is it the case that the Bishops of the Catholic Church NO LONGER BELIEVE THAT JESUS DIED TO REDEEM US FROM OUR SINS?
Is this USCCB now simply the American branch of the apostasizing post-Christian global episcopal cult?
Do they now profess nothing more than the apostate German Bishop Robert Zollitsch, who declared on Holy Saturday 2009, in a deliberately orchestrated TV interview, that Christ “did not die for the sins of the people as if God had provided a sacrificial offering….” Would they answer, if asked, as the TV interviewer asked Zollitsch, “You would now no longer describe it in such a way that God gave his own son, because we humans were so sinful? You would no longer describe it like this?” Would they answer as Zollitsch responded, “No.” ???
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/christ-did-not-die-for-the-sins-of-the-people-head-of-german-catholic-bisho
Their answer seems to be patently YES…we share the cult of apostasy…we no longer profess that Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins.
Recent information I saw suggests that the new breviary translation could actually hit the shelves by 2024, not that the translation wouldn’t be done until then.
Too true, alas.
His name is Joseph Verbis LAFLEUR! Lafluer NOT.
This is catch-up work orchestrated under pressure to finally address concerns in the Catholic Church which should have had primary attention beginning at least 50 years ago. It is meant to show the world that the bishops are busy getting things done, without making a firm statement on the matter of public official’s who support and promote grave evil—those flaunting their intent to continue to receive Holy Communion.
These prelates estimate the work will stretch into 2024. How convenient to, all of a sudden, work on 50 year old issues of importance, so as to side-step taking definitive action on those who publicly pluck the Lord’s beard, buffet him, and spit upon him.
Now these church officials talk about two military men who sacrificed their lives to serve others. Have church leaders been inspired by their heroic example? Judging from these prelates(lacking spiritual testosterone) I would say they have been busy with busyness these past fifty years. Were they willing to to lay their lives down taking the salvation of souls seriously? As Monsignor Mangan stated:
” Regarding the authority of a local ordinary in his diocese, Mangan emphasized the duty of a bishop “to teach, to proclaim, to sanctify, and to safeguard.”
“Safeguarding has a place. To safeguard the faith, to safeguard the dignity of human life, and the reverence due to the sacraments, I think that has a real definite place,” he said. See: Bishops must address Biden’s policies that contradict Church teaching, theologians say – Catholic World Report
I think not, or they wouldn’t be playing distraction with unfinished work, so that, the Biden/Pelosi’s of this world won’t be noticed. This is criminal.