If Amy Bleuel's Death Leaves You Feeling More Helpless, Please Remember This

When someone dies by suicide, it’s often accurate to blame stigma. If this person had only been comfortable talking about their suicidal thoughts, we think, perhaps they could have been helped. It’s the basis of every “anti-stigma” campaign, really. To end suffering. To pull people out of shadows. To save lives.

That’s why it’s a complex kind of painful to lose someone in the suicide prevention community to suicide. Someone who wasn’t fully in the shadows. Someone who didn’t let stigma stop them from speaking out about suicidal ideation and previous suicide attempts. Someone who actively spread messages of hope for others who face similar struggles.

It’s really hard to lose Amy.

If you don’t know Amy Bleuel, you probably know her work. She’s the reason the semicolon is more than punctuation for many who deal with both self-harm and suicidal ideation. Her nonprofit, Project Semicolon, brought together people who found hope in her message — that just like a semicolon, you can continue even when “your sentence” seems finished. The organization’s tag is: “Your story isn’t over.”

When sharing this news to the mental health community, my heart broke not only for Amy’s friends and family, but for everyone in the mental health community who saw the semicolon as a symbol of hope. My biggest fear was that those struggling upon hearing this news would feel like those who speak about suicide prevention were bullshitting them. I didn’t want our words of hope to lose meaning. I didn’t want people to lose hope for their own stories.

But all this proves is that suicide prevention is complicated, and we have a lot of research and work to do so more lives can be saved.

Suicide prevention work is done almost exclusively by people who have lost someone to suicide or who have experienced their own suicidality. Often, the calling to suicide prevention comes close on the heels of a near miss with an attempt, or the suicide death of someone we love, and it comes with urgency. In that way, it puts many of us in a precarious position: we so desperately want to save others from suicide that we forget to save ourselves. We dive in with our life raft before we learn to swim. — Dese’Rae L. Stage, suicide prevention activist and founder of Live Though This

I wanted to acknowledge the complexity of Amy’s death. I wanted people who feel hopeless right now to know we understand how much this sucks. We’re not going to pretend it didn’t happen. But we will tell you in no way does this taint the amazing work Amy did. It doesn’t make your semicolon tattoo have less meaning.

Amy fought against her own thoughts of suicide, and in doing so she gave so many people the opportunity to share their pain, their endurance, and their triumphs in a way that simultaneously spurred discussion and battled prejudice. For those of us in the field of suicide prevention, we’re reminded of the need to redouble our efforts, work harder, work more effectively, and to ensure people that hope, help, and healing is happening. —  Chris Maxwell, Advisory Board Member for OurDataHelps.org

I wanted to talk to other suicide prevention activists to get their thoughts on where we go from there. All echoed the same theme: We keep going. We keep spreading hope. We work harder.