Dear Vets: Are You Thinking About Suicide?

Official Handbook of Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST) Workshop

Dear Vets- Are You Thinking About Suicide?

September is Suicide Prevention Month. This is the third time I've written about my friend Bobby.

Bobby Barrios died on May 25, 2019.

He was a Green Beret and a senior communications sergeant on ODA 1211. He served twelve years before he separated. He had charisma, a good attitude, and more friends than most people I know. None of us saw it coming.

If Bobby had reached out to any one of us, we would have moved mountains for him. He didn't. I don't believe that was because he didn't trust us. I think that by the time he needed to reach out, reaching out no longer felt like something available to him.

What I got wrong about my own situation

In 2017, I lost my job in the middle of an MBA program. What followed was worse than the job loss. I was angry, I wasn't sleeping, and I was difficult to be around. When someone suggested that what I was dealing with might be PTSD, I dismissed it. In the world I came from, weakness was something you smothered before anyone noticed.

My wife pushed me to get help. I completed twelve weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy at the VA hospital. It taught me to recognize my triggers and gave me a way to rebuild.

I was not in an acute crisis, and it still took months and my wife's insistence to walk through the door. Consider the friction for someone who is.

Three things from suicide intervention training

After Bobby, I took Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training. Three things stayed with me.

People who are considering suicide almost always feel like a burden. Not sad, not weak. A burden. They've done the math and concluded that the people who love them would be better off without the weight of them.

They also feel trapped. One survivor described it as being locked in a wooden box with mirrors on every surface. You see only yourself, magnified. You end up believing you aren't worth much, and you can't see or hear the people outside pounding on the box trying to get to you.

The third is the one I use most. Ask clearly, and ask up front – “Are you thinking about suicide?” Not "are you okay," not "you'd tell me if something was wrong, right." Every instinct tells you that saying the word will put the idea in someone's head. It does not. What it does is tell them the subject is allowed, and that you are not going to flinch. Most people, when asked plainly, will answer plainly.

That's why this article is titled the way it is. If you're reading this and the answer is yes, keep going.

The specific problem with people like us

I've talked with Veterans at every stage of life, and there's a pattern I no longer treat as coincidence.

We're ashamed of being depressed. Ashamed of feeling helpless or lost. And because we're ashamed of it, we handle it the way we handle everything else: privately, on our own, through sheer effort.

What makes that dangerous is that it usually works. Our resolve and our grit are real, and most of the time they carry us through, which reinforces the belief that we can always figure it out alone. Then one time it doesn't work, and the result is permanent.

"Everyone knows where to go for cancer"

At one of our Grip Hands events at Strong Gray Line, Zach Peyton, USMA '04, made a point I haven't been able to shake. The Strong Gray Line is a non-profit I support, and Haley Uthlaut (co-president), the Board, and I recently narrowed the organization's focus to West Point graduates who struggle with mental health, and brought on Liz Dewberry as our Executive Director to lead the work. Narrow is what lets a small organization do something real.

Zach's point was this. If you're diagnosed with cancer, you know where to go. You've heard of the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic. You know world-class treatment exists, you have some sense of what good looks like, and people will help you get there. You would actually tell people you’re in a fight of your life and ask for support.

Now suppose you're diagnosed with depression, or you're sitting in your truck in a parking lot thinking about the fastest way out.

Where do you go?

Most people have no idea, and looking doesn't make it clearer. Some facilities marketed as treatment centers aren't equipped to keep a patient in crisis safe. There isn't broad agreement on what a good one even requires. We have no Mayo Clinic for this, and most of us couldn't describe one if we saw it.

The VA counted 6,398 veteran suicides in 2023. The number I'd underline is different: 61 percent of them had not received VA health care in the last year of their life. Whatever system we think we've built, most of the people we lost were nowhere near it.

The answer we keep arriving at is Community

Being genuinely connected to people who already know you and whom you already trust. For West Point grads, the natural unit is the graduating class. Nobody has to explain themselves to someone who was there. For other Veterans, it might be a previous unit or a team.

The reason it works is the same reason it's hard. A stranger on a phone line has no history with you. Someone who watched you get through basic or “Beast” has decades of evidence that you're worth keeping around, and can say so in a way you'll actually believe.

But it takes effort, and it takes vulnerability. Someone has to go first.

What I'm asking

If you're in this boat, don't bottle it. Email me at freddie@milspectalent.com and I will answer.

If you’re wanting to help others, say so publicly. Post this month on whatever platform you actually use that you're willing and able to listen, and that another Veteran can come to you. Someone in your feed needs to know a specific name, not a hotline number they've scrolled past a hundred times.

Then get trained. ASIST is a two-day workshop through LivingWorks that teaches you to recognize when someone is inviting help and what to do next. It's where I learned to ask the question directly, and it's the difference between wanting to help and knowing how. Reply to this email if you want help finding a course.

Bobby had a hundred people who would have come for him. The box doesn't let you see them. 

So the ones outside have to knock loud enough to be heard.

If you are in crisis: call or text 988 and press 1 for the Veterans Crisis Line, or text 838255.

Press on,
Freddie J. Kim

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