Brandon: Welcome to season four, a new season of the Leaders Way podcast. Misty and Whitney, I’m so thrilled to be gathered around the table with you.
Misty: Woo hoo.
Whitney: Amazing.
B: It’s the beginning of a new semester here at Yale. It’s the beginning of your last year.
M: Oh, I just, I don’t know how to feel about that, Whitney. What about you? I can’t.
B: Tell me about the vibes right now. How is this feeling?
M: I am really excited because school is my happy place. So I’m happy about … I can’t wait to sit down in a classroom again. I have my syllabus already going. I am not even kidding you. This is how excited I am. But also it just doesn’t seem real. And I think I’m starting to already have that feeling of, oh no, it’s almost over. And we have not started the year yet. So that’s concerning me a bit bout myself. Yeah. I’m going to miss this a lot. I really am. Yeah.
B: Oh gosh. Yeah. What about you, Whitney?
W: There’s just a lot of emotions that come with that final year. I mean, I’m just, I’m so thrilled to be a senior. Again, this is like the fourth time in my life I’ve been a senior.
B: It won’t be the last, though, will it, Whitney? The literally–the last one is like the long term senior.
W: So yeah, being the oldest and wisest in the group will be fun. I’ve loved being friends with Misty because she, her enthusiasm about school is infectious. And so if you just hang with her, then you’ll, you’ll complete all your assignments. You’ll know what’s coming next. And you’ll even be almost excited to talk about Barth for 25 pages. So I’m, I’m excited to hang with Misty for this next year.
I’m also really excited about like the discovery and like … discovering what the future holds because honestly, a lot of us at Berkeley, we don’t really know; a lot of us are on the ordination track, but we don’t know where we’re going to end up. And you know, it’s always God willing and the people consenting. We imagine something, but who knows. And for me right now, that unknown is a bit exciting. And also anxiety-producing if I let it go in that direction, but honestly, more excitement around it.
M: That’s such a good point. You’re totally right.
B: Of course. I’m so thankful you’re both here. I wonder, are there any bucket list things like Yale specific, New Haven specific bucket list things that you want to make sure happen before you get all dressed up in May and walk down the aisle and we all cheer you on?
M: I don’t know. I can’t think of a like particular thing. I think I’ve just been pondering being more cognizant and intentional of putting myself in all the spaces. Do you know what I mean? Spending more time at the library. Spending some time at Sterling library, going to the gym, doing, you know, doing the things that are actually in town. So that’s on my mind.
W: So it would be pretty amazing if like this semester and next semester, I actually like read everything that’s on the syllabus, that I’ve been asked to read. What if that’s the bucket list is like you actually …
B: Whitney’s dirty little secrets emerging before the world.
W: Oh, come on.
M: I’m going to try to not read everything.
W: Unless you’re Misty, You don’t. You can’t possibly read everything.
B: I was having this conversation with, I don’t know, like a dozen students. Like, Come on. It’s humanly impossible to read everything. And Misty, you were like a first year student. You’re like, “I read every single word.” And I was like, She’s not telling the truth. But I was like, now that I know you, you were totally telling the truth.
M: Okay. But I will admit that actually last semester, kick my tail with that because a certain professor who will go um … nameless (Jennings) would assign 400 pages of reading sometimes a week, every week. And that is more typically how much you would have total. So that meant I was looking at 700 … There was, there were a few pages that went unread … skimmed or something.
W: Even though we know that, I mean, it’s good. It was, it was good for us. And whatever Willie Jennings tells you to read.
M: Oh my gosh. You should read it five times and then have him tell you about it.
B: Yeah. You should do anything he tells you to do.
M: Anything he says. It’s so true.
B: We had a great episode in season two with Willie Jennings for this one.
W: That’s right.
M: Yep. It was great.
B: Well, I mean, follow along throughout the year, listen to all the episodes to track your journeys through the last year.
M: See how much we read or don’t read.
B: I guess speaking of journeys, we’re going on a journey today. It’s, it’s one that’s, that’s heavy. It’s intense. It’s a … we’re going to have a conversation today about suicide and mental health. And if this conversation feels overwhelming, like it’s too much for you, you may need to step away. Or you may need to find yourself actually leaning in to find in the wisdom, in the conversation, the some of the support you need. So, so we’re just sharing that at the outset.
Church spaces have sadly, not often been places where we’ve been able to have thoughtful, intelligent, well-informed science-informed conversations about suicide. And, and often we do so much more damage even as we minister to people who’ve been touched by suicide, right? So this conversation feels really, really important. And we have with us Michelle Snyder, who’s spent, you know, the last couple of decades or more of her life, researching, writing, ministering and thinking about how the church can be more compassionate, more responsive and more lifesaving really around, around issues surrounding suicide.
M: With as many people as we know are listening to this, we know that there are some of you out there who are really affected by this directly. And so we wanted to offer to you the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. And that number is just 988. So whether you need it or it’s something you can pass on to someone else, we hope that’s an easy thing to remember 988, the lifeline.
W: So I’m going to introduce Michelle Snyder, who is the executive director and a trainer at Soul Shop. Michelle has been a key member of the Soul Shop since its inception in 2014. With her background in both social work and theology, Michelle is uniquely equipped to serve as the primary Soul Shop presenter and faith community specialist. She’s led presentations in 37 states and four countries and has been a featured speaker at several national and state level conferences. Michelle is also the co-author of Life, Death and Reinvention: the Gift of the Impossibly Messed Up Life. Beyond her work in suicide prevention, she’s a mental health therapist, executive leadership coach, church consultant, and a devoted mother of two teenage daughters.
B: Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world.
We convene sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who explore the creative vision needed to lead change in our aching world .I’m Dr. Brandon Nabi, lecturer at Yale Divinity School and executive director of the Office of Transforming Leaders at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. I’m so glad you’re here.
Michelle Snyder, welcome to the Leaders Way podcast.
Michelle: Thank you very much. Good to be with you.
B: Oh, it’s so great to have you back here at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. For listeners and for Whitney and Missy, I want to give the context that Michelle gave a workshop to clergy here at Berkeley in the wintertime. I mean, it was one of the largest workshops we’ve ever run. And your teaching was so rich, so engaged, the stories, the insights we were hanging on all of your teaching. And I’m just so thankful for the work and ministry that you do. And you are kind enough to hop back on and share your ministry and your teaching on the podcast. So thanks so much for coming on back.
Michelle: Sounds funny to say that I’m always happy to talk about suicide, but it’s true.
B: Well, I mean, I think that’s what touched me deeply, the way in which you were just so comfortable talking about topics and suicide in particular that many of us, I know myself, I’m just so uncomfortable talking about. And maybe you can begin just by framing the state of the conversation right now. I’m hearing so much more about suicide in the news. I’m hearing folks in my own family impacted. Suicide seems to be more prevalent now than ever. Can you frame kind of the state of the challenge and just name some context for our conversation?
Michelle: Again, all of this is complicated and a little hard to say, but like in some ways suicide is having its day. Soul Shop is the organization that I run and Soul Shop was started by a pastor. The story goes that he had had a couple suicides in his church and this was in the 90s, mid 90s. He had a couple suicides in his church, three to be exact, three high school students died in one academic year. And he was like, you know somebody’s got to do something about this. And so he got trained in secular suicide prevention. And he said he would just go all over Southern Ohio teaching classes, kind of gatekeeper, one hour classes on suicide. And he said consistently, I’d like fill fire halls and school auditoriums and, you know, community centers with a hundred people that would want to talk about this topic that no one was talking about. And he said consistently, I’d look around and there just wouldn’t be a pastor in the room. Like there’d be everybody, teachers and health care people and parents and grandparents and first responders. Everybody was showing up for the conversation, but pastors.
And so Soul Shop’s origins really come from someone who looked around and said, no one is talking about this. I think we fast forward. The–it’s hard to say that that was 35 years ago. The 90s were 35 years ago. But we fast forward 35 years ago. And what I think happened is that back during that same period of time, a number of organizations and people had a similar sensibility. And so you can find multiple suicide prevention organizations started in the 90s, Living Works Education, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. And those organizations that were mom and pop, that were organic, that were grassroots are just sort of living into their maturity now. And so all of a sudden you sort of see this landscape populated in new ways with this conversation and think like we were never talking about it before. Really, there’s been kind of an army of people working to build the movement that is just sort of broken through the surface, I think.
Also, what’s true is that suicide rates are on the rise and they have been on the rise since that day. I think it’s since sometime in the 90s when they started tracking suicide rates, they’ve done nothing but climb consistently. So all these organizations work in all the talk about it, all the 988 helplines that are formed, all the things that are being done, the money raised, millions of dollars in research. The numbers still keep climbing, which is fascinating and challenging and important for us to know.
I think–I should say with one caveat, there were two years in that period from the 90s until now, the suicide rates dropped. And that was the two years of COVID, which is also really interesting. Yeah, lots of people think they went up and what did go up were calls to the call centers. Like help-seeking went up. Those kinds of things. I don’t know the data on reports about ideation, but suicide rates themselves dropped by 6%. 6% one year and 2% the next year, I think. So yeah, it’s interesting. And at Soul Shop, we have a theory and I do have a theory. I think I stand behind it pretty strongly. As we’ve done this work and the more you do the good you know, until you know better than you do better.
I think for a long time we have attributed suicide to this sort of narrow lane of mental health. And it is mental health, right? All health, you know, mental health is health and everybody has it and sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. So we, but really, I think what we’ve done with suicide is siloing it really towards mental illness. We’d probably deny that if you asked us that, but it’s kind of where we’ve put it. So people that somebody dies by suicide, you hear people say like, I didn’t even know that person was depressed. And in fact, the truth is that everybody who dies by suicide is not depressed. The data is about 60% of people who die by suicide had major depressive disorder at the time of their death, which is more than half, but just more than half. And there’s a difference between, you know, biochemical depression that’s just sort of comes from nowhere and the kind of situational depression that comes because of life circumstances.
So we’ve put it in that lane and we’ve done a lot of thinking about kind of channeling people towards therapy and channeling people towards medication and channeling people towards, um, towards hospitalization. There’s, you know, there’s been a lot of fear about suicide in the past about liability around it. You know, if you tell me you’re going to kill yourself, I’ve got to tell somebody. And so we feel like we need to put them in the hospital. All these things, I think have inadvertently accidentally helped to stigmatize the issue further.
And Soul Shop, my organization, is built around a quote from a suicideologist who also back in the 90s was doing this work. His name was Dr. David Litz and he chaired the Surgeon General’s task force on suicide prevention. And he said, people die by suicide for all kinds of reasons, but it basically comes down to two, a loss of hope and a loss of social connection. Um, I think we know more now. I think we also know that there’s a thwarted sense of belonging that’s part of that. And, and lots of research is being done about what are the other factors are. But, but if you think about hopelessness and isolation as the primary drivers, as opposed to sort of going down the path of depression, it shifts it away from this sort of biochemical factor, which is there. You know, it’s often there as one of the contributaries, but, but makes us ask different questions.
It makes us ask different questions of the world that we live in. It explains some more things about like, why are these rates rising as we are increasingly isolated on our phones? Why are these rates rising in worlds where, where, um, discrimination and mass incarceration are not going down, but instead are going up in spite of a black president and, you know, where did the arc of justice go? And, and all of those kinds of things that, that lend themselves to isolation and despair.
So I think in some ways, this is a long answer to your question, but I think in some ways the rise in suicide rates has something to do with being a little bit on the wrong track around some of that stuff. If I’m experiencing suicidality and you keep telling me, You need a therapist, and I know I don’t need a therapist–I need a job. Like I don’t need a therapist. I need a friend. I don’t need a therapist. I need to not file for bankruptcy. Like those, those are the kinds of things that create some dissonance in the industry that I think is part of our problem.
I think we’re doing better. I think we’re starting to think about how to get upstream, but, um, so suicide rates have been on the rise. Almost 50,000 people die by suicide every year at this point. And I think part of suicide having its day is that it’s just getting bigger and bigger and it’s harder and harder to avoid. So sorry for the long answer, but …
W: We need that context and I, I, yeah, I appreciate the full, fullness of that answer. And it also brought up all kinds of questionsI think for all of us, probably one of the questions that I’m holding right now, you talked about the siloing and the stigmatization of suicide, and the kind of restrictiveness of putting it into a lane of mental health. And I’m, I’m wondering about, you know, other lanes that we could put it in and your organization is definitely one of those spaces, um, where you’re thinking about it differently or trying to unsilo it, desilo it. So I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that, how you feel like that’s a, that’s another way of addressing or an important way and faith is a real key piece of this.
Michelle: Yeah, there is data to suggest that affiliation with a community of faith is protective of against suicide. So I’m a little careful with that statistic because on one hand I don’t want people to think this doesn’t exist inside the church. And on the other hand, I want communities of faith to understand that they just by virtue of being and by virtue of sort of the act of giving people a place to feel connected to, you know, something bigger than themselves, a place to be seen in a place to be involved, it can, it can be protective.
You know, well, how Living Works, the … probably the gold standard secular suicide intervention training company in the world, they’re from Canada. The way they frame it, this whole conversation is to talk about the river of suicide and where they start is by talking about how rivers get fed, which is with multiple contributors, right? There’s multiple feeders into a river and Living Works would say, suicide is never about just one thing, you know, I never want to be global, but you know, sometimes, sometimes you’re gonna have a real bad day that just overpowers your capacity to deal with it. But for the most part, suicide is almost never about just one thing. And they say it’s multiple contributors that feed this river.
In Soul Shop, we talk about seven of them. We’ve got seven different sort of categories when you say, like, sort of, mental health is one of the lanes, what are the other lanes? So we would say just sickness in general, whether you’ve got a mental illness, like anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, whatever, or chronic pain is a suicide risk, terminal diagnosis, chronic diagnosis, all of those are higher risk. So you’ve got sickness, and then add to that, shame, sometimes people … sometimes people have there’s something wrong with them. But sometimes they’ve done something that they feel bad about themselves, right? They feel guilt, they feel … they feel regret, they feel remorse, sometimes it’s shame around gender and sexuality issues or around body dysmorphia or around comparing myself. I mean, teenage girls’ suicide rates have skyrocketed as they’ve had access to all these sort of false notions of beauty, right? So you’ve got this kind of shame dynamic going on.
And then stress, you know, farmers have one of the highest suicide rates by vocation. And I always say in my trainings, like, how stressful must it be for the entire legacy of multi-generations of your families’ heritage, inheritance, vocation, identity, hanging on whether or not it rains? Like, what a what a crazy amount of stress that is. And then we talk about the societal and systemic issues that some of the fastest growing suicide rates, the most concerning are in black and brown communities right now. Indigenous communities have the very highest suicide rates of any ethnic group. Suicide rates for white men peak around between 45 and 65. But for black men, they peak around 25. And so there’s this kind of question of like, what are what are those kind of …what’s that discrimination and oppression that’s being experienced there? That’s creating hopelessness.
We talk about this, the sort of stat, like, just sort of baseline status things, like people who are suicide loss survivors have higher rates of suicide, the higher your ACE score or your adverse childhood experiences, the higher your ACE score, the higher your suicide risk across a lifetime. People who are in the foster care system have higher rates of suicide or risk for suicide. People who have been sexually abused as children, rape survivors, right? All of that sort of … veterans have higher suicide rates. So all those kind of baseline states. And then shunning is something that contributes to suicide when people do something wrong or are perceived as not right by their community and they get ostracized and shunned for that. That’s a suicide risk. And then sometimes people are trapped in situations like domestic violence or those kinds of situations that they can’t get out of.
And I tell you all that to sort of broaden the broaden the picture to say, if those are the multiple contributors, and, and it’s never just one thing, it’s often many, many things that are compounding, then where my organization comes in from the angle that we have is to say, like the mental health field has a role to play here. They definitely do for one of those lanes. But the church could do so many things for all of the other stuff.
And in our faith communities, we have been inclined to like, if we treat suicide like a hot potato, we catch it. And we just offload it as quick as possible to these referral systems that are really only trained, you know, for them, they’re a hammer. And so everything looks like a nail. And in fact, the truth is that when it comes to suicide, there’s a bunch of stuff going on and a hammer is only gonna fix one part of it. So I’m not sure if that exactly answers your question, but …
W: Yes, no, that that really does help. And I think also, I was, I am interested in talking more about how the church can help in all of those other areas, all the other ways it can show up. But first, I was wondering, also, how did you come to this? This topic, this issue, that’s so prevalent among us? And how did it dovetail with your own faith?
Michelle: Yeah, yep. Good, good question. Unexpected, unlikely answer. I am one of the few people in suicide prevention that you will ever meet who has had no personal experience with it whatsoever. Most people in this industry, either have their own suicidality or lost someone to suicide or some kind of personal interface. I did not have any at all. My friend who was the pastor in the 90s, who, who tells that story that I told you at the beginning, he and I were actually church consultants together.
The other thing I do for my day job is I’m a church consultant with the Center for Healthy Churches. And I am a recovering fundamentalist, ex-evangelical adult survivor of childhood clergy sexual abuse, spent many years in therapy sort of untangling toxic faith. Like, you’re going to ask me a question at the end about one of my random jobs, like, we’ll talk. But I, yeah, so, so I got a really good picture and I spent a lot of time thinking about how churches get it wrong. How churches can get it wrong, how faith communities can make it worse.
You know, and one of your questions was, how does faith help this? And, and I think it’s a complicated answer, because there are some, some manifestations of faith for people when they are in certain places that are really life-changing. You know, the companionship of Elijah and David who also struggled, the, the realization that, that Peter did stuff that he had a lot of shame around, and yet was forgiven. The ways that, the ways that our … that our community of ancestors understood this and knew, and that nothing can separate us from the love of God and Christ Jesus. All of these sort of this infusion of hope can be really helpful.
It can also be really isolating when, “Ask and you shall receive,” and I’m not receiving. Or when my faith community is teaching a gospel that says that I’m bad and wrong and need to be different in order to receive love. And so I think faith can be useful, but I’ll tell you where my faith community has been most useful to me is when they’ve been able to pray for things on my behalf when I stopped being able to name it for myself. I think when people are in despair, often they don’t need, you know, sometimes the text can help. No shade on Scripture, but sometimes the value of a community of faith is that the community can believe on our behalf. In Soul Shop, we talk about the story of the Philippian jailer. Paul and Silas are in jail, and most people miss the fact that when the jailer thought that they escaped, he was about to fall on his sword and kill himself. And what the text says is that Paul cried out from the darkness and said, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” And Soul Shop even has t-shirts that say that, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” The beauty of the text is that Paul says, “You’re not as alone as you think you are, and you have more options than you realize, and we will believe it on your behalf until you can believe it for yourself.”
So when we talk about the value and power of the faith community, like I think I’m pretty slow to just start peddling passages about hope. I think that’s a Maslow hierarchy, self-actualization kind of level, right? And when people are in despair, they’re at the very bottom of that. What they need is held. They need physically held. They need held in their faith.
Misty: Thinking about those stigmas that you mentioned earlier and how this topic gets treated like a hot potato that lands in our lap, and we want to toss it away as quickly as possible, what do you think are some ways that faith leaders can work to de-stigmatize it before the hot potato lands in their lap? Because from what you’ve said before, those hot potatoes are sitting in their congregation as it is, right? Like this difficulty is out there for everyone. What is the best thing for leaders to do?
Michelle: It’s a really good question. There are thousands of answers, and I think your question is the answer, right? Like, do something. Like, do something before the crisis, right? First of all, they should attend to Soul Shop. No, I’m just kidding. Yes, that’s true, but I’m just kidding. I do think that it’s a slow and steady turning up the temperature, right? Like when a person is sitting in your office, like saying, “I got a gun in my truck, and I need you to keep me here because I plan to use it on myself if I walk out there,” that’s a terrible time to start getting acclimated to this conversation, right?
One of our directors for Soul Shop for Black Churches is a pastor, and I am watching him using suicide and a pastoral prayer as part of a really long list of things people might be dealing with. It was a one-word, one-time, as a one-off. And then I started listening to him. He does weekly devotionals, and one of the devotionals was on people who are struggling with things they can’t quite handle on their own. And he mentioned, “I have a therapist.” And so it was just this really slow trickle, and now the water’s really running.
One of the things we do in Soul Shop is like a really intentional process of like, “Here’s all I want you to do. I want you to turn to the person next to you and use the word suicide in a sentence.” And I don’t even care what the sentence is. I just want everybody to get the word out of their mouth, and let’s see how that felt. We can’t talk about this if we can’t talk about it, so let’s use the word suicide. And they do, and some people struggle, and some people say, “That was really hard. I didn’t realize how that was going to be so hard. I found myself wanting to say ‘hurt yourself.’” Or, “I found myself wanting to say like some other more … kind of euphemism for it.” But you give them a chance to talk about the experience of trying to talk about it, and it’s really low stakes, right? I mean, my goal always in any training I do is to keep people in the yellow zone, which is like, you know, we don’t want to push people too far. And if you drop this big old bomb in the middle of the room, like people can’t handle that. But we’ve got to acclimatize.
One of the exercises that we do in the training is to have everybody write down the names of three people that they could call if they ever start thinking about suicide. It’s a great exercise because, number one,
suicide, honestly, suicide is just a gateway conversation. People who are thinking about suicide don’t want to be dead. They just want to be out of the pain that they’re in, right? And so when you ask someone if they’re thinking about suicide, really what we’re saying is, does it ever hurt so bad on a scale of like zero to 10, the pain scale? If zero is no pain and 10 is suicide, like does it ever hurt so bad that it gets to the point of suicide? We’re asking about pain.
So people who are thinking about suicide, it’s never about suicide. It’s often about domestic violence. It’s often about experiences of shame or regret. It’s about trauma. It’s about substance use and abuse. It’s about the stuff that we can’t shake. It’s about feeling like a failure. It’s about feeling like my future has no hope or prospects. So when we say write down the names of three people, we’re really saying, like, who are your people? Who are your people for suicide? Yes, but who are your people when you have a really bad day? Who are your people when you are about to do something really stupid? Who are your people when you’re feeling shame? And it gives people, you know, a realization like, oh, first of all, sometimes my first thoughts aren’t my best thoughts. What I didn’t write down my best friend because my best friend, I love to hang out, but she can’t keep a secret. Or the person who loves me most is somebody who can’t hear me say I’m not OK without falling apart themselves.
So it gives people time to create this network of safety in their own mind. It then is an invitation to use it in the small things as practice for the big things. It also is a way of saying, and you know what, I’m the pastor and I have one too. And your Sunday school teacher over there, they have one too. And everybody has one because this isn’t a thing that happens to sick or broken people. This is a thing that could happen to any of us. It’s the act of putting fidget spinners on every table so that the people who need them can play with them without shame because everybody’s got them. It’s the thing of everybody wearing a seat belt so that whoever has an accident has one on, right?
There’s a thousand answers to your question and your question is the answer. I think we start to do stuff and it’s not a once and done and it’s not all at one time or, you know, overnight. But I think we begin to just say hard things in the yellow zone where people can handle it that makes it possible to show that this is all of our thing. Yeah.
B: When I was in your wonderful workshop back in the wintertime, you encouraged us to ask folks that we’re working with closely in a pastoral conversation, for example, if they were considering suicide. This was a completely new and stunning thought to me that it would be appropriate or it wouldn’t be an invasion of someone’s boundaries or privacy to ask such a question. And I thought about it for the next week and thought, gosh, I wonder if I could do that. Well, a situation presented itself just shortly after and I could feel my heart racing and I thought, gosh, you know, there are enough of these risk factors that I remember Michelle describing. And I said, I’m not going to forgive myself if something happens. And I just I blurted it out. It was totally awkward and uncomfortable. I’m glad I did.
And we had such a rich conversation and felt more connected. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this because I think I still need a little more coaching. Like, do you really mean that? I mean, can you maybe do a little role play? Like, what does it sound like when done well? Because I think some of us not only feel awkward or afraid to do it, we’re afraid of doing it so badly that we make a situation worse, I think we imagine.
W: Or are we afraid that we have that we will make the situation worse or create ideation that isn’t already there or something?
Michelle: Yeah. Yeah. I will answer your question. But Brandon, I’m curious. Was the answer no? Did the person say no, they weren’t thinking about suicide.
B: They did. Yeah.
Michelle: Was it worth asking anyway?
B: Oh, for sure. Yeah. And I think the person felt cared for and felt my compassion and concern. So it certainly it helped the relationship, even though at least in that moment ideation wasn’t happening.
Michelle: Yeah. So a couple things there. I mean, the thing about the number on the pain scale, I think, is part of the orientation to your question. When we ask someone, are you thinking about suicide? It’s not a yes or I mean … it is a yes or no. Are you thinking about ending your life as a yes or no question? But in some ways, what you said is there are enough risk factors here. I’m seeing enough pain, distress, things that would cause me pain or distress. I see a person who is hurting. And when I say on a scale of zero to suicide, are you at the point of suicide? The answer might be no, but it doesn’t mean there’s nothing. Right. I mean, it might be the answer is “I’m a seven and seven means I sleep way too much these days” or “no, I’m not thinking about suicide, but I’ve been drinking more than I want to” or “no, I’m not thinking about suicide. But it gets really hard sometimes.” And all of that is an invitation to either a pastoral conversation or a very human conversation.
And so suicide is sort of the ultimate invitation to back into anything else that it could possibly be. Does that make any sense? Like, yeah. Yeah. I think when you say, does it ever get so bad that sometimes you think about suicide, you’ve kind of gone all the way up here. And so somebody might not feel free to say to you, you know, I drink too much. That’s a thing that elicits shame and we would maybe hide behind. But if you say, are you thinking about suicide? Now it gives them the chance to say, no, I’m not. Probably drinking more than I should. Right. And since you’ve named the hardest thing, everything they’ve got to say is less than that.
B: Ah, the permission gets somehow granted.
Michelle: Yep. That’s exactly right. Yeah. First of all, let me answer the answer the question or address the myth that asking somebody if they’re thinking about suicide can put the idea in their head. That question has been researched probably more than any other question in all of suicide prevention space. And there is absolutely zero indication or evidence that that’s the case. It’s just not there. You know, you can kind of think like if I said to you, any one of the three of you, you know, I’ve been thinking, I was wondering if you were thinking about signing all your paychecks over to me for the next six months. Like, if you’re not thinking about that, like, I haven’t just put that idea in your head. We are so hardwired towards life that we can’t put the idea in someone’s head.
And the thing is, like I said, people who are thinking about suicide don’t want to be dead. It’s not like you’ve injected this idea of wanting to be dead in the mind of somebody who doesn’t want to be dead. People who are thinking about suicide want to be out of the pain that they’re in, and they can’t they sometimes think that death might be the only way. And so all you’re asking is, Has it got so bad that sometimes you think that death is the only way? And you’re not, you’re not inserting anything in that.
So it’s just, and it’s just not there. The data, it’s not there.
W: Yeah. Thanks for saying it again.
Michelle: Yeah. Yeah. We like two different ways of asking the question that that work pretty well to sort of mitigate some of what you’re talking about. One is “Sometimes people going through what you’re going through start to think about suicide. Are you thinking about suicide?” And that way of asking has a way of building community, right? I thought I was the only ones ever felt this way, but actually sometimes you’re part of a big group of people who have this very normal response that you might be having to or might not be, but it’s normal. And lots of people have been here. It also kind of communicates a level of competence with the topic. Like I know this well enough to know that there’s this subgroup of people. Like so sometimes people going through what you’re going through start to think about suicide. Are you thinking about suicide?
And the other one is what I’ve been saying. Does it ever get so bad that sometimes you think about suicide? And in some ways, that second one, does it ever get so bad that sometimes you think about suicide is a way of not … I mean, suicide is secondary to the question of how bad is it, right? It’s not an assessment question that’s a checkbox as much as it’s a, “I see that it’s bad. I want to kind of hear how bad it is, even if that means that it’s suicide.” So we say clear, compassionate, and confident, and those ways are all three of those. The data suggests that 6% of adults and 20% of kids are thinking about suicide at any given time. That’s a crazy number. One in every 17 adults and one in every five kids is thinking about suicide at any given time. And so, you know, Brandon, when you say, “Do you really mean it?” That we’re really supposed to ask that question. And like, yeah, every single day you’re brushing up against someone who is in so much pain that they think death is the best option they’ve got. That’s generally how I frame the language of suicide. When I talk about suicide, that’s the most common way that I say it. I don’t say committing suicide. I mean, nobody in the industry anymore says commit suicide. That’s become a stigmatized way of talking about suicide because we commit things that are wrong. Like we commit crimes. We commit sins, right? Are you thinking about suicide or if somebody dies by suicide is the preferred language.
But all of that sort of makes suicide this thing, this scary hot potato, if you will, this sort of stand-alone entity that’s scarier than all the other things. And I like to frame it– language shapes culture–I like to frame it as people who are in so much pain that they think that death is the best option they’ve got. People who think the world would be better off if they were not in it. And when we start talking about suicide like that, it gives new lenses for thinking about who’s at risk and then how we can help the person who’s at risk.
Misty: Given those numbers … one in five is terrifying to me. Oh my goodness, to think that that many kids are thinking about it. One in 16 or 17 adults, too. Given those numbers, we have people listening right now who would fall into that category. Could you take a moment here to speak to them?
Michelle: Yeah, sure. You’re right. I mean, I’ll speak to you first to say that your sensibility is a good one there. I say it to everybody anywhere, but to clergy folk and people in ministry always presume that wherever you are and whoever you’re speaking to, there are people who are thinking about suicide. And I think what I would say to anybody listening who’s thinking about suicide is that I believe you when you say that it’s bad. And I’m sorry. I wish that it wasn’t, and I’m glad that you have stuck around. I’m glad that you’re still trying to find ways to stay.
I have a belief that there are people who care. I know that there are resources. If there is nothing else in your life that’s keeping you here, 988 is always a resource to turn to. I think we often aren’t as alone as we think we are, and we have more resources than we know. But we can’t often get out of the situations we’re in in isolation. And I know that the more pain we’re in, the less likely we want to talk. I would say try to talk. Try to find somebody, that Sunday school teacher that you haven’t talked to in 40 years, but you know who loved you. The grandparent, the uncle that you haven’t talked to in a long time. Find somebody. Tell them what’s going on and ask for the help that you need. That’s what I would say.
Misty: Thank you.
Michelle: One of our sensibilities is that in addition to those people who are listening, there are also people listening who are worried about a loved one who’s thinking about suicide. And there are options and there are people out there who are doing really good work. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is a great organization with chapters in every single state. NAMI is in your community. Mr. Rogers said, “Look for the helpers.” And they exist.
So I know that can be isolating and it can feel like there’s not a lot of choices, but there’s help. There’s also people who have lost someone to suicide who are often triggered in their pain. And there are people who have their own lived experience of suicide. And one of our visions in Soul Shop is that there are often, I think probably many, many of our churches on any given day, there are people who are thinking about suicide sitting right beside people who have been suicidal in the past. And they found ways to live and we just want to get those people talking to each other. So, yeah. Yeah, that’s a good reminder. Thanks for that.
W: I guess the question I’m still holding is to take us back in the conversation about how pastors were not in the audience in the 90s when your colleague was out there giving workshops and doing these talks. Are you seeing a shift in church leadership and in church communities, congregations around this issue? Are you seeing rays of hope or signs of hope? Yeah, sure. About how we’re showing up? What does that look like?
Michelle: Well, the kingdom comes here and there now and again. I mean, I think, I do think, you know, there was a time that we didn’t talk about cancer because I think we are natural. I wasn’t born then, but there are people who remember those days. And I think that we are inclined to only want to talk about the things that we have some capacity to do something about. I think we think we avoid topics that we don’t understand. And as education is going up and as information is coming out and as all the public health folks are doing their job and doing their work, as people have more and more resources and feel more and more capable of dealing with it, all of a sudden they’re more willing to talk about it. So I do think, I do think that faith communities are coming around. I think that, you know, Soul Shop is a great program, but I do think that it happens to have been burst like at a synchronistic time. And so just as pastors are starting to look for resources, you know, we’re here and people are coming and they’re showing up and they’re preaching sermons on suicide. They’re praying prayers about suicide. And I get stories like Brandon’s almost daily, like, I went to a thing and you said that I might use this thing. And lo and behold, I ran into somebody and I did it. I did it. Yeah. So I do think that churches are doing much better.
I think this generation, you know, the emerging generations, even Gen Xers are better at talking about this. One of the problems we have in younger generations is the overuse of the word suicide. There’s a kind of flippancy with the language that can give you an illusion. Everybody wants diagnosed and it’s kind of a source of identity to have a mental health diagnosis or something. I find that generation no more willing to talk about the things that cause them so much pain that they think that death is the only option they have. And so I think that it’s kind of an illusion, but that is a generation that’s more willing to talk about mental health and mental illness and all of that. So we’re seeing some shifts, very hopeful work to be in. People ask me all the time, like, is it hard? It must be hard to talk about suicide all the time. And it isn’t. It isn’t. What I get to be is the arbiter of hope in some pretty dark spaces. So that’s good stuff.
B: I mean, thank you so much for all this work, Michelle. I wonder before we end the conversation, if you share a little bit more about Soul Shop, we have a lot of clergy leaders listening in. A lot of folks who are members of the church who are just really intrigued by your work feel called to engage with this. How can they engage with you at Soul Shop? What sorts of programs do you run? Obviously, you do clergy trainings. Do you come to churches and do things for faith communities locally?
Michelle: We do. Yeah, we do. So Soul Shop is a national movement, actually international. We launched into Africa in January. It’s an international movement where we do one day training for faith community leaders. We define that broadly. That’s pastors or youth ministers or deacons or parish nurses or Stephen ministers or anybody who wants to be more involved in the life of the church, in mental health ministry and the life of the church. We teach them all how to build what we call soul safe communities, then teach them how to take that out into their church and do it as well. We do a whole biblical analysis of all the places you can find suicide in the Bible. We have them write a prayer that uses the word suicide, and then we pray together those prayers. We talk about all of those. We call them seven S’s of suicide, the stigma or the shunning and the shame and the being stuck in a life that’s not worth it. Help them sort of really roadmap for their own congregation, what it would look like to pick up some of those and take them on as missions. So that’s what Soul Shop is. After you go through a Soul Shop, we have a curriculum that they can take back to their congregation and start using it to run with their own people. We believe in a soul safe community. Every person in the church has been taught to ask the question, has been given the opportunity to practice that, has a list of resources to lead people to safety, has been given a script for how to ask the questions, the names of three people written down. So our curriculum helps the leaders in the communities to take that back into the church.
We have Soul Shop for leaders, Soul Shop for youth workers, Soul Shop for campus ministry, Soul Shop for Hispanic churches, Soul Shop for black churches. It’s translated into Spanish. We’re currently working on Soul Shop for Korean churches and Soul Shop for Indigenous communities. Oh, and Soul Shop Africa too. So translated into Spanish and French. The way it works is that somebody wants to bring us to their community calls and says, “Will you come?” And then we say, “Yes.” And so that’s often, we’ve been brought in by, you know, continuing ed programs and seminaries, by diocese and conferences and presbyteries, by ministeriums in a community, by churches large enough. There’s an Episcopal church in Connecticut that’s bringing us in in October.
Anybody that has the heft to do it, you know, a small church of 25 people in rural Vermont might struggle to both afford it and fill a room. But one of the most robust ones I ever did was in Northwest Minnesota in a farm town of 200 people. And there was a murder-suicide on the reservation 10 days before the event. And I think there were more people in the room than there were residents of that town. So, yeah, if there is a will and a desire to bring us in to do that, we’re one phone call away, the website is soulshotmovement.org. So you can learn more there.
B: Well, one of our traditions here on the Leaders Way podcast is to combat what we see as this putting experts on pedestals. We know that experts and people with a certain amount of expertise are real people like anyone else. And so we have a little tradition of asking some fun questions so we can further get to know you. So even conversations this serious often end in joyful and hopeful ways. And you have a way of radiating joy and hope even as you lean in to really difficult conversations. So I suspect this might come quite naturally to you. Well, Misty, what do we call this segment?
Misty: It’s time to play Holy Cow, a game that’s inspired by our mascot, St. Lucas, who is a winged ox, believe it or not. So our first question for you today is, what is your favorite snack?
Michelle: We and my family have recently rediscovered like plain rippled potato chips and old fashioned French onion dip. Like the 1980s French onion dip and chips. Yeah, so it’s the newest favorite snack.
Misty: I like that. That’s a good one.
B: That French onion dip. I haven’t thought of that in years.
Misty: I know. And then you’re like, why did I forget about it?
Michelle: Exactly the question. All these flavored chips and stuff. And we were like, where did the French onion dip go? Why did we stop this? Yeah. So that’s what.
Misty: Okay. What about your favorite way to unwind after a long day?
Michelle: I’m an avid reader. I’m an avid reader and I almost only read fiction. So a glass of wine in my recliner with a 300 page fiction book. Five hundred is too many. Two hundred is not enough. Three hundred is exactly the right size novel. Yeah.
Misty: A random former job that you would like to share.
Michelle: Well, I told you that I was a fundamentalist, recovering fundamentalist. And I lived in New York City and I would dress up as a clown with a boombox and go to Coney Island and like do puppet shows and like.
Misty: Fantastic.
Michelle: No, no, no, no.
W: I was going to say it’s like the beginning of a horror film.
Misty: The clown with the boombox at Coney Island.
B: Jump scare.
Michelle: Yeah. You know, like when you’re like reaching like a fever pitch of a crisis moment where the collapse is really close. Yeah, that clown thing was really, really close to the end. Yeah.
Misty: That might be a story for another day. OK, do you have a bad habit you’re willing to share?
Michelle: I do. It is not as bad of a habit as it used to be. But I notoriously would leave my wet towels on the bed.
W: I’m so disappointed. The way … I’m so sad right now.
Misty: You can never travel with me. I’m just kidding.
Michelle: Well, so here’s I mean, I use this in my therapy practice a lot. My husband would like, you know, early marital conflict and nag, nag, nag and stop. And why don’t you and would you please? And it wasn’t working. It didn’t work at all. It didn’t penetrate until he just started … he didn’t say word. He just left them on my pillow. And so I would go to bed. And my towels are like, yeah, I have a wet pillow and it broke me like nothing has ever broke me. So I still do it from time to time, but it was a great strategy. Kudos to his brilliance on that.
Misty: That is pretty great. OK, the best one of all, who plays you in the movie version of your life?
Michelle: I don’t I don’t know. What do you think?
Misty: All of a sudden I’m picturing that –who was it that was on like Cagney and Lacey?
W: Oh, Tyne Daly. Was that Tyne Daly?
Misty: I think you’re right. Maybe…
W: Maybe … she’s a wonderful actress.
Misty: Oh, such a talented actress.
W: But I don’t know. When somebody asked me this question once, I just decided to pick the person that I admire most. The actor actress I admire most, which I will say is Meryl Streep for all everyone.
B: Oh, that’s a strong answer.
Misty: She can do anything.
Michelle: I don’t want to steal that from you.
W: You should have her.
Misty: Just for today.
Michelle: I mean, we’re not delving back into deep stuff, but we’ve been so many selves. Yeah. And and there’s this kind of like one of my one of my adventures last year was like buying a mermaid tail online and like learning to swim like a mermaid in somebody’s backyard. And then on over here, I’m like a nationally renowned speaker that like garners respect from the masses. And so I don’t know.
Misty: And in your spare time, you’re a mermaid. I love it.
W: I just feel like Meryl Streep could do all of those roles.
Michelle: Well, maybe that’s true.
B: Yeah, she checks all those boxes.
Misty: Exactly. It’s true.
B: Well, thank you so much, Michelle, for your ministry, for making time for us. Would you offer a prayer or a blessing for our podcasts and our listeners?
Michelle: I would. And in fact, what I have done is pull up the benediction that we close every Soul Shop with.
B: Oh, beautiful.
Michelle: Yeah. And it is from St. Francis.
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths and superficial relationships so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection and isolation so that you may reach out your hands to comfort them and turn their pain into joy.
May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in the world so that you can do what others say cannot be done, bringing hope and kindness to all God’s children.
Amen.
B: Thank you for joining us today on the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We hope you found the episode expansive and nourishing. If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your support helps us to continue bringing you sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars and spiritual leaders who are dedicated to transforming our world. For more information about our guests and to catch up on past episodes, visit our website at Berkeleydivinity.yale.edu . Follow the show on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast to stay updated on future episodes and events. Until next time, I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, walking with you as you lead with courage, wisdom and compassion.
W: And until next time, peace be with you.