We wrote this op-ed for World Suicide Prevention Day 2025. It takes issue with the standard line on suicide, which is perhaps why no mainstream media outlet picked it up. We stand by our advice. Please feel free to share it widely.
Whatever our country has been doing to lessen rates of suicide, it doesn’t seem to be working. The CDC reports that over the past quarter century, suicide rates increased 37 percent. In 2024, they climbed from 14.2 to 14.7 per 100,000 people. Youth suicide attempts are rising sharply.
We want policymakers to know that a fundamental misunderstanding of suicide is weakening prevention efforts. Put simply: Suicidality isn’t cured by kindness. It’s cured by restoring a sense of agency.
We are two women with fulfilling lives and successful careers—one a psychologist, one an author of leadership and mental health books—who went through months-long episodes of depression or anxiety severe enough to cause suicidal ideation. We know what helped us recover and what didn’t. This past summer and fall, as part of our research for a forthcoming book about mental breakdowns in high-functioning professionals, we interviewed 24 individuals who navigated one or more serious mental collapses. About 40 percent of our interviewees thought seriously about suicide; a few planned how they might do it; one made an actual attempt.
Most people see suicidality as a death wish fueled by dark emotions. Brighten the emotions, they think, and the wish will disappear. Show the unhappy person they are loved or that their problems aren’t so bad, and they’ll stop wanting to die. In a suicide’s aftermath, survivors imagine scenarios in which they “reached out” to the deceased in a caring way. “If only he’d felt he had a home!” said one tearful guest at a memorial service for a friend. More empathy from others, she assumed, would have raised her friend’s spirits and kept him alive.
We’ve learned this assumption is wrong. What the suicidal have in common isn’t a particular feeling or attitude, nor a need for sympathy, but a belief that their mental anguish—whatever its nature, whatever its cause—has spiraled beyond their control. They believe they’ve tried everything to stop the suffering, and nothing has worked, so the only option left is to stop their very existence. They believe agency is permanently gone and pain is permanently king.
In our interviewees, thankfully, this belief was not yet irreversible. Some spent minutes or hours convinced all nonlethal exits were blocked, but they managed to set that conviction aside long enough to try another tactic, talk to another counselor, or go to another place that might, just might, restore some sense of control. As one woman put it: “I knew I had to do something drastic, because none of the regular stuff I’d tried had worked. I figured if I killed myself, then I couldn’t go to the hospital, but if I went to the hospital and that didn’t work, I could always do the other thing later. So I decided to try the hospital first.”
A morbid chain of reasoning, for sure. But once you understand the deadly logic of self-harm, you understand why kindness isn’t the answer. Is kindness better than hardheartedness? Of course. Kindness alone, however, will not change someone’s belief, based on exhausting, excruciating struggle, that there’s only one move remaining: to leave the board. The key to reducing suicidal ideation—and its extreme manifestation, completed suicide—is to help the person see there is another move.
With this in mind, we have three suggestions to make suicide prevention more effective:
Therapists should present themselves not as omniscient fixers, but as guides to a vast array of treatment options, medical and nonmedical. This is hard, because desperate clients are often comforted to hear, “This pill/method/approach will solve your problem.” In the long run, though, it’s better to be honest: “Human brains are radically individual. Nothing works for everyone, but something will work for you. No matter how long it takes, together we will find that thing.”
Policymakers and philanthropists should understand that the 988 hotline is a crisis service designed to talk desperate people off the ledge (sometimes literally). Once past the crisis, people need sustained help accessing and navigating a healthcare system that’s daunting even at the best of times. One promising development is the mental health doula, a paraprofessional who works alongside clinicians to provide practical guidance and emotional support to individuals at psychological risk. We think it’s a role ready for funding, training, and promotion.
Friends and family should recognize suicidality as a serious illness and proactively help their loved one get care. This might mean making the telehealth appointment, driving them to the rehab center, or sitting with them in the ER through six hours of intake. And when that’s all done, it will mean building their agency by bolstering belief in their own ingenuity, persistence, and courage. For in the words of Christopher Robin to Winnie-the-Pooh, “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you know, and smarter than you think.”
Jocelyn Davis and Kelly Kinnebrew, PhD, are researching a book on high-functioning professionals who have recovered from serious mental health collapses.