“Early intervention is tragedy prevention”: what losing my best friend at 14 taught me about mental health.
By Ray Munn For many children and teenagers, the most difficult thing they will deal with whilst they are growing up is the death of a loved one. When I was young, I always assumed that, naturally, I would first deal with loss (outside of pets) when my grandparents would pass away. I never thought that at 14, I would deal with one of the most emotionally taxing types of bereavement there is: bereavement caused by suicide. At 21 years old and seven years later, I’m still coming to terms with the choice my best friend made that day. Bereavement through suicide is a special kind of grief: the questions that remain unanswered scream and demand to be asked, some of the most difficult, complicated, and painful questions someone can ever ask. What happened to make them feel this way? Why didn’t they talk to me? How did they come to this conclusion? How long did they feel like this? When did they decide that this was the solution? This list goes on forever. For many of us, the idea of ta...