Care, community, and inclusion is suicide prevention.
There’s something about National Suicide Prevention Month that feels altogether personal, raw, sticky, and weighty. I grew up in a home where there was bipolar disorder and suicidal ideation. And while I’ve never been suicidal and have never been diagnosed with depression, there was a point in my life, in my mid-20s, when I undoubtedly believe that I had depression. I was looking for any escape from the life that I was living at the time.
Ultimately, that sentiment is why I started Fellas Night In—I wanted to create the kind of community and connection that was so absent when I needed it most.
While I’m always thinking about belonging, community, and connection, I really think about it a lot within the context of things like depression, anxiety, and suicide. After all, the focus of my psychology grad school program was on positive psychology and how the field was studying and exploring new ways to address and treat mental challenges and conditions.
However, a lot of my grad research and assignments focused on non-white populations. Because while the field of psychology has been around for more than a century, it’s often people of color and marginalized communities that are least represented in the research. What’s more, it’s people of color, Indigenous people, and LGTBQ+ communities that see some of the greatest mental health disparities, such as rates of depression and suicide that are far greater than the general population.
Suicide rates of American Indians/Alaska Natives (AI/AN), for example, have historically been several times higher than those of the general population. Black youth are one of the populations that have seen some of the greatest increase in suicide rates in recent years. And in The Trevor Project's 2025 national survey, 36% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered attempting suicide within the past year. This is on top of suicide rates that are already so high for the general population. It’s heartbreaking.
Yet, I have reason to be hopeful. In that same survey by The Trevor Project, it found that LGBTQ+ young people who reported living in very accepting communities attempted suicide at less than a third of the rate of those who reported living in very unaccepting communities.
Other populations are also seeing some encouraging trends. My grad school capstone actually explored depression among Native Americans, and among the research I cited were several studies that had found positive benefits in culturally-grounded treatments and peer-led interventions for Indigenous people. In New Mexico, Native American suicide rates dropped 43% from 2022 to 2023 following the launch of the state’s 988 crisis support line and as Native communities started creating more culturally-grounded resources and treatment options for people in need. The video below is one of my favorite storylines, about how an Indigenous community in Alaska is approaching healing.
On a more global scale, a study published in a 2020 edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry, of more than 100,000 UK adult participants, found that social connection was the strongest protective factor for depression.
But all of this isn’t to say that if people would just make more friends, suicide would decrease. That’s an oversimplification and not what I’m saying. But I do believe we need to have more conversations about the kind of culture of connection and belonging, or lack thereof, that we’ve created. Because as some of the prominent theories on suicide posit, like the interpersonal theory of suicide, suicidal ideation in part emerges from a sense of perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness, and a hopelessness about these states.
What I will say is that I strongly believe that we need more spaces where people can feel a sense of ease, settle into their authenticity, and where safety, connection, and belongingness are a given, not where it has to be earned. Because care, empathy, love, and inclusion are suicide prevention.
