Suicide Prevention Month: The Part in the Deepest Despair
This article discusses suicide and suicidal thoughts. It does not describe methods. If you are struggling right now, please skip to the resources at the end, or reach out to someone today. In the UK you can call the Samaritans free on 116 123, at any hour, or text SHOUT to 85258. If you are in immediate danger, please call 999.
On Saturday 5th September, I had the privilege of sitting on the mental health professionals panel for Right Before I Go, Stan Zimmerman's powerful stage production built from the real final words of people who died by suicide, and from the words of those they left behind.
It is a piece that refuses to look away. It lets us hear the voices behind the act, not as statistics or warnings, but as people in unbearable pain. It’s also done gently, with little moments of humour and absolute hope.
The impact of that play on the audience was profound. We collectively felt and held the same emotions and feelings. And it was healing. All those nervous systems experiencing that together was extraordinary. There were people in that audience that found connection with others and for the first time were able to feel something they’d never been able to access before. It was an incredibly magical experience being in that room.
Sitting with that performance, the energy, and with the audience afterwards, I keep returning to the way parts work has shaped how I understand these moments. I want to share some of that here, carefully, and with no claim to have answers that anyone's suffering could be reduced to.
If you’re happy to read on, I talk about the parts of us that are in despair and how to support yourself or a loved one.
A note on what this is, and what it is not
I want to be very clear before I go further. Parts work is not a cure for suicidal feelings, and it is not a substitute for crisis support, medical care, or the presence of another human being when you are in danger.
Nothing in this email is meant to suggest that if you just understood your parts well enough, the pain would lift. That is not how any of this works, and it would not be right for me to imply it is.
What parts work can offer is a different, gentler way of understanding what is happening inside a person in despair, and sometimes that understanding and attunement can be what is needed.
The part that reaches for the last stand
In Internal Family Systems, we understand the mind as made up of many parts, each carrying its own feelings and its own job. When someone reaches the point of seeing suicide as the only way out, IFS would not say that the person wants to die. It would say that a part of them, a part in the deepest hopelessness and despair imaginable, can no longer see any other way to end pain that has become unendurable.
This is a crucial distinction, and Right Before I Go holds it so tenderly. The part that arrives at suicide is not an enemy and it is not a flaw. It is a protector that has run out of every other option. Its whole reason for existing is to stop suffering, and when every door it has tried has closed, it can come to believe, with total conviction, that this is the only door left. It is not that this part wants you gone. It is that it wants the pain gone, and in its exhaustion and terror it has lost sight of any other way to achieve that.
When we can see it this way, the shame that so often surrounds suicidal feelings begins, just a tiny bit, to loosen. You are not a bad or broken person for having such a part. You are a person carrying a part that is in more pain than it knows how to hold.
Despair narrows the world
One of the things despair does is collapse the field of vision. It takes a whole complex life, with all its other parts, its loves, its future possibilities, its ordinary tomorrows, and it narrows everything down to a single unbearable now. A person in that state is not thinking clearly about all their parts, because one part in agony has taken over the whole inner system and is speaking as though it is the only voice there is.
This is why, from the outside, others so often say afterwards that the person in pain had so much to live for. It is not that those things stopped being true. It is that a part in complete despair could no longer see them.
The other parts, the ones that love and hope and want to stay, are still there, but they have been drowned out.
If you recognise this part in yourself
If you are reading this and something in it feels close to home, I want to speak to you directly and gently. If there is a part of you that has been whispering that there is no way out, please hear this. That part is in enormous pain, and its pain is real and deserves care. But that part is not the whole of you, even when it feels like it is, and it does not have the full picture, even when it insists that it does.
You do not have to believe the other parts of you right now. You only have to not act on the one in despair today, and to let another person in. Please reach out, to your GP, to a crisis line, to someone you trust. A part in that much pain should not be left alone with the decision. Let someone help you carry it, just for now.
What this asks of the rest of us
For those of us who love someone, or work with someone, or simply share a world with people who suffer, Right Before I Go asks us to listen differently. Not to fix, not to argue a despairing part out of its despair, but to turn towards it with the same compassion we would offer any part in pain.
To say, in effect, I can see how much you are hurting, and you do not have to hold this alone.
Sometimes that turning towards, from one person to another, is the thing that keeps a door open long enough for the light to get back in.
I am grateful to Stan Zimmerman and to everyone involved in this production for making a space where these voices can be heard with such dignity. It is difficult, necessary work, and the world is a little more compassionate for it.
If you are in London on Wednesday 9th September or Thursday 10th September , you can still get tickets to this extraordinary performance here.
If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, you are not alone and support is available right now.
In the UK: Samaritans, free on 116 123, day or night. SHOUT crisis text line, text SHOUT to 85258. In an emergency, call 999.
Wherever you are in the world, you can find a local crisis line through the International Association for Suicide Prevention at iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres.
