Three Noses

When I first applied for the position as Suicide Prevention Coordinator, I told several of my close acquaintances. When I got the interview, I told more people about the job. Since my first day on the job, I have told even more people about my job.

Nearly every time I tell someone that I am the Suicide Prevention Coordinator at Mental Health America of Licking County, I am given either strange or sympathetic looks. (Thankfully, I do get the occasional look of admiration, along with the comment that I am doing very tough work.) At first, I understood why people I knew gave me the looks of sympathy or fear. Suicide is one of the last taboos in America. We can freely talk about sex, pedophilia, homosexuality, HIV/AIDS, and abortion. But mention suicide, and people take several steps back, like you’ve just grown a second nose.

This is why I have a job. Since people don’t talk to their friends, parents, children, and so on about suicide, not many people know the truth about it. Unfortunately, this also means that the rate of suicide in America is still alarmingly high. Most of the completed suicides stem from mental illness, most often depression. Depression is a treatable brain disorder (another word for mental illness). Logically, this means that suicide is preventable if depression is caught early enough. Having just attended Gatekeeper training with the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation, I would like to impart some of my knowledge about how to prevent suicide to you.

When we encounter stressful or threatening situations in our lives, our brain (three pounds of protoplasm housed in our skulls) helps protect us. With the way the economy and politics are going, more Americans will be facing stressful and threatening situations in their lives. Our brain, or more specifically, our amygdala, releases three different hormones that are related to fight-or-flight. We become equipped to either stand up for ourselves (fight) or escape the danger (flight).

• Testosterone is what gives us strength in our muscles to either fight or run away.



• Epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) moves blood flow from body functions that are not necessary for the fight-or-flight response, like digestion, to our muscles and brain.



• Cortisol soothes the body after fight or flight has taken place. (Ever used hydroCORTISONE cream to make swelling go away?)

There is only one problem. These days, none of us are chased by saber-toothed tigers or giant wooly mammoths; instead, we sit at our desks or on our couches, and when stressful or threatening situations occur, we don’t use up the testosterone, epinephrine or cortisol that are released into our system. As beneficial as these hormones are to our body, too much of them in our system destroy little things in our brains called neurons. Most often, the neurons in the part of our brain that stores short-term memory, mood and emotions, the hippocampus, are affected. The breaking down of the neurons that determine our emotions and moods causes people to become depressed.

Like I mentioned earlier, 90% of people who die by suicide suffer from some form of brain disorder (mental illness), mostly depression. Depression, like other mental illnesses (thanks, Kristen!), is highly treatable with medications and therapy. If we begin to screen everyone for depression, we can catch it, treat it, and prevent suicides.

I do hope that one day, I work myself out of a job, but there is much work to be done until then.

Oh yeah, and exercise as much as you can, and you can help save your neurons from destruction!

--Brittany Schumann

Suicide Prevention Coordinator