Breaking the Silence: What Support for Mental Health Really Looks Like
I’m honored to welcome Kim as our newest guest blogger. Kim is a mental health and grief advocate, a suicide widow, and a gifted writer who bravely shares her journey through loss, healing, and everything in between. Her words speak directly to the heart—offering honest reflections on the weight of grief, the ongoing work of caring for our mental health, and the slow, sacred process of finding hope again.
Breaking the Silence: What Support for Mental Health Really Looks Like
I didn’t choose this path, but I’ve chosen within it to tell the truth. To invite others to find language for what hurts and what heals. To be a witness to sorrow and to the resilience that can follow.
For too long, we’ve lived under the weight of unspoken truths. We’ve whispered about mental health in back rooms. We’ve said “I’m fine” when we were anything but. We smile for a brief moment, hoping no one can notice what we really feel like on the inside.
I know this intimately. I am a suicide widow. I am still here.
After my husband’s death, grief became my teacher, and through that journey, I found a new calling, which was to sit with people in their sorrow, to tell the truth about mental health, and to gently, persistently, break the lies that keep so many of us suffering in silence, the lies that fed the stigma that took my husband from me.
ad of feeding on lies, learn to tell themselves the truth.
Stigma begs you to lie and to stay silent about what is going on. The truth? Silence is what makes it worse. We lose lives when people feel they can’t speak up. When we avoid the hard conversations, we miss the chance to listen, to notice warning signs, to show someone they are not alone. When we avoid hard conversations, usually at some point, they will become a subject to talk about and to figure out what to do next, but now, one can’t control the narrative, and one can’t put whatever it is back in the box and put it away. Talking about mental illness doesn’t plant the idea for suicide, for example, it plants hope. It opens a door. It says: You matter. Your pain matters.
Another lie is that if you look good, you feel good. Many people are high-functioning and still deeply unwell. My husband wore suits and ties to work. He had a tie for every day of the year. He had more dress shoes than I did. He looked good on the outside. He smiled. He laughed. But all that was a mask. We must learn to check in gently, to create space for honesty, and to honor what lies beneath the surface and go beyond, are you okay, and ask deeper questions like,
What’s been on your mind lately?
What’s feeling good, and what’s feeling tough to tackle?
What word or phrase would you use to describe your life right now?Or say things that you notice, followed by asking what is going on, and offer to help.
I notice you are not laughing much.
I notice you’ve been very quiet lately.
I notice you’re grumpy these days.
I notice you don’t text me often anymore.
I notice you are losing a lot of weight, and that is great if you are healthy. Are you?
I notice you are coming to work (etc) looking so tired, what is going on?Real support looks like being present. It looks like listening more than fixing.
It looks like showing up again and again, even when the words are messy or the healing is slow, and being willing to have the awkward conversations.
Real support means saying, “I’m here for the hard stuff.” It means asking, “What would feel supportive right now?” instead of assuming we know. It means educating ourselves about depression, trauma, PTSD, and grief so we can meet others with humility and understanding.
If you’re struggling, you are not alone. If you’ve lost someone, I’m holding that with you. If you’re someone who wants to be better at loving people through their mental health challenges, thank you. You’re doing good work. If you want help with knowing how to talk about mental illness with someone you care about, reach out to me or to AFSP or NAMI, or 1N5.org. These are all organizations I am a part of. We will listen, and we can find a way to have that conversation.
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