Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You.
[00:00:00] Speaker B: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 05:00 p.m. Or Wednesdays at 07:00 p.m. If you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison church, you can find us online at Madison Church. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast Madison Church of Christ sermons thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: In psalm 139, verse 14, David states, I praise you for I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well.
David knew keenly that God created him, that God planned for him, and that God created every part of him. And so there's a lot of times that we're studying spiritual things about people, but do you know that God created our mental health as well? And as such, it's tied into biblical verses over and over again that maybe we didn't notice as we were growing up. I've given you a handout that has a lot of verses on here about anxiety, worry, depression. It's not all of them, it's just what I could fit on the page.
But anxiety is the number one thing that we as counselors see in our practice. One in three people suffer from anxiety at some point in their lives. And so it is something that's really common for us. And if you were in this class back when Anessa and Suzanne were teaching this class, I did a very similar class during that period of time. But I've changed it around a lot. I've got some other things in it now, and so some of it will be a repeat. But that's how we learn best, is when we by repetition. So we're going to be talking about worry, anxiety and depression.
First of all, I want to define what a mental health condition or a mental health disorder is. Our health condition involving. It's a health condition involving changes in the way that we feel, the way we think, the way we act, or more than likely a combination of all of these. But what takes mental health to the level of a disorder is when it causes a disruption in either our social settings, our work, our school, our family activities, multiple areas of life, are affected by one of these areas, and that's when it rises to the level of being a mental health disorder. And that's what Karen and Sandra I work with on a regular basis.
So my question to you, are worry and anxiety the same? And every counselor you talk to will give you a different answer. So I'll give you my answer, because that's the one that counts right now.
Worry is characterized by repetitive thoughts about future events with uncertain outcomes, some of which might be negative outcomes.
Anxiety, though, and here's a big key to this, anxiety is a physiological response to a stressor characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes. Now, we can delve into this a little bit more by looking at the comparison between the two. Worry typically is relatively temporary. All right. When I was in grad school, I worried a lot about turning papers in. I worried about taking tests. But, you know, that's gone. I don't worry about that anymore. It's gone. It's a part of my past. Anxiety, on the other hand, is long term. It's not a short period of time. It carries on.
Worry happens sometimes. Maybe I have something today I'm worried about. I was worried a little bit before Chet got here that I wasn't going to get my PowerPoint running. But since he walked in, I knew I was okay.
But anxiety is pervasive. It's all the time.
We worry about very specific things. Is my power component going to work? Because I teach off a PowerPoint.
But anxiety is more diffuse or vague. Am I going to make a fool of myself up here? Am I going to make mistakes? Are you going to understand what I'm talking about? It's much more vague.
Worry is a mild emotional response. It's mild, but anxiety tends to be a strong emotional distress. It's a physiological response, and I want to stress that over and over again. Anxiety is a physiological response. Our body responds to a stressor.
Worry doesn't usually interfere with functioning action. It doesn't usually interfere with our day to day activities. But on the other hand, anxiety can make. It can paralyze us. It can cripple us.
Worry leads to problem solving. I knew when I was in grad school that I was going to have a test, and I've worried a little bit about it. But what did that worry do? It caused me to study for the test. It caused me to run flashcards. It caused me to spend time on my subject matter. But in anxiety, it's difficult to solve the problem.
And then worry is about realistic concerns like am I going to fail this test where anxiety may be less realistic. And so when you look at the two of them, there's similarities to them, but worry is kind of a mild thing that we go through that oftentimes leads us to problem solving, where anxiety is a pervasive physiological response to a stressor.
Typical symptoms of anxiety, and you may have one or two of these. You may have all of them. You may have none of them. Feeling of nervousness, restlessness, or tense?
Are you that person that's got to shake the leg or shake the hands, or you've got to have something in your hands at all times? Sweating profusely, sleep difficulties, uncontrollable feelings of worry or impending doom? That's part of anxiety.
Increased irritability. Are you snapping everybody's head off and you don't even know why?
Stomach problems. When you have anxiety, it's going to hit you in the gut, it might hit you in the heart and make you have that rapid beat. It may hit you in the head, and you've got headaches, and you can't function, and you've got chaotic thinking, increased heart rate, and rapid breathing. That is part of the physiological response to anxiety. And then that difficulty concentrating is a big part of anxiety. So these are the typical symptoms of anxiety. You may experience anxiety in a different way, but these are very typical things that Karen and I would see in the office on a regular basis.
Now, anxiety and depression are all in your head.
How many of you think that's true?
How many of you think that's false?
How many of you refuse to answer because you know it's a trick question?
All right, anxiety and depression can be in your head. Let's look and see.
All of us have what we call neurotransmitters. In our brain. There are billions of tiny little neurons that interconnect and talk to each other. And without those, we don't function, and nothing gets done. And they secrete little chemical signals called neurotransmitters. And that's kind of what you're seeing right here. And, you know, if all your neurotransmitters are working, that's great. If they're working the way they should, all is well. However, sometimes you might have too much of a chemical, you might have too little of a chemical, and it can throw off that brain chemistry. For those of you who are postpartum, that can kind of throw off some of that brain chemistry. And so when that happens, our neurotransmitters kind of get out of whack. Our brain chemistry gets out of whack.
So what are some of the neurotransmitters? Well, there's serotonin, dopamine, gaba, norepinephrine, endorphins, oxytocin, cortisol.
These are just some of the neurotransmitters in our brain. And if you have too little serotonin, you may struggle with depression and anxiety. If you have too much serotonin, you might struggle with, like, shivering and diarrhea and muscle rigidity, and you can even die from too much serotonin.
If you don't have enough dopamine in the brain, you may have some depression. If you have too much dopamine in the brain, you're going to be highly competitive, petitive, and you think you can go out and do things that maybe aren't real safe to do.
All of these chemicals have their roles, and when all of these chemicals are in balance, that's great, but sometimes they're not in balance. And so when we look at that, anxiety and depression are very much in our head because it's in our brain structure.
You'll see on one side, the brain. I don't like the word normal. I like typical. You have the typical brain, and then on the other side, you have a brain that's somebody with anxiety disorder, and you see all that red firing going on.
Okay, so we can actually do a scan of the brain and see that there's a problem here.
Now, there's an iceberg for many of our different mental health disorders, but I kind of like this one a lot. When you look at an iceberg like this and say you're in a cruise ship and you're up in Alaska, and you look out and you see that iceberg, what you see is about 10% of the iceberg.
The other 90% of the iceberg is under the water, and you can't see it. So what you see is anxiety, but what you feel are a number of other things. Maybe you feel embarrassed, helpless, ashamed, hurt, disgusted, insecure.
All of these things. Frustrated, confused, lonely, grief, sad, jealous, disrespected. All of these things, they're under the surface. And when we're feeling these things, it may surface up to anxiety.
And we sometimes have to get deep down into that iceberg to find out how to help with the anxiety.
Now, can we cure anxiety?
How many people think we can cure anxiety?
How many people think you can't cure anxiety?
How many of you think that? You're not going to answer the question because it's trick. Yeah, you're getting good with that. Okay, can we cure anxiety?
No, but we don't want to cure anxiety. God gave us anxiety. It serves a purpose for us. It keeps us safe.
A little bit of anxiety is good for us. A little bit of anxiety made me study for all those tests in grad school.
A little bit of anxiety helped me get my papers turned in on time.
A little bit of anxiety got me here early enough so I could have all the problems worked out on this PowerPoint before you all got here.
Anxiety can be good for us. God gave it to us to keep us safe. I buckle my grandchildren into a car seat. Why? Because I have a little bit of anxiety over a car accident.
All right? It doesn't cripple me, but anxiety keeps us safe.
And, in fact, we know that for peak performance, there is an optimal amount of anxiety that we need. And when we look at the optimal amount, it's kind of right here. I don't think this shows up on this. Oh, yeah, right here. Okay. The optimal amount of anxiety is right in here. Now, if you have not enough anxiety, you may be inactive and bored.
You might have a little tension as you move up here, and then you start going down here. If you have too much anxiety, you experience panic and anxiety. You have burnout and breakdown. So optimal amounts of anxiety help us to be more productive and keep us safe.
Okay?
Now, this is one of my favorite things to do with clients when they're in my office. When we're struggling with things like anxiety, depression, OCD, you name any of those things.
It kind of starts with a thought.
And so maybe my thought is that, wow, I'm not adequate for the task. I can't get up here and teach this class.
And then I develop some feelings that are related to that, and I start having some anxiety. I start maybe having some depression. Maybe I start having other kinds of things. Go on. And so when that happens, when you have these thoughts and these thoughts and feelings, it drives our anxiety, our OCD, our depression up.
And we don't like to feel that way. It doesn't feel good to have anxiety. And so what do we do?
Well, we develop unhealthy coping mechanisms. Substance use, alcohol avoidance, anger and aggression. Nicotine overworking, overeating, overspending. Another big one today. Video game addiction. If I'm playing video games, I don't have to think about all my anxiety. Reckless behavior, negative self talk. All of these things are unhealthy coping skills that we use because we've got these thoughts and feelings that drive up our anxiety or depression. But in reality, if we deal with our thoughts and our feelings, then our anxiety comes down and we don't have to enact these unhealthy coping mechanisms.
And so the key may not be to spend all of our time trying to figure out how to handle those unhealthy coping mechanisms, but deal with these thoughts and feelings that are at the root of what's going on with us. Okay?
We call this the triangle of conflict. I'd like to believe that I made it up, but I didn't.
Let me stress that on average, and this is going to be a wide range, on average, a person has between 12,060 thousand thoughts per day.
That's a lot of thoughts. And I think if you have something like adhd, that number goes up. Okay. 80% of our thought processes are often negative, and 90% to 95% of our repetitive thoughts are the same ones we had the day before. They just spiral over and over and over.
Some say that the brain actually has what's called a negativity bias, which is part of our survival. We all are constantly scanning the environment for danger, something negative that may happen. And so those negative thoughts outnumber our positive thoughts daily, and they have a greater impact on us than our positive thoughts.
Now, thoughts are not facts.
I just had a thought.
It came in, it ran around for a little bit, and I'll let it go, but it's not a fact.
Feelings are not facts. I can feel that nobody likes me, but if I ask a few of you, I probably find out that that feeling is wrong and that some of you do like me.
So thoughts and feelings are not facts, but they are the things that drive our anxiety and depression because we get wrapped up in spiraling with them. Now, Karen's going to talk with you next week about some ways to slow that down just a little bit. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, on the thoughts that drive anxiety, because this is what she's going to do and that's what her specialty is. And so next week, she's going to be talking about CBT come next week, and she's going to talk to you about some of this stuff. But these are things that I teach clients all the time to help them with those spiraling thoughts.
Now, anxiety and depression are best friends. They go everywhere together.
They hang out all the time. So if you've got anxiety, you probably got depression. If you've got depression, you probably got anxiety because they just go hand in hand.
If you look here, you see on this side, that isn't a typical brain.
This is a brain that's shutting down. This is a brain that's very depressed. And so, as you look at that, you can once again see. You can do a brain scan and see this in the brain.
Now, depression is characterized by a consistent feeling of sadness that may affect how a person thinks, acts, feels, and even how they approach situations. If I feel like I'm not capable of coming in here and doing this, then I may turn everybody down and say, no, I can't do it. I can't do it. So Mike Baker reached out to me and said, becky, would you and the other counselors put a class together?
If I'm very depressed, then I might say, no, I can't do that. I don't know how.
So, depression is characterized by that consistent feeling of sadness.
And, again, we have an iceberg for depression, too. And in our depression iceberg, 10% of what we see is right up here. And that's that sadness. Maybe you can't get out of bed. Maybe you don't want to get dressed. Maybe you don't shower like you should. Maybe you don't want to go anywhere. Maybe you're turning away friends and opportunities. Okay, we see some of that up here, but when we look down here, this is what people don't see.
Anger, anxiety, changes in appetite, depression, emptiness, fatigue, guilt, feeling hopeless, oversleeping, self harm, memory problems. Yes, we have memory problems with depression, irritability, insomnia. All of these things, they're underneath the surface. And so to go in and say, well, I'm persistently sad, well, let me give you some medicine and make that go away.
Medicine can be a great thing, but let's get to the root of the problem. Let's find out what's going on beneath the surface, and let's deal with what's going on beneath the surface.
So, how do I know if I need help? How do I know if I have a pathological problem that needs to have some help, or if maybe I just have some mild symptoms? And I thought this was a good one. The National Institute of Health put this out, and I'm allowed to use it. There's no copyright on it, so I'm allowed to use it. But if you have mild symptoms that lasted less than two weeks, feeling a little down, you're still able to do your job, you're still able to take care of your kids, you're still able to do your schoolwork. Maybe you struggle to sleep a little bit, feeling down, but you're able to function, then you're probably okay to see if that passes. But then when you go on and you get a little bit more, here's some things that you can do.
Exercise. I'll talk about this again in a little bit. Exercise is one of the best things you can do for feeling down. And if you can exercise in the sunshine, that's even better. That's why this time of the year, we have a lot of problems with seasonal affective disorder because we can't get out into the sunshine. But if you can get out, walk, run, engaging in social contact, coming to class, being here as a class, going out to lunch with a friend, doing things together with other people, socializing, getting adequate sleep, eating healthy, have a trusted friend, practicing meditation, relaxation and mindfulness. So you can do things for that. But when you have severe symptoms that last two weeks or more, that may be when you want to seek out Karen or myself or one of the other counselors. Sandra Bethany Langley's a counselor here, you may want to seek out some help with this.
So there are many things that we can do that don't include medication. All right. They're right there. Physical activity is one of the best things we can do for anxiety and depression.
Good sleep, hygiene, getting to sleep at night on time, sleeping good through the night, good social support. We talked about healthy eating. Avoid alcohol. Now, if you have a cup here, and that cup represents you and you're depressed and you have this bottle of alcohol, and alcohol is a depressant, what happens if you take a bottle of depression and pour it into a depressed person?
It's a little bit of a problem. So avoid alcohol, reduce your caffeine, quit smoking, and get out in the sunshine. These are things that all of us can do. We don't have to go to a medical doctor to know that these things are good for us.
But maybe you have a problem that's a little bit greater than that.
And so the first thing that I do, if you come to see me, one of the first things that I'm going to do is say, well, you know what? I think it'd be a good idea for you to go and make an appointment with your medical doctor and have a complete medical checkup. Let's find out if your d is the right level. Let's find out if your b is the right level. Let's find out if your thyroid is working. Let's check and see if all of these parts of your body are working the way they should, and if they rule out everything, okay, come back. Then we're going to start some therapy. And so we may do talk. May, Karen and I both do trauma therapy.
Medication may be in order. And neither one of us are opposed to medication. That's not our first line.
Deep breathing.
All the little kids know about deep breathing.
I do. Every Tuesday morning I'm in here with PK 34 and kindergarten, and I'm teaching them about their emotions and how to handle them and coping skills, and they all know how to breathe. And they say, I got really mad at my mommy. And I said, well, what did you do about it? I used the deep breathing and it got better.
Man, they're great. I love it. Relaxation skills, mindfulness, stress reduction, and then psychoeducation. We can help with that.
This is not very dark. I hope you can see it. I want to talk just a little bit about suicide. I am not going to read everything that's up there. So glance up there and see. In 2023, over 50,000 people died by suicide. Now, more died in car accidents, more died in other ways.
Heart disease is the number one killer, but 50,000 people died by Suicide, and that's 50,000 people too many. And it's something that we need to talk about. It's something that we need to understand.
So these other statistics are up there. Suicide is the 11th leading cause of death in the United States.
A couple of terms that maybe are good, we used to say we committed that. Somebody committed suicide. We don't do that anymore. They died by suicide. It was death by suicide committed. Seems like it's some great big sin and they committed suicide. And we know that when people are in the depths of depression, when they are that bad, all they can do is look to get out of the pain. And so we've changed the wording now to where hopefully it takes some of the stigma away from suicide. They died by suicide.
A suicide attempt is when a person harms themselves with the intent to end their life, but it doesn't.
All right, I thought this was interesting.
Highest rate of suicide is people 85 years old and older.
Highest rate.
People 75 to 84 have the second highest rate, which means people 75 and up have the highest rate of suicide in the country.
Third highest rate is 25 to 34. We're getting into a little bit of our younger people, and in 2021, and that's the latest number I could find. I can't find anything for 22 and 23. In the state of Alabama, there were 827 deaths by suicide.
That's 827 people in Alabama. Too many that died.
Risk factors. There's a lot of risk factors that you can look at with people as far know, why does this person attempt suicide? And why does this person not attempt suicide? If they've had a previous suicide attempt or if they've had a family member that died by suicide, that increases their risk. Chronic pain. Karen will be doing a class later on on chronic illness. They have a higher risk of attempting suicide. Criminal legal problems, marriage problems, job problems, financial problems, people who are impulsive or aggressive have a higher risk. And then I want to talk about this next one. History of adverse childhood experiences. One of the things that I'm always looking for when you come to see me is, what was your childhood like?
Because when we find things buried deep in your childhood, it helps us to better handle what we're seeing today. And for those children who were raised in adverse childhood experiences, their risk of suicide is much higher.
Bullying, you can see it just goes on and on. Suicide clusters in a community. That's why you're always worried. In a school system where one child commit, so you have to keep working on it. Where one child dies by suicide, you have to work with the other children to make sure that you're giving them the mental health counseling that they need. Community violence, historical trauma, lack of access to health care is a risk for suicide. Social isolation is a big risk to suicide. So as we move into that, there's some protective factors, and I think these are really important for us to get in our minds.
We need to develop coping and problem solving skills. I try to do that with the children that come to see me. They come in, and what I do with most kids is I tell them to bring a notebook, and in the notebook, if they've had problems that past week, they're supposed to sit down and write out in their notebook, and mom and dad can help them write out in the notebook something that went on. Maybe they lost their temper, maybe they flew off the handle, maybe they hit somebody and they're supposed to write it out. And then they come to see me and they bring that in, and we open it up and go, oh, wow, I can see that you hit a child at recess the other day. What do you think we could have done besides hitting somebody? And we look for problem solving skills. We try to teach them how to solve the problem rather than acting on their aggression.
Reasons for living. Do you have family? Do you have friends? Do you have pets? Again, that isolation is a problem.
A strong sense of cultural identity.
Do you belong to a group of people? I happen to think this is our culture here.
Feeling connected to others, high quality physical and behavioral health care. Religion is a protective factor for suicide. When I was working out at Decatur west, we would always ask them, where do you go to church?
Because if we could find that religious belief, we could work with that support from partners, friends, families. How important is it that you reach out to somebody that if you see somebody hadn't been here in a few weeks and I don't know what's going on, I think I'm going to pick up the phone and call them. How important is that?
Everybody needs a person to reach out to them.
We're family.
And then reduced access to lethal means of suicide among people at risk. So if I have somebody in my home that's at a high risk of suicide, I may lock up any weapons that I have. I may lock up any knives, sharks. I may lock up medication. We would send people home from Decatur west with a plan, and the family had to lock all this stuff up before we would send them home. And so there's some protective factors that you can use when someone is suicidal.
Now, this one to me, is one of the most important ones that we're going to see today, because what I'm going to do is show you some things where you can be more aware of what to look for as to whether somebody may be suicidal.
Talking about wanting to die, having, expressing great guilt and shame, feeling like they're a burden to other people.
They may feel hopeless, empty, trapped. They may not have any reason to live. They're sad, they're anxious, they're agitated, or maybe they're full of rage, unbearable emotional pain.
And then you can kind of see some changing behavior.
Perhaps they research different ways to die by suicide.
Perhaps they withdraw from friends, or maybe they give their goodbyes, or maybe they have some important, meaningful treasure and they come to you and they say, I really want you to have this. I want to tell you what a good friend you've been to me.
And you might need to connect a little bit stronger with them.
Taking dangerous risks, such as driving really fast, mood swings, eating asleep, eating and sleeping either more or less, and using drugs and alcohol more often. If you see these warning signs, you may need to reach out to this person. You may need to be this person's friend. Don't ignore these things.
I don't ever want to lose a client or a friend or a family member to suicide.
I don't ever want to do that.
And so we need to be aware of these things so that we can connect these people to someone who can help them.
If you'll see on all of my PowerPoint slides tonight, there's nine eight eight. There used to be a regular number for the hotline. Now they've changed it to nine eight eight. It is functional. All over the country, you can dial nine eight eight and it's the suicide and cris lifeline.
And so that's not a bad thing to have on your refrigerator.
It's not a bad thing to carry around, especially if you have problems with depression.
So what can you do? Five action steps. I tried to make it as simple as I could ask, are you thinking about killing yourself?
Let me make it clear to you, talking about suicide does not increase the risk of suicide.
Talk to them about suicide. Ask them about it. Is this what you're thinking? When I get a parent, call me and they say, my seven year old said he wanted to die, okay, I'm going to stop everything, and I'm going to get that child into my office, and we're going to have a long talk about suicide.
Talking about suicide does not increase the risk of suicide. If you think somebody's despondent, ask them, hey, do I need to worry about you? Are you okay?
Ask the question.
You may save a life.
Keep them safe. Reduce access to lethal items or lethal places. Keep them safe from whatever it is they're thinking about doing.
Be there. Listen carefully. Acknowledge their feelings.
Don't put them off and tell them, oh, that's a big sin. You can't do that.
Listen to them. Listen to their pain. Talk to them.
Help them connect.
If you don't know any other way to help them connect, call nine eight eight. But always know. Always know that Karen and I are available. I don't know what Karen's told her clients, but I tell my clients, if you text me and you have 911 in the text, I will stop everything.
Now, if they do that four or five times a week, I'm not going to do that anymore. But I said, if you put 911 in a text to me, I will not see the next client before I call you.
And people are very respectful of that. So Karen and I are here. We are trained. I try to do a training every year in suicide. You're probably close to that. Yeah.
We try to hone our knowledge and our experience with suicide. And so we know how to help them, we know how to assess it, and we know how to connect them and then stay in touch with them. If you find out that they were suicidal, that's not the time to turn your back and say, I don't have time for them. That's not the time for that. That's the time to be checking on them and seeing what you can do to support them.
Sometimes people with mental health disorders feel like they're broken. They feel like they are struggling. I love the song I come broken to be mended, because sometimes people feel so broken.
This is a bowl or a plate with what's called kentsuji. It's the japanese art of repairing brokenness. They take the ceramic piece that's broken and they put it back together. But instead of putting it back together with ugly glue, they put it together with gold.
With gold lacquer. And so all of the gold becomes part of the beauty of the piece.
Yes. Probably all of us at some time have struggled with some level of a mental health disorder, but that becomes part of the beauty of who we are.
And it's okay.
It's okay to say, I struggle with anxiety. I struggle with depression. I struggle with OCD. I struggle with bipolar disorder. Because you can make that part of your beauty.
Thank you for your attention. Any questions that I can answer it. All it takes is one person asking the question and then more will. Yes, I'm sure there's research, but of the likelihood of mental health disorders being passed through families. So that's something I struggle with, knowing that I have depression, what is the likelihood that my kids are going to have it? And feeling guilty about that. Okay. And that is a possibility. We call them stinky genes.
There's that old age, nature versus nurture. Am I this way because of the genetic structure? I'm this way biologically, or am I this way because of environmental?
Yeah, but yes, these things can be passed down. But also remember that everything kind of has to play into it. You may have the propensity to have anxiety, but if the environment, if you learn the coping skills and you're in the environment, it may not ever trigger that.
And so that's a really great question, but it's a complicated question. And so, yes, it can't. The stinky genes is what we call it, but that means we work with them on developing those coping skills, getting them outside and doing the things that they need to do to help with that. Good question. Thank you for asking that.
Karen, you want to add anything?
[00:41:27] Speaker C: The only thing I'm thinking of, even though you don't have to be a mental health counselor to help people that are suicidal, I know that there is a training program, I think it's called.
It's Alabama suicide. I forgot something. Resource center. But anyway, they give trainings and they're online and virtual. They're free. They're usually like one to 3 hours. And anybody, I mean, we encourage ministers, teachers, everybody to get just training on that, like how to respond and that kind of thing. So that's the only thing I can think of.
[00:42:12] Speaker A: Mental health, first aid. Yeah. There's all kinds of things out there that you can get into to learn this. And there was a while back that I wanted to bring someone in to do a training on it, and I don't know what happened. I guess we got busy and it didn't happen. Now, I know. We'll also tell you that the last class, right now, currently the last class, will be A-Q-A panel of all of us. So if you've got questions that you didn't feel comfortable asking today, write them down and maybe by the end you'll feel comfortable asking, but we'll do a Q and a that last time. Yes, ma'am.
[00:42:50] Speaker C: What's the best way to support someone close to you who's lost somebody from suicide?
[00:42:58] Speaker A: Okay. All right. Her question is, what's the best way to help someone who's lost somebody to suicide? You listen and you listen some more, and you listen some more. And it's not about what you say to them. It's about how they listen, how you just listen to them.
Don't go into those things about the terrible things people say, but just listen and then help make sure that they are getting that connection to a professional.
It may even be they're struggling to take their medication. They may be put on medication, but I think listening. I think empathy.
I didn't put it in my thing this time, but I have this. All right, so look up empathy, Brene Brown on YouTube. It's about two minutes and 30 something seconds. And I think that that is a great answer. I usually have it in every presentation, but I didn't put it in this one. But empathy, Brene Brown. And it's getting down into the dark hole with them, but you're not trying to fix them. You're just listening. And you've got this big bear that says, I don't know what to do, but I'm here for you.
Okay. Other questions.
All right. Thank you again for your kind attention. I think that we did everything. I think next week Carol Hargett might have a quick announcement to make after the class is over with.
But that scroll of our ladies. Things will be going on next week, too, and Karen will be teaching.
