Suicide: Getting to Resilient

                        Suicide: Getting to Resilient

            Five percent.  One out of twenty.  That’s the reality of our community, our country.  Within the last year, one out of twenty adults seriously considered ending their life.

            Suicide.  It is an epidemic, and we don’t talk about it much.  Suicide talk is taboo.  Don’t go there.  But, we must.   

            Every person needs to be connected to at least one other person, and to be able to reach out, talk about depression, sadness, and hopelessness.  We all need hope, an expectation that there is a tomorrow, there is opportunity for change, that our lives make a difference, and that life is worth living. Life’s problems can’t be only on our own shoulders. 

            Last week, I was part of a workshop, getting trained with skills to take on this intensely personal problem, to be a first responder in addressing suicide in our culture.  Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST) is a national movement to develop a first response model in our communities.  Evidence based models and techniques gave us the tools and the confidence to reach out and connect with someone who is possibly contemplating ending their life. 

            Invite a conversation, and plunge into the “perfect storm” that is roaring through their lives, and make connection.  When the signs are there, find the courage to “ask the question” and begin talking about suicide, and options for change, connecting them with you and connecting them with resources to be able to move ahead with their lives, and regain hope. 

            Suicidal thoughts have stormed through my own life, sometimes ending lives far too early, or paralyzing people with deep depression and isolation.  Surviving family and friends are wracked with uncertainly and chaos, leaving profound questions unanswered and lives thrown off track. 

            Making connections is what changes lives and saves lives.  What I’ve learned in life, and relearned at the ASIST training, is that you do connect.  You do reach out, engage people, and show your genuine concern for them and their well-being.  You connect with your own humanity and your fellows, and make that vital one to one connection. 

            Showing concern and empathy, and making that connection often saves lives and gives people a new sense of hope and possibility in their lives. 

            Help make them safe now, and help them develop their plan to be safe now.

            When you have that conversation, make those connections, one to one.  And, help them connect with others; not only with friends and family, but professional care givers and health care providers.  Be the gatekeeper for them and help them find their way. 

            The National Suicide Prevention Hot Line, 1-800-243-8255(TALK) is a  valuable resource. I’ve added it to my phone contacts.  Other resources: http://suicidepreventionlifeline.org, Youthline (1-877-YOUTH-911) and their text: TEEN2TEEN@839863.

            Connect with your local mental health services provider.  In my hometown, Tillamook, their crisis line is 800-962-2851.

            All of these services operate 24 hours a day, because suicide is a 24 hour a day issue of community wide concern. 

            Help build a resilient, safe community.

            ----Neal Lemery 9/1/2016 

Getting Sober

                                    Getting Sober

I’ve lived in the same small town almost all of my life, and we’ve always been riddled with the demons of addiction and wanting to find the magic wand of sobriety and recovery.

Much of my professional life in the law, and many of the conversations I have, even now, has been about people finding meaning in their lives and working on getting sober.  Addiction was certainly the “meat and potatoes” in my legal career. 

Our society is riddled with addiction, in all its crazy forms and actions.  You say “addict” and we think alcohol and drugs.  Insidious and destructive as those addictions are, there are others, equally powerful, equally destructive of our souls and our community. 

The list of dangerous, habit-forming thinking and actions is long; the list of destructive results is even longer. And your list looks a lot like mine.

            This cause and effect are often unmentioned and ignored.  It is the elephant in our village’s living room. To some extent, we all deal with it, in our own lives.  And, we see the devastation our addictions cause in the lives around us.

            Much of my work in the law came across my desk because of this addictive thinking.  Being the good lawyer, I worked to find the remedy so that people could find happiness and move on in their lives.  All too often, the addiction was too powerful, too all consuming.  And, it is hard to be clean and sober in a society where addiction, and addictive thinking, is an accepted way of life and a widely accepted theology. 

            Yet, we’ve come a long way since the days of my childhood.  As a kid, I was chastised for greeting a neighbor coming out of the liquor store, or commenting about someone being drunk on the street and asking “why”.

            We didn’t have AA in our community, and there were no alcohol counselors.  We knew there was plenty of addictive behavior, but addiction and complacency about its destructive ways simply wasn’t mentioned in polite society.

            I am so grateful for Betty Ford coming out publicly, talking about her addiction to alcohol and opioids and how inpatient treatment transformed her life.  At last, it was politically correct to talk about this taboo topic.

            Recently, I’ve had deep conversations about addiction, and turning our lives around, becoming healthy and clean.  It’s tough work, and we go deep with each other. Reaching out and being supportive is an essential part of the work, and the healing.

            Paul Carr writes in the Wall Street Journal about his struggles to become sober (March 19, 2012). He didn’t choose AA, but he says each of us has our own path:

“If it worked for me, it can work for anyone, right? Wrong. The chances that any of the advice here will work for you are vanishingly slim. So, too, are the chances that reading "How to Win Friends and Influence People" [Dale Carnegie’s classic book] will result in your doing either of those things. In truth, all self-help guides are guaranteed to work only for one person: the person who wrote them.

“The real secret to getting sober, and to repairing all the broken aspects of your life, is to take the time (probably through trial and error) to figure out the causes of your addiction and the aspects of your character that can be pressed into service in curing them. To do that, you'll have to figure out your own list of things you enjoy about drinking (for me: adventures, reckless spending, dating, etc.) and how you can keep those things alive through sobriety. Then you need to figure out what part of your personality will drive you to stay sober (for me: ego).

“And then, as every recovering addict will tell you, it's simply a question of taking one step at a time.”

—Adapted from Paul Carr's "Sober Is My New Drunk”.

            Today, my community has an active, visible AA community and a variety of mental health professionals. Sobriety and addiction are respectable topics of polite society’s conversations.  We even greet neighbors at the liquor store and openly support people in recovery. 

            Yet, in our search for economic viability, our community is busy funding and promoting brew pubs, and beginning to enjoy the tax revenue from the local marijuana stores.  Every bar promotes its state lottery games, and the game terminals are conveniently located next to an ATM, with the bartender happy to refresh your drink while you gamble.  Casinos advertise their first class celebrity entertainment, luring us inside for your Las Vegas experience. The Legislature depends on the state lottery to fund our schools and improve parks.

            Money talks. 

And, opioid addiction is at its highest level ever, as folks who have become dependent upon opioid pain killers then look for cheaper highs after the prescriptions run out. And, heroin is so much cheaper. A loaded syringe of heroin goes for $5, maybe less, right here in my town, cheaper than the black market for Big Pharma’s opioid pills.

            100 million opioid pills are prescribed in Oregon, and one out of three Oregonians has received a prescription for an opioid. Oregon ranks near the top nationally in opioid use and in deaths.  More people die from opioid overdoses here than car crashes.  (Medicine in Oregon, Oregon Medical Association, Winter 2016, page 12.)

            Big Pharma deluges us with TV ads, urging us to ask our doctor for medications and pain relief. Where are the ads about addiction; the social conversations about our addictive culture? 

            The addiction machine in our society is doing well.   

            And, you know good and well this scourge isn’t just here in the form of the strung out street person.  This addiction is alive and well everywhere. It’s alive and well with neighbors, friends, and, yes, even family.  It’s an uncomfortable truth.

            We’ve responded by turning the addicts into criminals, with the criminal justice system busy making felons out of addicts, and locking them up in our jail for twenty days or so at a stretch.  Our judges order them into treatment, and the system collects the court ordered fees for all that. But we don’t take on the tough conversations about really getting sober, or changing our culture’s addictive ways.

            I don’t have a magic wand, and I don’t have a “cure all” solution.  I wish I did; lives are literally at stake. But, I do know that one person, one conversation, one relationship can alter the course in a persons’ life, and begin the change toward how we as a community can heal.

            It takes a village, you know.

            Let’s start that conversation. Let’s get sober.

--Neal Lemery, May 25, 2016

Peace Making

Peace Making

It is a lofty goal.  Religions preach it. Politicians speechify it.  Song writers laud it.  We all like to say we are peaceful, loving people.  

And, it’s really the other guy who can’t get along, who pushes us into the argument, the fight, the war.  

“They started it,” we say, justifying our own escalation of the argument, as we stiffen our backs, and pick up the nastier word, the bigger stick.  

Our wars are longer now.  This country’s ten year war in Afghanistan barely makes the main section of the daily newspaper, and rarely hits the front page.  Our “victory” in Iraq really isn’t seen as a victory of democracy over tyranny, but rather a bad nightmare we should really rather forget.  

The latest Israeli-Palestinian rocket war is seen as inevitable and unsolvable.  And, folks quickly blame one side or the other for the terror and destruction, the deaths of families, and the unbending, inflexible positions of the major players.

Not many people see the irony in both sides justifying their geographical arguments on scriptures and theologies that also preach unconditional love and peacefulness being the true direction to humanity from an all loving God.  

And, at home,  war is being waged.  We have the highest rate of jailing our fellow citizens of any country in the world.  And, we criminalize and jail drug addicts.  Our economy continues to impoverish millions of families.  Our politics of late turn into high paid deceptive and vicious advertising and name calling, rather than looking towards solutions to difficult problems, and an expression of compassion and helping others achieve the American Dream.  

Aside from all the noise, a quiet revolution is going on.  Without fanfare, without a lot of chest thumping and back slapping, change is afoot.  

Volunteers, neighbors, students, good people from all walks of life are making a difference.  Soup kitchens and warming centers are springing up in the basements of churches.  Food banks, community gardens, and community centers enjoy quiet and energetic support.  Twelve step programs are strong and are attracting healthy members.  Prison outreach programs, local music jams, potlucks, and community thrift stores are thriving.  

We baby boomers are retiring now, in record numbers, and we are volunteering, helping out, talking with people.  We are engaged in our communities, our neighborhoods, and in our homes.   People are tending their gardens, taking up crafts, and working with others.  We teach each other new skills, and we are reaching out to others, on every level.

The grass roots in this country are healthy and strong.  Social media has expanded the front porch and the neighborhood coffee shop into a bigger, national neighborhood of old friends, old classmates, and long lost relatives.  New connections are made, and our common humanity, our common passion for connecting with others, for caring for each other, are re-weaving the social fabric.

As a country, and as a community, we are re-creating our social conversations, and deciding what topics we will take on.  Newspapers and the major television networks, and other corporate media are finding their audiences shrinking.  New books are now self-published, and marketed by word of mouth and on Facebook and blogs.  We are taking charge of what we talk about and what we learn.  

The richness of our own wisdom, our heritage, our values, and our work is now easily shared, and easily explored.  What I think and what I want to say to others now can be quickly “aired” to not just my household, not just to my buddies at the coffee shop, but to the world.  With a few keystrokes, my morning rant about one thing or another can be put out to all my friends, and, literally, to the world.  

Someone thousands of miles away can read what I think, and can find my thoughts, on their computer and their cell phone.  “Google it” is the motto of this decade, and the back fence conversations start up with a smart phone text or a reply to a Facebook posting.  We’ve become master weavers of the social fabric.  

We’ve rediscovered the value of those rich one on one conversations, the power of reaching out and simply saying, “I care about you.”  Yes, we do that electronically, but we also do that face to face, neighbor to neighbor.  This is our reality; we are rejecting the mass media view of the world, and being told what to think and what is truly important.

This morning, the cashier at Denny’s and I had a rich conversation about the real meaning of Thanksgiving and thankfulness, and the crass commercialization of Christmas.  She’s rejecting that commercial hoopla and instead, she’s gathering and distributing underwear and toys for foster kids. Her mom is mentoring those kids, filling a need in her community, changing lives.   

I’m spending time with young men at the youth prison in my town, playing guitar, being friends, hopefully showing them a more fulfilling way to live. Me buying them coffee at the canteen, just being there, and listening, is opening hearts, and changing all of us.

Yes, small steps, but in the right direction.  Together, we are an army, working for change.

Perhaps this country’s “Arab Spring” starts with those conversations at Denny’s, or engaging your neighbor in an idea to revitalize your town. It starts with each one of us, one step, and then another.

We’ve rediscovered the power of taking the initiative, of finding our voice in our community.  When I post something on Facebook, or write a rant about something on my blog, or “share” a particular article I’ve found on line, I’m really joining my neighbors on the front porch, or at the coffee shop.  

I don’t have to depend on the corporate media to set the agenda, or tell me what the real “news” is, or what to believe.  I’m my own news editor now, and I produce my own news show.  My friends and neighbors do that, too.  Our conversations, in person and on line, are abuzz with new ideas, rich discussions, and the rebuilding of our collective social consciousness.

In all that buzz, we are rediscovering the power of that one on one conversation, about caring for each other, and getting involved with each other.  That is the practice of love, love of self, love of family, love of our fellow humankind. Isn’t that the true meaning of the holidays, our true spiritual calling?

We are getting off the couch and thinking for ourselves again, and rebuilding our community, making peace.

--Neal Lemery 11/22/2012