Training faith leaders to work against suicide

One of my primary convictions is that we have siloed suicidality as a mental health issue in ways that are distracting, unhelpful, and sabotaging. Estimates are that 6 percent of adults and 20 percent of kids are thinking about suicide at any given time. Our work is built around an idea from a suicidologist who said that the various reasons people die by suicide basically boil down to two: a loss of hope and a loss of social connection. If the church of Jesus Christ can’t do something about those two things, then it should probably just close its doors. An estimated 60 percent of people who die by suicide had major depressive disorder at the time of their death. That’s more than half, but not that much more.