Serving Helps Prevent Suicide

TRIGGER WARNING – This blog contains information about suicide which may be upsetting to some people.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that more than 150,000 people felt the need to get help because they were thinking about taking their lives. That doesn’t count how many people did not make the call and instead followed through with taking their life. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death for Americans ages 10 – 34. There is a death by suicide in the U.S. every 11 minutes. How very, very sad.

Serving Helps Prevent Suicide

Reading the article got me thinking about how serving helps prevent suicide. Bet you never heard that before! It’s true. Let me explain.

Serving boosts our mood or makes us feel happy. In the book Compassionaries: Unleash the Power of Serving I explore how serving makes us feel happy. First, there is a biological effect when we serve in that mood-boosting hormones oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine are released in the brain. Some people call it a serving high. If you know anyone who is depressed, get them to serve others and watch their mood improve. It is virtually guaranteed.

Second, serving others enhances our sense of purpose and our positive connection to other people. In her book, Growing Young: How Friendship, Kindness and Optimism Can Help You Live to 100, Marta Zaraska says neuroscience has confirmed that serving others contributes to well-being and longevity. It is hard for anyone who is regularly involved in serving others to feel sad or forlorn for very long. Serving literally lifts them up out of the mire of despondence.

Serving Others Gives Hope

Suicide is the consequence of hopelessness. “Hopelessness is the absence of any hope, an inability even to imagine a time when help will come when normal life will return when pain will end. ‘Take from a man his wealth, and you hinder him; take from him his purpose, and you slow him down. But take from man his hope, and you stop him. He can go on without wealth, and even without purpose, for a while. But he will not go on without hope.’” (Compassionaries, p. 78)

When a person is so depressed as to contemplate suicide, if she can become involved in serving others, she will inevitably feel her depression fade and her sense of self-worth grow. The two are polar opposites—serving people in need and self-hate or looking for a way out of life. Serving others is good medicine, plain and simple!

Similarly, when we encounter a person who gives off signals of severe depression, we can help them by serving them. In this case, serving provides a caring presence. What a suicidal person needs more than anything is caring from another person. Nothing exudes caring better than service. And it doesn’t have to be anything big or complicated, just being with the person can be more therapeutic than you can imagine.

A True Story

Mark was walking home from school one day when he noticed that a boy ahead of him had tripped and dropped all of the books he was carrying, along with two sweaters, a baseball bat, a glove, and a small tape recorder. Mark helped the boy pick up the scattered articles. Since they were going the same way, he helped the boy carry part of the burden. As they walked, he discovered the boy’s name was Bill, that he loved video games, baseball, and history, and that he was having lots of trouble with other subjects. 

They arrived at Bill’s home first, and Mark was invited in for a Coke. The boys watched television and the afternoon passed pleasantly. After a few laughs and some small talk, Mark went home. Mark and Bill continued to see each other at school, had lunch together once in a while, and both graduated from middle school. They ended up in the same high school where they had brief contacts over the years.  Finally, the long-awaited senior year came, and three weeks before graduation, Bill asked Mark if they could talk.

He reminded Mark of the day years earlier when they had first met. “Did you ever wonder why I was carrying so many things home that day?” asked Bill.  “You see, I cleaned out my locker because I didn’t want to leave a mess for anyone else. I had stored away some of my mother’s sleeping pills, and I was going home to commit suicide.”

Bill told Mark that he realized he didn’t want to die after spending time together talking and laughing. “I would have missed that time with you and many other good times in my life that followed. I am trying to say, Mark, that you did a lot more when you picked up those books that day. You saved my life.” (Deanna Landers, morningcoffeebeans.com/the power of compassion, accessed May 27, 2021, cited in Compassionaries: Unleash the Power of Serving, pp. 82-83.

What Do You Think?

Have you experienced a time when you or someone you know was extremely depressed, and you wondered where that might lead only to have someone bring them up by serving them or by involving them in serving others?

If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text the Lifeline at 988.