|
Only have a minute? Listen instead
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
HARLINGEN — The dark night of the soul is a tragic place where the losses and the violations and the emotional destruction of life can claw away at a person’s sanity.
In the most desperate of moments when the destructions and violations send someone into the emotional wastelands of isolation, they sometimes consider the unthinkable: an ending of all things, a termination of feeling, a shutting down of the rage and the agony and the horror.
In those moments of complete despair when they choose to end the agony, they forget they also release themselves forever from the shimmering gladness and the laughter and the passions of life. They are also sacrificing beyond repair the opportunity for hope and renewal and the resurrection from despair.
Hope is light and promise and healing, but isolation can darken that light.
And that’s why students across the Harlingen school district have come together as Hope Squads to give classmates a familiar presence to relieve them of that isolation and walk with them toward that Hope and the light that beckons struggling travelers toward Hope.
“I want to help kids get as far away from that as possible,” said Katelyn Saldivar, 17, who is in her third year as a Hope Squad member at Harlingen High School.
“I wanted to help others who were struggling with suicide or self-harm,” said Serenity Salinas, 16.
“I had a friend when I was a kid who was having a hard time because her step mom would abuse her,” Serenity said. “She came to school one time with a purple and black eye and she started cutting herself during class. I saw that her sleeves were bleeding and I had to go to an adult that she was hurting herself.”
Serenity was 10 years old at that time.
The specter of suicide lurks in the corners of madness every second of every minute of every day and therefore requires continuous vigilance, but September is National Suicide Prevention Month.
This makes September a time to remember the lives lost to suicide, acknowledge the millions more who have experienced suicidal thoughts, and the many individuals, families, and communities that have been impacted by suicide.
Discussions regarding mental health are critical when it comes to recognizing and understanding the warning signs that someone might be considering suicide, said Becky Tresnicky, director of behavioral health services and performance excellence at Valley Baptist Medical Center in Brownsville.
“Suicide awareness is incredibly important because it is something we can all work together to prevent,” Tresnicky said. “Understanding the issues regarding suicide and mental health is an important step in helping ourselves, helping others, and positively reframing the conservation around mental health.”
Suicide is the twelfth leading cause of death in the United States, says the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Tresnicky said individuals thinking of suicide often display certain behaviors or risk factors.
“Risk factors can include a current or historical mental health diagnosis, alcohol and/or substance use disorders, feelings of hopelessness, history of trauma or abuse, lack of social support, stressful life events (such as divorce, bullying, financial crisis, or psychosocial loss), exposure to another person’s suicide, and perceived stigmas associated with mental health,” she said.
In schools across the United States these factors have constant presence, and that is why Hope Squads are so important. Hope Squad is a national movement that began in Utah after a school administrator observed a high rate of suicide in his district. The movement soon spread to other schools across the country, and recently arrived in the Harlingen school district.
“A few years ago we had in our junior high a percentage of students either attempting or actually committing suicide,” said Virginia Mejia, a student advisor to the Hope Squad at Harlingen High School.
“The attempt level was extremely high,” Mejia continued. “We did have a couple of incidents here in the high school, and we saw there was a need for the students to have an alternative to going to their parents or going to their counselors.”
When the district began the program, Mejia volunteered to be a student advisor to the Hope Squad. The decision originated from many reasons. Of course she cared for the students, but she already had a personal experience related to teen suicide.
“Being a parent who has a daughter that I’ve had to deal with a suicide attempt, it just kind of hit close to home and so I volunteered to be one of the sponsors,” she said.
Her daughter drifted into this desperate abyss after Mejia was diagnosed with cancer and began a road to recovery. This was especially frightening to her daughter because Mejia’s husband was already a cancer survivor.
This derailed her daughter’s studies in San Antonio for a time, but she eventually continued and completed her graduate studies in history and has published several papers. Mejia smiled as she revealed that her daughter just married a wonderful man, and it was a destination wedding in Costa Rica for the simple joy of getting married in Costa Rica.
The struggle of suicide manifests itself in many ways.
“Some of the students I have seen, the depression either stems from bullying, from the stress at home, from stress from parents, making grades,” she said.
Katelyn joined Hope Squad after enduring her own time in hell.
“I had attempted suicide in my sophomore year,” she said. “I was in a very abusive relationship, domestic abuse with an ex-boyfriend, physically, emotionally, mentally, sexually, everything.”
The internal trauma was devastating.
“I had gotten to the point I had lost my sanity,” she said. “I was hearing things, seeing things, feeling things. It drove me to the point where I had no connection with reality.”
Fortunately she did not succeed in her attempt. She was committed to a mental health hospital and afterward saw a psychiatrist, a therapist, and a caseworker. She’s now on track to graduate from high school and attend college.
And she’s ready to help those in need.
“The way I’ve experienced things, I’ve been to that point,” she said. “I’ve seen it first-hand. I don’t want kids to go through what I went through.”
The need for such interventions are at all levels. Hope Squads are in place at all the high schools and middle schools in the Harlingen district, and there are plans extend the program to fourth and fifth grade students.
