86 Time November 4, 2019
T
he suicidal ThoughTs
started when Kristina Mossgra-
ber was 17. A loud voice in her
head told her that she was a bad
person, a failure, better off dead.
She cut herself in secret and told no one about
the thoughts slamming around her brain, ex-
cept her pediatrician, who dismissed them as
normal teen angst. But her suicidal thoughts
and behaviors didn’t stop. “I was so good at
hiding it and kind of normalizing it.” She re-
members thinking, “I just need to keep these
to myself.”
She did, all through her 20s and early
30s, until one September day in 2014 she
drove three hours from her home in Roch-
ester, N.Y., where no one would find her,
and cut her neck and the veins down her
arms. After struggling to hide her wounds
for four days, she went to an emergency
room. A doctor sent her home. “They didn’t
think I was suicidal enough,” she says.
Mossgraber was referred to an outpatient
treatment program, but she couldn’t absorb
any of the information; she went through the
motions, all the while planning how she was
going to kill herself. She withdrew from friends
and skipped Sunday dinners with her family.
“I was falling deeper and deeper into this de-
spair,” she says.
Three months later, she bought a jug of
anti freeze, mixed it with Gatorade and woke
up days later in the intensive- care unit. Once
inside, she had a different experience. After
doctors stabilized her, the psychiatric team
helped her write a safety plan, a personalized
guide for Mossgraber to follow to help her cope
when she feels suicidal. They matched her with
a specialist in a type of behavioral therapy that
treats suicidal thoughts and actions. And they
connected her to an outpatient program, where
she would finally be diagnosed with bipolar
disorder and given medication that worked.
“I had a lot of great people who encouraged
me to keep going, and get better, and go home
and start this hard work of recovery,” she says.
“People listened to me and treated me like a
human being.” It saved her.
Suicide is one of the most urgent health
problems facing America today. It is the
10th leading cause of death in the U.S., claim-
ing 47,000 lives per year—and likely more,
given that many suicides are not reported.
Recent federal numbers indicate that the na-
tion’s suicide rates are the highest they’ve
been since World War II; they’re rising in
nearly every state and across age groups
and ethnicities. Alarmingly, suicide rates for
young people are now the highest this cen-
tury; among people ages 10 to 24, the rate
increased 56% from 2007 to 2017, according
to federal data from October 2019. Suicides
among active-duty members of the military
have also increased over the past five years,
the Department of Defense reported in Sep-
tember, and a Department of Veterans Affairs
(VA) report from the same month found that
suicides by veterans are on the rise. Ten mil-
lion Americans seriously considered suicide
in 2018. “It’s an extremely serious problem,
and the fact that suicide is increasing shows
that we all need to do more and do better,”
says Richard McKeon, chief of the suicide-
prevention branch at the Substance Abuse
and Mental Health Services Administration
(SAMHSA), a branch of the Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS).
Suicide is complex, and it’s not clear what’s
driving the rise, but experts speculate thatMossgraber, 39, had
two very different
experiences at the
same hospital: after
her first suicide
attempt, she was
sent home; after her
second, clinicians
saved her life and put
her on the path to
recovery