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Taking Good Care of Yourself When Someone You Know is Suicidal

September 10 is Suicide Awareness Day

Shirley J. Davis
8 min readSep 10, 2021
Photo by Ricardo Resende on Unsplash

This article is written to the family members and friends who love someone with any mental health issue who are suicidal.

Suicide is a topic most folks would rather not speak about. It is frightening that someone they love could decide they do not wish to live any longer and leave them in a cloud of grief and guilt. However, just because we don’t talk about suicide does not mean it will go away.

Today is suicide awareness day. In this article and those that follow in this series, we shall discover together what complex trauma is and how advocates for those who are experiencing suicidal thoughts can help themselves.

Complex Traumatic Stress Disorder

Complex trauma involves multiple exposures to repeated traumatic events and is related to many associated psychological outcomes, such as developing dissociative identity disorder (DID).

One of the clues that someone you love is experiencing DID is if they self-harm. Self-harm occurs when a person becomes overwhelmed and deliberately hurts their body. The injuries are anywhere from minor cuts to severe injuries that are life-threatening. As bad as self-injury is, most people who…

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Shirley J. Davis
Shirley J. Davis

Written by Shirley J. Davis

I am an author/speaker/grant writer in the U.S. My passion is authoring information about mental health disorders, especially dissociative identity disorder..

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