He didn’t know what was causing this, he told the Toronto Star. “I thought that I knew that I had to kill myself in order to escape this.”
Fortunately Mike Richey, who happens to work as a care worker for local youth, was on his way to work when he saw Henick clinging to to the overpass railing. He drove to a convenience store and told the clerk to call police. Then he drove back to talk to Henick, and talked for “what seemed like hours,” he wrote in a letter.
Soon there was a crowd of police, paramedics, and onlookers. Richey convinced the young man to inch closer to him, but Henick was barely hanging on by his fingertips and heels.
At this point, serendipity kicked in.
“I felt like he was working himself up to let go. I was completely focused on his fingers, waiting for them to start slipping,” Richey said. “Within moments, they did. And as he leaned forward into nothing, I reached out and put my arm around his chest.”
Then a police officer grabbed the back of Henick’s jacket, pulling him to safety.
From that day on, however, Richey never saw the teenager again.
Here’s where a few facts and figures come in.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collects and analyzes data regarding mortality in the U.S. and deaths by suicide are included, The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (TAFSP) reports. In 2013 — the most recent year that full data is available for — 41,149 suicides were reported, and this means that suicide is the 10th leading cause of death for Americans. Someone committed suicide every 12.8 minutes, the statistics say.
The CDC has been measuring changes in the prevalence of suicide over time, and it does this by calculating the suicide rate in the U.S. every year. This rate expresses how many suicide deaths that occur for every 100,000 people in the population that the rate is being reported on.
From 1986 to 2000, suicide rates dropped from 12.5 to 10.4 suicide deaths per every 100,000 people in the U.S. That changed over the 12 years following, in which the rate increased and by 2013 stood at 12.6 deaths per 100,000.
Firearms were the most common method of suicide, accounting for a little more than half–51.4 percent of all suicide deaths, TAFSP reports. Suicide by suffocation — including hangings, and suicide by poisoning were next.
However, my best friend chose a different method.
Suicide by cop
Suicidology reports that a study using data from 1998 to 2006 found that of 707 officer involved shootings, 36 percent were attempted or completed suicide by cop, and out of that number 51 percent of subjects were killed. I never knew that my best friend would choose this method to kill herself.
I met Elizabeth Catherine Kropp at a poetry reading in Modesto, CA, where I was living. She was kind, articulate, and highly intelligent. But intelligence carries a price in some people and Beth was schizophrenic. The voices in her head were never kind.
“Megan,” she’d say, “They whip my a–.”
Beth tried everything she could to fight her mental illness. She was in-and-out of the hospital, tried different drugs — which didn’t interact well with her, regularly saw her psychiatrist, but things escalated. It really didn’t help her that she had such trouble with the medications, and I think that was her undoing.
One time, while she was hospitalized, the voices started talking to her about me, and I had to quit visiting her because it was too stressful for her and me.
Not long after that, I began working as a crisis counselor for the mentally ill and helped to run a suicide hotline. It was rewarding work, but it wasn’t long before I knew that Beth was trying to kill herself again. I would see it in our record books and it was gut-wrenching for me to see that she was suffering so. I wasn’t allowed to visit her, because of my job, but I worried about her all the time.
Then I moved hundreds, and then thousands of miles away.
It wasn’t long after that when Beth decided she’d had too much of the cruel voices that persecuted her without mercy. So, she walked out of house in a rural Modesto neighborhood that was near a school. Reports say that she was carrying a meat cleaver and cutting her forehead. She wandered onto the grounds of an elementary school and understandably made people nervous. Someone on staff called police and officers found Beth hitting and cutting herself with the cleaver. She ran at them, carrying the cleaver and the police opened fire. On a chilly December day in 2009, Beth was dead before she even hit the ground.
So there was no serendipity for her. No defining moment that changed her life and erased the voices. No mercy for this woman who was my best friend.
This is the fallout from suicide that reverberates through families, friends, and coworkers.
“Could I have done something else? Why wasn’t I there for that person when they needed me?” The questions are endless and they have no answer. The questions are dark and they pounce on us in the middle of the night.
So when I read about people like Mark Henick, I am glad that there are Mike Richeys in the world. These people are heroes to me. For one brief moment in time, Richey reached out of his world into someone else’s and saved a life.
In late January, Henick hopped on the social media, hoping to find the man who saved him all those years ago, The Huffington Post reports. Fortunately, two people who knew Richey got in touch. And, in a strange coincidence and serendipitous fashion, Richey had decided to send Henick a letter. He’d seen a TEDTalk lecture Henick had given.
You can hear an emotional Henick read the letter in this YouTube video:
The two men plan to get together sometime, The Huffington Post reports.
“For the last 12 years, I wasn’t completely sure if I had actually made all of this up, if this was something I had just imagined or dreamt,” Henick says, per the video.
“I know what I need to do next, I need to meet Mike.”
If you, or a loved one is considering suicide, the Mayo Clinic has these recommendations.
It also helps to remember that sometimes what seems like an end is merely a beginning.
