Suicide: Now So Out in the Open By a Guggenheim Fellow Who Tried It 10 Times

Tarot readings are very intimate. Typically by time a trusting relationship is established clients confide their suicidal feelings or even attempts. 

How they experience the world is dark. Their "Tower," that is what they have known as their life is collapsing. 

My struggle to bring insight, hope and solutions are been effective. But now I have an unexpected resource to guide them through that emotional and spiritual abyss. That the recent memoir by a Guggenheim Fellow, philosophy professor and widely published author Clancy Martin. He has published How Not To Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind.  On Amazon, it is a best-seller. Here is his LinkedIn Profile.

The tone is balanced enough and the content couched in safe almost clinical (but engaging) context so that it can even be read and reflected on by those in emotional distress. As Martin hammers, there are other publications dealing with suicide such as the poetry of Anne Sexton which he steers those in darkness away from. 

His contribution to the field of mental health is that he extracts from his own 10 suicide attempts and those of others the default mindsets which seem to go along with that syndrome. Usually that is labeled "suicidal ideation." Once those going low on hope understand what is going on in the minds they might be able to connect the dots - in a preventive manner. 

In addition, he lifts the self-shaming by those who have been plagued with suicidal ideation all of their lives. He fingers a genetic component. Like, the message is: This is a default and it's not your fault. 

What I have discovered through providing years of Tarot readings is that there are simple, yes, simple, ways to exit the compulsive urge to reflect on suicide. That goes back to the 12-step program emphasis on getting out of yourself. If you are there totally inside yourself, you are, according to the 12 Steps, roaming around a bad neighborhood. 

The 12-Step slogan is: Move a muscle, change a thought. The very least that can be done is phone a hotline for those at an emotional flashpoint. Excellent, confidential, 24/7 and free is the Samaritans of New York (212-673-3000).

Another non-complicated move is to just get yourself  directed to go somewhere, anywhere. It could be a coffee shop or a drive to nature.

A third is to pray. The one created by St. Francis of Assisi also frees you from yourself. Here are key lines from that for you:

" ... grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love."

Takeaway: Just because you are thinking about offing yourself that doesn't mean you should follow-through. Change that thought process, save your precious life. 

Tarot Card Reader. Medium. Intuitive Career Coach.

Don’t Give Up Before the Miracle.

Empathy and compassion.

No-pressure complimentary consultation about the answers you need. Then, fees custom-made for your budget.

For an appointment, please contact janegenova374@gmail.com or text 203-468-8579.