Teen Suicide: Knowing the Signs

Lacy Sturm: When I grew up, I always had this picture of the devil as some guy with horns and a pitchfork. You expect him to have a different voice. What made it so hard was that it was my voice. It was me that would say that I wasn't worthy, that I was a burden, that I was unwanted. That's what made it hard.

John Fuller: That is one teenager's description of how depression affected her spiritual life. At her worst moment, she couldn't discern the devil's voice from her own voice. This is the second episode of Teen Suicide: Knowing the Signs. I'm John Fuller, along with Danny Huerta. He's a counselor and his Vice President of Parenting and Youth here at Focus on the Family. Danny, depression affects so many areas of life, particularly for teens, including their spiritual life.

Danny Huerta: It does. Let's make a note here that anxiety many times dances with depression. They're together. It causes some paralysis of many things, including your motivation to do academic work. You become afraid of things you were not used to being afraid of, including social moments or moments of failure.

There really is an effect on all areas of a child's life. There's an effect on just the overall friendships and the choices of friendships, the involvement in sports or activities. The level of confidence goes down. What's fascinating to me is there's that group, but there's also another group of kids that are depressed that turn towards aggressive behaviors and become fearless of death. They almost want to dare death.

They don't care if they die. So we want to watch for both. If you see a child folding in and being paralyzed by anxiety and fear, and they begin to disconnect in all areas, their grades go way down, they tank, and they're disconnecting from friendships they've had, that's one group. The other one is if you see a child all of a sudden taking risks that are really on edge of death, that are really scary, you want to step into that as well because that's the other extreme or they're becoming very aggressive or going into themes that are very violent where they don't really care about the topic of death. Those are two extremes of the same spectrum.

John Fuller: In this episode, we're going to be hearing more about some of the causes of depression and suicidal thoughts. We'll be discussing as well how to combat the spiritual component of depression. First, we're going to hear from Lacy Sturm, who is the former lead vocalist of the band Flyleaf. She describes the events that led her to a really dark place and eventually to, as a teenager, contemplate suicide. Here's Lacy talking with Focus on the Family President, Jim Daly.

Jim Daly: When you look at what's happening in schools today, that bullying factor, there's a lot of that going on. Even in our own community here, we've had a number of teen suicides, right at the school that my boys go to. I'm having to have those discussions with my kids. So often what they've observed is that these young people are feeling that despair and they don't know where to go with it. That was you. You were feeling that sense of despair, weren't you?

Lacy Sturm: I talk in my book about how I had a tragedy happen in my family. My mom's sister was a teen mom and her boyfriend situation didn't work out. They ended up living with us when she was pregnant. She had her son, my cousin, and he lived with us. When he was around three, she met a man, they moved to Houston, and got married.

Shortly after that, that man beat my cousin to death. He was abusive, anyway. We knew he was abusive at times with my aunt, but we didn't know he would do something like that. Of course, when that happened, my mom had always talked to me about God. Whenever that happened, she always said God would take care of us and I saw him provide for us along the way. But when that happened, I remember thinking, "I thought God was going to take care of us. Why didn't he take care of my cousin? Why is he dead and I'm alive?"

Jim Daly: And you were about nine at the time, nine or ten?

Lacy Sturm: I was ten years old. I kept thinking, "Why is he dead and I'm alive? Why did it happen to him and not me?" I wondered how I could honor his death. I understand this now and I even realized it as I wrote the book. I didn't realize it before that it was a conscious decision I actually made. God actually helped me as I was praying when I was writing the book to go back to that moment when I chose to stay sad for him.

I kind of did this as a loyalty to his death. I decided I was going to stay sad for him and I actually became distrustful of people who were happy. How can you be happy in a world where children get beaten to death? Something is wrong with you. You're either naive or something's wrong.

Jim Daly: You also kind of turned your back on God, right?

Lacy Sturm: I did not believe in God anymore. I felt like that was a broken chair people were telling you to sit in. I didn't feel like that was true and it made me angry when people would talk about God.

Jim Daly: This is all from the time you're like ten to fifteen or sixteen, right? I mean, that's early to contemplate such weighty and heavy concepts, but you were seeing injustice in the world and feeling that.

Lacy Sturm: I would never assume that that wasn't a normal reaction for a ten-year-old, but people say that all the time. When I was there in the situation, it was so logical to just ask yourself, "Where's God? He's supposed to protect us and care for us. You talk about God all the time being good, so why not Him taking care of us?"

Then the same thing, in a sense, we were in a situation with six kids and we're really poor. We shared everything. Everybody's in the same boat. For me, maybe it's a mothering thing, but I can't eat without thinking, "Did you eat?" Since I was little, I was never able to. So when my cousin died, I thought, "He died, why am I not dead?" I always thought about death and I always wondered about how long we live.

Jim Daly: How did resolution for that come about? Because you're young, again, thinking of these concepts of why your cousin died at the hands of his stepfather. You're rejecting God because you don't see justice in the world. If God is real and alive, there should be some justice in this world. How did you come to kind of accept that bad things happen in this life?

Lacy Sturm: I think that's what drew me to people who actually talked about it and people who actually dealt with it, whether good or bad. I wanted answers. I wanted to know truth about those things. I didn't have good resources. When people were suspicious of the jovial kind of life, I related to that. I thought, "Yeah, why? Something is wrong with those people that are so happy. They're living a lie."

Jim Daly: You identified with sadness. In fact, you mentioned in your book the reason Kurt Cobain's death was one that caught your attention. The fact that it showed despair. Here's a guy, arguably, that was at the top of his game in music and had a lot of notoriety and it was empty, obviously. That really resonated with you and where you were at. How old were you when Kurt Cobain committed suicide?

Lacy Sturm: I was twelve. From our perspective as fans, I believe it was heroic. Now I understand how strange that sounds, that it could be heroic from an outside perspective. I know that a lot of cultures consider suicide heroic. Because of my experience, I so despise the suicidal spirit. Those suicidal temptations, I despise them. I feel like they're so deceptive and they make themselves sound so reasonable in the moment.

It sounds like there's no other way. It sounds like it's honorable. It sounds like it's brave. I remember there was an Instagram thing that went around and my friend Jordan wrote on her arm, "It's brave to live." That's the thing that a lot of people don't recognize. In those moments, if you make a choice to continue to live after you've decided that you don't want to live, you can do whatever you want with your life. You can hand it over. You can go on any kind of adventure. You can risk everything.

To look at that moment of not wanting to live and take it as a place of saying, "Well, let's do something different. Let's go a different direction." For me, the day I planned to commit suicide, having an encounter with God, I remember thinking when I let that guy pray for me, I thought I was just going to go die.

Jim Daly: Let's talk about it because we're right at that point. This despair, this path of despair that you were kind of meandering down because you despised happy people and joyful people. I'm sure there weren't many committed Christians that were giving you the answers that you needed at that moment as a twelve or thirteen-year-old. But what was that allure to move into greater despair and even contemplate taking your own life and doing what you thought would be a brave act like Cobain and say, "Okay, I'm not enjoying this life, I'm going to end it"? Talk about what got you to that point.

Lacy Sturm: Well, with Nirvana, the message was they came out in a materialistic time in the 80s where everybody has the "in" and they're so flamboyant and all of this kind of expensive whatever. They came out looking like homeless people with torn shirts and the whole bit. He was celebrated for having been homeless and living under a bridge. He had a song called Under the Bridge.

To be celebrated as a poor person who wears those kind of clothes because that's from the thrift store and who gets made fun of because you have nothing, all of a sudden now you have an identity and you're like, "Yeah, we have a voice here." When he got into being famous, you could see in his interviews the struggle he had with being famous and everybody knowing him but him wanting to be an everybody person. They kept exalting him and you could see the struggle in his interviews.

What I perceived as a fan was that he was saying, "I don't want this. I'm better than you. I'm above you. But I don't know how to let go of it. It's like I'm stuck and sort of trapped in this." That was attractive to me because that was me. I was living in clothes I got from the thrift store. I was poor. My dad wasn't in the picture. When I showed up at Grandma's house, it was so relieving. It was so relieving to get out of the environment of being stressed and starting over is such a great feeling.

Jim Daly: But you did have some conflict, right?

Lacy Sturm: Well, I'm still struggling with all the things I struggle with, but there's a relief in starting over. I'm still drawn to those people. I'm hanging out and I'm trying to find ways. We end up being involved in drugs and not following the rules at home the way I'm supposed to. I don't think it was necessarily vindictive. It was just I had a hard time understanding sometimes. Transitioning was hard anyway.

I magnified any little thing in my mind that was rejection. Anything that was a discipline, I magnified it in my mind and just always thinking, "They don't love me and I'm a burden to them." That's what I felt at that age. You look at them and you think they wanted to do the right thing because they have to do the right thing. I didn't feel like I was a blessing to them. I felt like I was a burden.

Jim Daly: Do you ever think about your behavior being a test of their love to say, "Will you love me even if I act this way?" Have you ever thought of that?

Lacy Sturm: Maybe subconsciously there was that.

Jim Daly: In fact, you and your grandma had a bit of a shouting match, if I read that correctly in your book. There was one day where the two of you verbally just went after each other and you were yelling and she started yelling back at you and she didn't stop for an hour. Literally just screaming. What was she yelling at you?

Lacy Sturm: Her husband, my grandfather, was in the hospital, had had a heart attack earlier that week. She was trying to tell me, "You're not obeying our rules. You're getting in trouble at school. You're doing things that are illegal. All of this is stressful. Your grandfather's in the hospital. He had a heart attack earlier this week and you're not helping anything."

What she's trying to say is your actions affect more than just you. There's more people impacted by your problems than just you. That's actually good advice for somebody who's depressed, to get them to take their mind off themselves and focus on how they can help other people around them. But I was looking for a reason to end my life. So I twisted her words from what she meant, "We love you, you're impacting us because we love you," to saying, "Our life would be better without you," which is not what she meant.

This is what the enemy twisted in my mind, which was not true at all. Because there is no way it would have been less stressful if I had committed suicide on my family. It would have been more stressful. But I found it to say life would be better without you. I'm going to take my life. I found a selfless reason.

John Fuller: We can hear the mental contortions and the different voices in the head of Lacy Sturm. The death of her baby cousin was such a tragic event. Ten-year-olds are not equipped to deal with that kind of thing. Danny, it's common though for an event like that or a significant event to happen and trigger depression in a teenager, isn't it?

Danny Huerta: It is. It's a common thing because we're human beings. We respond emotionally to what's around us. We're full of emotions and that's the beauty of being a human and the difficulty of being human. For children, they interact with their world through emotions. They don't have the capacity to interpret the way we do as adults and to draw on experience and other moments of victory in our lives to really know how to navigate something that feels permanent at the moment.

Death is so hard to understand for a ten-year-old. There is a situational response that has a spectrum. There's all the way from a friend's death that wasn't supposed to happen to a moment of rejection or a moment of failure or disappointment. "I didn't make the team. Now what do I do? I must be a failure." There's this mindset that "I must be the most awful soccer player in the world. I'll never play soccer." You as a parent can come in and bring truth. "Hey, wait, let's interpret that a little differently." But not with the emotions driving the car.

John Fuller: How does that work, though? I mean, if I'm a teenager and I'm feeling, does your truth, your logic really penetrate my sense of wellbeing?

Danny Huerta: First, you affirm it. It makes perfect sense that you're feeling that. That's what you would think a person would feel towards what has just happened. Let me help you understand it from my perspective where I'm not feeling the intensity of your feelings. I want to help you be able to navigate and manage that big huge emotion that you're feeling because I'm sure it's overwhelming for you. So you're showing that empathy and compassion and that really softens a child, especially a ten, eleven, nine-year-old.

You may have a little bit more hardness with a sixteen or seventeen-year-old. Be patient with that. Empathy and compassion still work with a teenager that sees that you're in there for long haul. You're not just coming in because you think you have to as a parent. They want to know you truly care and you truly understand what this emotion is all about.

John Fuller: I appreciate that insight, Danny. Let's go ahead and hear more now from Lacy Sturm as she talks to Jim Daly about her despair and spiritual truth that kind of cut through all that.

Jim Daly: So you go in. What are you feeling when you walk into this church, feeling despair, feeling rejection, not feeling loved, and your grandmother is forcing you to go to church? What are you thinking when you walk in the door?

Lacy Sturm: I hate everybody. I hated everybody. I hated everybody, especially the pastor. I also had this feeling like I was an intellectual. I was in Mississippi and everybody to me was like they're not educated, which is not true. They just talk real life.

Jim Daly: You're feeling like you know more than everybody else around you. But what happened in that church service that got your attention?

Lacy Sturm: Well, when he spoke, he began to talk about scenarios that he had been through that were just like I was the only person in the room and like he was telling my story. He talked about different families and the struggles they went through. He talked about the kids feeling isolated and having to take on more responsibility than they need. He talked about how the violence that happens in those situations and how they feel alone and misunderstood.

He talked about suicide. He stopped in the middle of all of that and just started crying. That was really impactful to me because I never saw someone weep over someone they don't know and to weep over someone who's despairing of life. Even just seeing him weep resonated with me. Like, "Do you cry? Do you have pain in your life? I will listen to you if I know that you can understand that that's how I feel." For him to weep stopped me and made me listen.

Jim Daly: And he doesn't know you're there, really, and what your issues are. He's just speaking to the full audience.

Lacy Sturm: He didn't say anything, just weeping. He stopped talking, just weeping. Everybody's listening and you can feel some people are embarrassed and it's uncomfortable. Finally, he's wiping his tears and he says, "There's a suicidal spirit in this room." It was just total silence. Everybody realized you're crying because you feel like a sense that there's somebody here who wants to take their life. I was like *gasp*.

Jim Daly: That was you.

Lacy Sturm: It was me. He just wiped his tears and says, "Please come up here and let us pray for you, whoever you are. God has a plan for your life. He doesn't want you to die tonight." I didn't go up there. My pride wouldn't let me go. Can you imagine being him? He passed away now, but how brave it is to say that and have no one respond. You think you failed. You think you just made something up in your head. But somebody caught me on the way out. There's a man I still talk to him. We call him Poppy.

Jim Daly: So he caught you at the end of the service. What did he say to you?

Lacy Sturm: I didn't know him and he said, "I feel like the Lord wants me to speak to you." He had tears in his eyes too. I think he knew. God knew. He said, "I feel like the Lord wants me to speak to you and He wants you to know that even though you've never known an earthly father, that God will be a better father to you than any earthly father could ever be."

When he said that I thought, "I don't need a dad. I don't need a man in my life." I had hated men and I distrusted men, especially older men that were strangers. He looked at me with such love. I never saw pure love in a stranger man's eyes directed at me like he knew me. I'm thinking, "I don't need a dad." Then he spoke and he said, "God has seen you when you cry yourself to sleep at night." He said, "You've been rehearsing your pain. There's been pain in your heart from your own sins and the sins of other people committed against you and your family. But I want you to know Jesus died on a cross to take the sins of the world on himself. So he took the effect of the sin, he took our pain so we don't have to carry it in us. Can I please pray for you and ask Jesus to take the pain out of your heart?"

At that moment where I'm like, "I'm either going to go die or I'm going to wait a minute and let this guy pray for me and how can he know all these things?" Finally, this flicker of receptiveness came. I said, "Okay, you can pray."

Jim Daly: You mentioned in your book the reason having courage to live. One, you said it's brave to keep living when life is sad or difficult. Now you know working with people who are sad and in despair, that's a hard thing to convince them of. What are you getting at when you say it's important to live even if you're feeling sad?

Lacy Sturm: What I understood when I encountered God was that he is very real. He is holy. His love is so overwhelming, so overpowering, so all-consuming that the questions and the weight and everything, it's like turning the light on so bright that all the shadows disappear. I don't sit and I say, "Well, bad things happen because of this."

No, I say my cousin was murdered, beaten to death by a stepfather, and then I encountered God. I have no reasons for the other, but I know that there's a good God who's holy. I can't tell you any answers that are tangible, but I can say when you encounter God, that you will have that light that's so bright, that's so beyond me. His love is so beyond my understanding and it's so tangible.

Jim Daly: Lacy, the question might pop into people's minds who are struggling, who have that bitterness because something bad happened in their life. How does that change happen? Where you can go from you, in your case, it moved you toward not believing in God, seeing your cousin die at the hands of his stepfather. How does a person let go? How do they say, "Okay, Lord, I'm going to accept the fact that bad things happen and that it's not your fault"?

Lacy Sturm: Outside of knowing God and not just knowing about God, but knowing him, outside of that, we make this life about this life. This isn't all there is. This is a shadow of what's to come. We're eternal beings. If you were in heaven looking at the earth, seeing these things happen, and God were to say to you, "Can I send you? Will you help? What will you do? Can you go be a light?" From that perspective up there where you're in eternity, can you go step into time? It's like this question of we get a chance right now. Life is a gift to you and no matter what happens, whether somebody lives or dies, you're breathing and you have a purpose. God doesn't give you the miracle of life on accident. That's what I had to understand when I woke up the next day. I wasn't supposed to wake up today. Why do you care? Why do you love me? And here I am. Why'd you give me more time? Because I don't have any plans.

John Fuller: What a tender conversation Lacy Sturm had with Jim Daly and what an important message from her. We're joined now in the studio by our colleague Dr. Joni DeBrito. Joni is a licensed mental health professional who specializes in crisis and trauma counseling. Joni, thanks for joining us to discuss this story. Let me ask you about the events that led Lacy to contemplate suicide. There are factors that probably caused her depression to escalate toward suicidal thoughts.

Dr. Joni DeBrito: It sounds like Lacy had a difficult life to begin with. It sounds like her mom was having difficulty with her. There was a lot of conflict. She was moved to her grandmother. Her father was not in her life and most kids get their sense of identity from mother and father, but very much from father as well. So she was already in a difficult place. Then she lost her cousin to a tragic death, actually at the hand of his stepfather.

If you take a young girl in the midst of a very difficult life and throw in a tragic event like that and expect her to be able to process that well the way a child would with supportive, loving parents, that's a little bit too much to expect and it sounds to me like it was just overwhelming for her. Also, that lack of identity that she probably didn't have because of not having parents to help her with that, then she started identifying with Kurt Cobain, who obviously committed suicide. That's a very common thing that kids will find an identity when they don't have their own identity. They'll find it in another person. If that person is similar, they're experiencing similar things and their decision was to die by suicide, then they start to think maybe that's what I need to do as well. I think there were many factors that played into her getting to the point of thinking about hurting herself.

John Fuller: A lot of complexity in her life. So if kids are fighting depression, it does seem that there is a spiritual battle going on there. So let me ask you both, Danny and Joni, as a parent, how do you help a teen discern the voice of the enemy versus truth?

Danny Huerta: This is a real difficult thing for a parent to step into because they're very real thoughts in a teen's mind or a child's mind. You want to point out lies as they come in. "Hey, this is a lie." You can base it off of Ephesians 2:10 that we are God's masterpiece, created for great things in Christ Jesus that were prepared ahead of time uniquely for each of us to step into. We're created on purpose and with a purpose for something.

Reminding our kids of that, that life is all about growth until we die. There's grace, there's forgiveness along the way, available to all of us. Whenever our thoughts go towards death and that we're failing, that is a lie. There's nothing that says that that is true about who we are. What I ask my kids and I've asked other kids coming into my counseling office is: Who gets a vote in saying who you are? Why do they get the vote? How come they got more vote than the other people?

I've heard all these other people say something different and you've chosen to believe this one vote. Why is this one so powerful? It gives them insight to the fact that our brain gets fixated on negativity, on the negative things, the things we do wrong. It gets fixated on that missing tile. It gets fixated on flaws. That's a problem of sin that we have in our brain where we miss out on the beauty of what God has created, including ourselves. As a parent, you can enter a child's life in a very affirming way by patiently and calmly reminding them of who they are.

One of the common themes within a parent-child relationship is shame sneaks in and a child bases all of their interpretation of life off of that shame lens. "I'm a bad person." You have to deal with that belief for sure. You're not a bad person. Do you make mistakes? Do you make poor choices? Do you make dumb choices? Absolutely. We all do. But that doesn't make you a bad or awful person or stupid person. It makes you a person that is very human. That's a truth that your child has to hear over and over again so that they can deal with the changes and the realities of life.

Dr. Joni DeBrito: I also think that it's helpful if parents can help their kids understand the mind of Christ and the heart of God and to understand that often those voices that kids hear in their heads that are telling them to do something destructive, that's not consistent with the will of God. God is not going to say kill yourself. God is not going to say hurt yourself. God is going to help you find a way through the issues that you're struggling with or the despair that you are in. God is also not a vengeful angry voice. Often I would hear kids talk about, "God yelled at me and told me I was *filling the blank* and all of these awful words." That's not the way God conducts himself. That's not God's love. That does not show God's love for human beings. To help kids understand that voice that's yelling at you, that voice that's telling you you're nothing, that voice that is telling you things that we know to not be true, those things are not consistent with the will of God and the heart of God.

Danny Huerta: I remember talking to my son one time. I said, "There's an all-out war for people's souls. There's a spiritual war and I want you to be aware of it and the real estate it wants is your mind." That's the real estate where God is saying, "I want your mind." It says it all throughout Scripture. There's this battle for the mind and you can see it in society. You can see it through music, video games, technology. The awareness of the war is what your child needs to know. There's a lot at stake here and that real estate is up to you. I want you to take ownership of that and I'm going to help you because I'm one of the only people in this world that would die for you and I'm not going to let your mind be taken over.

John Fuller: I appreciate that insight, Danny, and the heart you just expressed there. As we wrap up, Joni, let me take it back to Lacy's story. God intervened and saved her from suicide that night she visited the church. That's not going to be every child's story. What are some of the more ordinary means God may use to help a child divert from that path?

Dr. Joni DeBrito: I think that God uses people in a teen's life to speak into their lives. Often I'll be talking with someone who's struggling with depression or suicide and they begin to get better and they say, "My aunt came to me and talked with me and shared with me Scripture or prayed with me." God can use people to speak into their lives. I also think that it's very clear in the Bible that God gives people certain gifts.

People may have gifts of mercy and for sure teens who are struggling with depression need those gifts of mercy and grace, but also gifts of counseling, gifts of medical skills and so forth. There are professionals that are there to help kids who are struggling and those may be people who God gave very specific gifts to to be helpful. So I say take every resource that you can get and recognize that in many cases it's coming directly from God.

John Fuller: Danny and Joni, thank you so much for once again sharing your insights and your helpful advice and your hearts for parents and kids. We recommend that you check out Lacy Sturm's book, which describes more of her really incredible life and her powerful conversion story. It's called *The Reason*. We'd be happy to send a copy as a thank you gift when you join the support team here at Focus on the Family. Make a donation of any amount and we'll send the book.

For a comprehensive guide on preventing teen suicide, check out *Alive to Thrive*, which is our free online curriculum designed for individuals or groups. If you're interested in starting a conversation group about this, you can download the leader's guide. It's free and it's on our website. Or you can download the participant's guide and go through the training on your own.

This is the first in a series of podcasts addressing mental health in youth. In coming days, we'll have future podcasts on topics like anxiety and self-harm and social media use. Please be sure to subscribe to receive future episodes. For now, I'm John Fuller and thanks for listening to Teen Suicide: Knowing the Signs.