Preeti (00:00.534)
Hey Curt, how's it going?
Curt (00:02.707)
Excellent. How are you doing, Preeti?
Preeti (00:04.406)
I'm okay. I'm okay. I've been thinking a lot about a really difficult topic that I think it's important for us to address and one that we think we can help with at MAYA. And that is the alarming increase in teen suicide rates. Over 60%. We've seen a 60 % increase in the last 20 years of teen suicide rates. And the Jed Foundation, reports that 13.6% of adults ages 18 to 25 have had serious thoughts of suicide. 22% of high school students have reported seriously considering suicide in the last year, and 10 % of high school students have actually attempted suicide in this last year. It's an incredibly scary statistic for us to reckon with, especially as a parent and I wanted to get your take on that. And I wanted to also ask you to talk to us about how this begins and what we can do about it.
Curt (01:12.491)
Yeah, it's a great point. And certainly your work at MAYA drew me to this project, having three teen boys. And I think it's one of the hardest conversations a parent, even a good parent who judges themselves as doing a good job, they can go to the kids game, they can referee, they can coach, they can drive everywhere. And then you ask him, Well, have you ever talked about suicide with your son or daughter? How much they think about known as suicide ideation? It's terrifying. It's it's it's harder to it's easier to say I love you to a teen, you know, child than
talk about suicide. And I noticed as my parents passed away and some uncles and aunts that I call it the moment of surrender, which I find fascinating, completely ripped off as a U2 song title. But it's the point where a human being, and now that we're seeing it a younger age demographic, stops living their life and begins to wait to die. So they start making choices subtly usually.
about, especially in the older generation, not taking care of their health. So that's not going to the doctor regularly. That could be not getting their teeth cleaned and taking care of regularly. That could be drinking much more alcohol than they have their whole life. Maybe they start smoking cigarettes, doing events that will increase their likelihood or their timeline of their death.
Now with teen suicide and social media pressure, as we've talked about at MAYA and some other videos we're the opposite of Meta, we try to counteract the effects of social media. It's something where getting and talking to a person, whether they're 12, 13, 14, all the way to 65, 70, where that switch takes place, where they stop taking their medication every day and going for walks and being healthy and not eating too much red meat and not drinking too much. And then subtly,
There's a "51/49" moment where that seesaw goes, I'm tired, I'm tapped out, or the pain I'm carrying around, say it's "Big T" trauma or "Small T" trauma is too much. I just, I'm going to start the process of no longer living to my fullest and trying to be healthy and vibrant. But now I'm just kind of waiting to die, not put a gun to my head or put a noose around my neck, but making decisions that will slowly increase my death chances or the timeline of my death.
Curt (03:26.859)
At MAYA talking to someone, whether they're 15 or 55 at that moment is where I think we can do our best work and figure out what's going on and give, especially as a teenager, they don't have the perspective as someone at say 55, 65 that would having these same thoughts, right? It's they think the world is ending possibly on a breakup or not making a sports team or something very emotional that goes on social media. and of course we see the deaths of bullying on social media too. So absolutely terrifying conversation.
But I highly recommend to any parent watching, if you don't know the answer to the question of "How much does my teen think about suicide?" and how relevant is it in his life, because thinking about your own death is actually a very common thing among humans of all ages. But at this point, you need to find that out because that's the most terrifying result is guessing wrong or not knowing the answers to that.
Preeti (04:20.566)
And, you know, it occurs to me that if as an adult, one were to have suicidal ideation, it's probably not the first time you've thought of that. That's something that begins in childhood. And developmentally speaking, it's also sort of a normal thing that we humans contemplate our death. We're probably the only animals on the planet who do that. We know that there's a finality to it. We experience death and grief and loss throughout our lives, but contemplating our own death and contemplating what that would be like is not abnormal or unnatural. But where we can be helpful at MAYA is that there are...
There are distinct characteristics of somebody who has gone down a path where external validation, where addiction, where the need for more is taking place of real self-esteem, a sense of value and worth in the world. And I mean, I have personal experience with this. As an adult, I was suicidal. As a child, I was suicidal.
But my suicidal ideation turned, over the course of about 35 years, into an actual suicide attempt. And it's something that I've been quite candid about and it's something that I talk about in order to shine a light on how everything can look pretty great from the outside and things are still not necessarily going well in a person's inner life. And I will also say that MAYA is not a mental health program.
MAYA is a self-esteem program. And I highly recommend that anybody who's working with us, whose child is going through suicidal ideation is also working with mental health professionals. I did as well. I 100 % have been in therapy since I was 17 years old. At some point in my adult life, I suffered from panic attacks somewhere in my early 30s. And I went on some medication for that.
Preeti (06:28.534)
at the same time, I had been self-medicating for a number of years with alcohol and then eventually with drugs as well. And, when, when life became, when life became unmanageable, when my alcoholism got to a place, a point of no return and I started to feel incredibly defeated by life. I was about 42 years old.
and I was incredibly successful. I had a great group of friends. I had a good family. I had, I ticked a lot of boxes that a lot of people would say, well, she's okay. And I actually wasn't okay. And I hadn't been okay for a long time. And I didn't feel equipped, even though I'd been in therapy, even though I had done the work, I didn't feel equipped to talk about this deepest, darkest secret. And I definitely didn't talk about it with my parents.
I'm wondering if you think that that might have helped, the ability to talk about it at a younger age and then maybe taking away the shame and allowing our kids to have the space to say some things that are really uncomfortable and perhaps actually quite frightening for us could be helpful.
Curt (07:27.979)
and youth.
Curt (07:48.075)
You just hit it right on the head as far as how difficult, if you think it's difficult as a parent listening to this, and then say, talking to your teenage son or daughter after this video, Hey, you know, how are these thoughts in your head? What a Imagine the, what you just laid out going to your parent and having to have this discussion. Have you created the space? Have you created the relationship and the trust? you know, are you preaching or teaching generally to your kids to where they could talk to you about this before an act?
Preeti (07:48.758)
I think it's very, very hard. It's kind of difficult, but it's still pleasant.
Preeti (08:13.494)
you
Curt (08:17.419)
could take place. So that's why I think you get the guilt and shame as you talked about as well as parents just not on the kid's side is that if your child can't talk to you about this, you feel like a failure, you have shame and God forbid they followed through on any of that ideation, then you really feel like it's your fault. And it's you didn't do anything and you didn't know. So you hit it right on the head as far as communicating and being able to have these discussions, you know, with parents, like I wonder what your parents would say if you had gone to them and said something at that age.
Preeti (08:46.945)
Right. I would say that the shame and the pain was there as an adult as well. It took me many years to actually be able to talk to my own family about what had happened. And it was only after I had gotten treatment for my alcoholism that I'd been in recovery for a couple of years. And then also, to be perfectly honest, when I decided to do a podcast and start talking about what had happened to me in order to help
shine a light on some of these issues that are still quite taboo in our society is when I realized that I actually needed to tell them because I didn't want them to hear about it through a third party. I didn't want them to find out on a video or on social media. That would have been awfully disrespectful.
But I had a lot of shame and I also felt very protective about them and their emotions. And I didn't want them to think that they had failed. I didn't want them to think that they had caused this in any way. And the truth of it is that my environment and my DNA and the way my brain was created and the way my addiction took a hold of me and some of the choices that I made that made me feel like I had no other choice. And the fact that I was very very inebriated when I did it were all factors. The ability that I had and the support I had to navigate my life as an adult in therapy with medication, with family that understood that I had some mental health challenges both in terms of anxiety and depression was not enough to prevent me from feeling like there was no other way out.
And I think about that, I think about the fact that this had been a thought that had occurred to me during my first depressive episode when I was 17 years old. And I went through untreated depression for a few years until I got to college and somebody, a dean recognized it in me and helped me get the treatment that I needed for that. So I'm wondering from your perspective, having high school age children,
Preeti (11:00.214)
What as a parent would you do to begin this conversation with your kids?
Curt (11:06.219)
Well, certainly not coming out just at the dinner tonight. You know, there has to be some buildup because this is, in my opinion, the ultimate question, right? You know, we have a thing as parents where whenever teenage kids are putting a plan together, the first rule is nobody dies, right? Whether it's drinking or vaping or what's going on at a dance or someone's house that night. But the first rule of fight club, of parent fight club is nobody dies tonight over this, regardless of what's going on. So bringing in that context to nobody self kills themselves either.
You know the education through MAYA and some of the things we do to open up that conversation. I was really impressed with Just understanding it like talking to your child before you even bring up those words about how's it going? How's school? You know, how's your boyfriend girlfriend? And then you have to talk about yourself. You have to give them the space to let them know about your life how's it going with you? You know give them an insight into who you are and your what your some of your struggles are. Remember you're their role model
So if they see you talking about your struggles or what you're dealing with, or it's been a hard week this week for X, Y, and Z, that gives them some space also to maybe go a little deeper than the standard, as we know, teenager answer: about good, how's school? Great. How's so -and-so? Good, you know, and they need to see their role model open up and talk about struggles. So they feel comfortable talking about some of their struggles. And it's, it's a process, which again, MAYA is excellent at, and I was really attracted to joining this program and doing it with you is because we can really make a difference.
in those conversations and help both sides, parents and teens.
Preeti (12:38.006)
Right, definitely opening up the dialogue is a huge part of it and it will serve to shed the shame from this, both from parent and child. One of the most important things I've learned in recovery is that feelings are not facts. I have a lot of feelings a lot of the time and I have learned to investigate those feelings. And if they are feelings of shame and being unloveable and a sense of unbelonging and feeling ostracized and left out and and all those things that we still feel as adults but are acutely complicated and difficult as children, when I investigate those feelings, mostly I come up with that they are untrue, they are valid, but that they are not true. They are not based in the facts of my life. And that's been really helpful for me. The other thing that's been helpful is that thoughts are not an action plan. And that if I had an opportunity, to without shame be able to talk freely about the thoughts that I'd been having about how unlivable my life was and about how, you know, it was really shame at the core of that as well. I felt like I had lived a charmed life and I'd been given every opportunity and I had squandered it. And the amount of self-loathing that came from that thought, which I had decided was a fact of my life and not just my perception, faulty perception as it were. The amount of shame and self-loathing that came from that made me believe that one, I deserved to be as miserable as I was and therefore shouldn't talk to anybody about it because this was the circumstance of my own making. And two, that everyone would be better off without me.
Curt (14:24.363)
And I think that finality of that last thought is what children or teens at that age, everybody would be better off without me, which as parents, you know, isn't true, but, you know, being caught up in a world of social media that didn't exist when we were growing up, if you're over 40, 50, those mistakes and those embarrassments are being amplified through friend groups, through social media, through every, through every platform.
And so this is a very real conversation you need to have as opposed to maybe what the stereotypical person who may have a serious suicide ideation was 30 or 40 years ago. Now it's coming much closer. It's much earlier, much closer to home because of the access and amplification of mistakes and bullying that's now present on their phone 24/7.
Preeti (15:02.486)
Right.
Preeti (15:15.574)
And the internet never forgets, so your mistakes are there forever. And bullying, the bullying is 24/7 because you can be bullied on social media, you can be bullied through text message. And bullying is shameful and embarrassing for kids, and they often don't talk about that as well.
Curt (15:35.307)
Yeah. And again, remembering that as parents, we're role models. So if you're not talking about, you know, just your day, your struggles, it doesn't mean you have to lay it on your kids. Like they need to solve it for you. But when they see their role model being open to discussing what, you know, what's had a bad day, this is really, you know, worrying me. I'm stressed here. They're going to feel more comfortable saying the same things to you. So that's how you start.
Preeti (15:56.982)
Right. And so at MAYA, our program is designed to help build self-worth. We're not a suicide prevention program. There are a lot of really, really wonderful programs, but we do recognize that self-esteem and self-worth is a core, is part of the core foundation that our kids aren't often being given the time and opportunity to build because of the cult of achievement that we're all a part of.
And I will tell you firsthand that all of the achievements that I had and the great resume that I built did not make me feel like I belonged, like I was worthy and that the concept that I am worthy because I exist, the concept that, you know, out of, there was a one in 700 trillion chance that that sperm and that egg created me.
That's actually a stat that Mel Robbins has promoted on her podcast. And I was really excited to hear about that. It made me feel very special for about a minute. But it's true. A one in 700 trillion chance that each of us was actually conceived and born, whatever it is that you believe, the fact that we have somehow decided that we have to do all of these things in order to
in order to be worthy of our existence is really, really faulty thinking. And I think that many of us fall into that category.
Curt (17:35.243)
And you nailed it on the head with your Unloveable's program. We all feel unloveable and we all, at least at earlier stages of life, seek a lot of external validation because we need to find our tribe. We want to fit in. We want to be liked not only by our friends, but if you're heterosexual by the opposite sex, et cetera. So all those, you know, external judgments of what you should look like and how you should perform and even this pressure of being a great student and a great athlete, those kids
suicide ideate a lot too, and some kill themselves, even though from the outside, they look like they're just the perfect kids. So I think it's a great discussion. We continue it at MAYA for Life, MAYA the number four life, and hopefully the programs and people checking it out will, it'll resonate that we can have conversations that really help our kids and ourselves.
Preeti (18:23.958)
That sounds great. Thanks, Curt.
Curt (18:25.803)
All right, good talk today.
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