From the Field: The Hurting Helper

This week’s From the Field reflection comes in honor of National Prevention Day. 🌿

This week, on Suicide Prevention Day, I reflected on a group often missing from prevention conversations: clinicians, spiritual caregivers, and healthcare professionals. These are the helpers most hesitant to seek counseling, yet they experience rising rates of despair and suicide.

We often talk about prevention at the secondary or tertiary level—after crisis is already acute. But the greatest need is at the primary level: identifying early markers such as loneliness, hopelessness, isolation, prolonged grief, and loss of meaning.

In my work, I’ve walked alongside surgeons weighed down by guilt after losing patients, and neurologists overwhelmed by delivering multiple brain death notifications in a single week. These fixers and healers wrestled with depression, burnout, and spiritual confusion—not because of lack of skill, but because outcomes were outside their control.

Psycho-spiritual assessment and care can open new doors. It creates space for healers to explore responsibility, surrender, meaning, and hope. Studies confirm that early intervention—addressing emotional pain, stress, grief, and disconnection—is where the greatest opportunity exists to prevent suicide.

Evidence continues to grow shifting prevention from crisis response to primary psycho-spiritual intervention is essential. My white paper explores how spiritually integrative mental health—assessing meaning, purpose, faith, exhaustion, and relational factors—offers customized tools to address root causes of risk before despair hardens into finality.

This is a conversation worth continuing. 🌿