Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
Hi, Kerry Martin, from San Diego.

Kerry Martin:
Hi, Suzanne, from Vancouver.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
From Vancouver, and I bet we have more rain here than you do. I want to talk to you today about upstreaming in terms of suicide prevention, this idea for parents to understand that we can make life worth living rather than just not dying, because this is what you’re all about. You have got Foundation for Life, which you started this month, a suicide prevention upstreaming platform. You are a suicide attempt survivor. You proudly have bipolar disorder. You are a Harvard MPP, and you are really into this idea of shifting upstream: let’s make life better. Thanks for joining me. What do you want to tell me about yourself after that intro?

Kerry Martin:
Wow, thank you. That was a lovely intro, and thank you for having me. As you mentioned, we’re starting a nonprofit called Foundation for Life, and it’s not just me. I have an amazing team, and you are our connection scientist on our board. We call ourselves the Hope Architects, and what we’re doing is building a fence of hope upstream. Why are we doing this? As suicide survivors who have come together, we realized in retrospect that we can’t wait for a crisis. We can’t wait for our kids to jump into the river. The work being done in crisis management and suicide prevention is important, don’t get me wrong, we have to jump in and save them. But what makes much more sense to us as survivors is to go upstream. It makes a lot more sense to prevent our kids from jumping in the first place. So at Foundation for Life, we’re trying to go all the way upstream, into the earliest developmental windows for our kids. What we do is hardwire resilience, making life the only option.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
I just had an analogy as you were talking. It’s like you have a child you don’t want to drown, so instead of just hiring somebody to watch the pool and save them when they’re drowning, you teach them to swim as early as you can.

Kerry Martin:
Yes, exactly. So when we’re building this fence of hope and cultivating the will to live in children, we do it by building five program pillars, which we can talk about, and it’s about hardwiring resilience and hope into our children. In my own personal situation, when I think about what led me to attempt to take my own life, and what would have made the difference, I really feel that if these five program pillars had been in place, I perhaps wouldn’t have attempted three times.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
I want to get into tangible solutions later, but I actually want to talk about your own story first. You’ve said you have done counselling, worked with youth, and done dialectical behaviour therapy training, which you can tell me about later. What’s the story you want to share that led you to this suicide prevention upstream organization you are launching?

Kerry Martin:
I’ve been doing mental health advocacy work for a couple of decades. It all started when I, as you mentioned, thrive with a bipolar diagnosis, though I haven’t always been thriving. The world is a difficult place for people with bipolar disorder. We’re often misunderstood and stigmatized. For me, it started when I was at Harvard. I was really struggling. My mother is also a suicide survivor. I was struggling with that, and with coming out of the closet, and I lost my way. I found it within myself to reach out to the mental health clinic at Harvard and set up an appointment. I went, I poured out my soul, and had what I thought was a good session. I went back to my apartment in Somerville, and about ten minutes later I got a call. The woman I had poured my soul out to was on the other end of the phone, and she said, “Kerry, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
Gosh.

Kerry Martin:
That was a clinical failure, to put it mildly. I felt like I was actually beyond help. I spiralled down after that, didn’t have the support I needed, and felt like I didn’t belong, like the world would be better off without me. That led to my first attempt. Thankfully, I’m still here. Some other things happened where I couldn’t get myself sorted. I didn’t have the coping skills, the emotional regulation, the distress tolerance, all the things taught in DBT, to just stay. That’s one of the things we talk about at Foundation for Life: stay one more day, the world needs you. I couldn’t get it together for a long time, but I’ve managed to turn my pain into purpose, and to now build what DBT calls a life worth living. I want to make sure nobody goes through what I did. Part of Foundation for Life is making sure our children never go out to the edge like that, that suicide never becomes a concept they even consider.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
I think you’ve just answered my next question, but I want to confirm it. My next question was about the defining moments that led you here. It sounds like being told a counsellor couldn’t help you was enormous. Are there other defining moments that got you to where you are today?

Kerry Martin:
Yes. My two other attempts: I got laid off from a company in the throes of bipolar depression. Rather than showing empathy, and we’re often stigmatized and misunderstood when we have bipolar disorder, even though I was a rock star at work, nobody reached out to ask what was going on with me when my work started to slip. Just getting up in the morning and dragging myself to work took a mammoth effort. Rather than getting the empathy and support I needed, I got laid off. That caused another really difficult breaking point in my life. The third and final time, I had a bit of a psychotic break, and there were issues with the broken mental health system in the States I won’t get into. Rather than being forced into involuntary treatment to get back on track, I didn’t go that route, and I spiralled again. That was my third and final attempt. Through that whole process, I started a nonprofit in 2014 called Hope Exchange, specializing in helping the bipolar community. I felt that if I’d had somebody who had walked in my shoes, that I could call and say, “here’s what I’m going through,” I really wanted someone to understand me, and there was nothing like that in the States. We had a program where people could be virtually mentored by people like myself. We did that for five years, but unfortunately couldn’t get funding, because people don’t care about people who have bipolar disorder, sadly. So I’ve been a mental health advocate for years, and I worked as a peer support specialist and bipolar coach. I’m very driven to give back, because I don’t want people to go through what I did. There’s nothing more painful than struggling with the feeling that nobody wants you here, that the world would be better off without you. For three months, I couldn’t get out of bed. It’s the most awful, bleak, lonely place, and I can’t imagine my granddaughter being in that space for a nanosecond.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
I did an interview with David Woods Bartley, who’s on our team, about healing from a suicide attempt, because there’s so much of a story to get to that point, and there’s healing that is absolutely required in the aftermath of an attempt. It seems like a process.

Kerry Martin:
Yes. As you walk through the darkness and come out into the light, you go through a transformation, and in addition to wanting nobody else to walk that path, you want to sort it out. My solution, after all this time, coming from a marketing background, is that I want to offer a picture of hope, not despair, like David. We want to save people from jumping in. We don’t want people to do what we did. There’s no reason to wait until you get to the downstream crisis mode. We can go upstream and save people from jumping in. That is now my mission. At the outset, we talked about suicide, but we’re not really a suicide prevention nonprofit. The impetus for starting it was that we’re suicide survivors, but we’re trying to replace the epidemic of suicide and despair with one of hope.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
What does that look like? How does it play out when you’ve got this upstream approach of making life worth living and meaningful, versus just stopping somebody from dying? How do you know when it’s happening? How do you do it, in general terms?

Kerry Martin:
All of our children are at risk of suicide. We spend a lot of money modeling who’s at risk, when the point of fact is all of our children are at risk. So we need to go upstream and work with all of our kids. This isn’t about suicide prevention, this is about mental wellness, getting all of our children on track. Children today do not feel seen. They don’t feel heard, and they don’t feel understood. So all of our programs at Foundation for Life, which we’ll be funding through our Hope Rising cohort, are programs for kids in general, about setting them up with what we call a will to live. We have five program pillars. The first is teaching hope to our kids, which is a teachable, scientifically proven skill. It’s about arming them with resilience toolkits. It’s about going in very early, since kids are hardwired from zero to sixty months, what’s called the alpha-theta brainwave stage, through early childhood priming programs. It’s about setting up more community and belonging for our children, since they’re behind this wall of disconnection with social media, which we have to eradicate. And the final pillar is helping very vulnerable communities. I’m bipolar, and I’m also gay, and the suicide rate in those communities is astronomically high. We have to spend more money on these vulnerable communities, which we’re not doing right now.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
One of the things about the LGBTQIA-plus community is there’s always a story behind it. I did an interview with a transgender student I had at my psychiatric unit, who was seventeen at the time. There’s a story there, and a very high rate of substance use and suicide. That’s our upstream, starting when we’re young too. Can you give me the five pillars in two or three sentences each, in order, and what a parent would do with that at home?

Kerry Martin:
When it comes to parents, they can’t do all of these programs at home. Some of these are driven into school districts, and we can hope children are sent to schools that teach this mental armor. Parents can only work within the paradigm of what they can control. They can’t control the fact that their kids are on social media, though they can control how much and what kind. They can’t control the extent to which their children have a sense of community and belonging outside the home, or whether their children have access to early childhood priming curriculum in schools. But zeroing in on what parents can control: are they allowing their children to interact with grandparents, building that intergenerational sense of belonging? Are they taking time to be present with their children, making sure their children feel seen, heard, and validated? I see a lot of parents who are controlling versus connecting with their kids. There’s a lot of principles underlying our programs that parents could take away and apply at home.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
So you just described a connection: go take your kid on a walk, a bike ride, or for a burger. That aligns with what we can do at home to upstream and make life meaningful.

Kerry Martin:
Right. It’s hard for parents right now, and I understand that. But we can arm our children with tools to help them cope with an incredibly challenging world. I practice DBT, I run DBT groups, and I’m a bipolar coach. The world is challenging, so parents can accept that as their reality and work with what they can control. I’m a big believer in DBT, which is an extremely intuitive modality that’s been adapted to be understandable by children. I’m not saying parents should all become DBT therapists, but some of it is very approachable. The foundation of DBT is mindfulness: can we sit with our children and meditate, do a bit of yoga? Of course we can. Can we teach our children how to manage their distress properly, one of the three pillars of DBT? Of course we can. There are lots of things in the toolbox that parents can use to help children deal with growing up in a very disconnected world.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
Can you explain what dialectical behaviour therapy is, the basic premise of it, and when we use it?

Kerry Martin:
One of the reasons I love it is that it was started by a woman named Marsha Linehan. In her late teenage years, she was in a psychiatric hospital, hearing voices, and nothing anybody did was helping her. So she checked herself out, went to a Zen monastery, and stayed with the monks for a long time. She came out and said there had to be something more we could do for people like her; she was diagnosed with a serious mental illness herself. So she came up with DBT, a variant on cognitive behavioural therapy, but with mindfulness built in, which was very different, and a dialectic approach: on one hand, we have to teach our children to accept the things they cannot control, and on the other, that they can also work on changing themselves. You accept yourself for who you are, but you’re also responsible for changing things. The other thing she pushed, which I love, is that regardless of who we are, our diagnoses, our sexuality, we all deserve to be happy, we all deserve a life worth living. All of DBT and its skills, the triangle of emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness, is about driving people to build a life worth living, based on finding your purpose and your joy. It’s a beautiful modality.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
I’m curious what you think of this, because it’s a bit contentious: I really believe it all starts at home. I don’t mean that in a guilt-inducing way; we all make our own mistakes, and I don’t mean we have to be perfect. I just interviewed a former student of mine who’s now a surgeon, Dr. Allie Donaldson. She’s twenty-eight, new in the field, and I asked her about connection. She said one thing she saw during her psychiatric rounds was that sometimes parents would go off about how bad their kid is in front of the practitioners, saying they don’t listen, they misbehave. And I thought, there’s your disconnection. I’ve seen that with so many psychiatric students I’ve had, a disconnect between parent and child. As a teacher, we have programs for social-emotional learning, trying to build emotional intelligence. What I found in my research and experience was that at the end of the day, every child wants to be seen, heard, understood, and valued, to know they are worthy. Every single child, no matter their age, wants their parents’ face to light up when they walk into the room. I understand all of these modalities, and I’m all about therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, but I believe there are things we can emulate at home, like what you said about mindfulness, or just knowing you are worthy of this life. What are your thoughts on that?

Kerry Martin:
If you strip away all the jargon and the psych talk, you’re absolutely correct, and it’s very core. DBT is this notion that we are all worthy of a life worth living, worthy of joy and happiness. At the very core, when everything is stripped away, we have to teach our kids about self-worth. They need to feel connected to us, and they need to feel like they belong. There has to be unconditional love. We can’t control everything that happens once they’re out in the world, but we can equip them with mental armour and send them out the door wrapped in our love, so they’re best equipped to deal with everything they have to face. One thing I do want to add: I get approached a lot by parents who have lost their children to suicide, and I want to make very clear that there are parents out there who were doing an amazing job with their kids. When there’s a loss like that, there’s guilt, and I want to make it very clear to anybody listening that you did nothing wrong. There are situations where tragedy happens and no amount of love could have changed the outcome. That’s something you have to keep repeating to yourself. Someone reached out to me a few days before Christmas; she had just lost her son, and it was her family’s first Christmas without him. She was writing twelve letters for the parents and siblings he’d left behind, and asked if I could reach out to people to help write these letters. I reached out to a few people, and they immediately wrote letters echoing exactly what I’m saying: there was nothing the parents could have done to save their child. There is good parenting, and there is parenting that could be better, but it’s incumbent on schools and other parts of society to help parents too. There isn’t enough support out there.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
I’m so glad you brought that up. I find it such a juxtaposition, but I totally agree with you. I want to call a spade a spade: it starts at home. We need to step up to the plate. Parenting is not an afterthought or a pastime; you’re on for a period of time, and if you can’t be on, you can do damage to children. But I’m so glad you said that, because there are lovely, amazing families out there who have enormous grief over suicide, who did everything they could. It’s tricky to hold both of those in the same conversation, and I can’t imagine that guilt. And yet I stand by it: it starts at home.

Kerry Martin:
I hear you too. I tell my granddaughter Sarah, who’s twenty-eight now, and her daughter Noel, that when you make the choice to have a child, you make the choice to put that child first, always, regardless of what else is going on in your life. That kid is front and centre; every single thing you do has to be about putting them first. If parents adopted that mindset a bit more, when it comes to deciding how to spend a Sunday afternoon, it should be with your child.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
But we still need all of these upstreaming entities everywhere else too, in schools and institutions. I’ve talked about this village approach. I do believe it starts at home, but it’s also a village approach, and for some people we both know who are suicide loss survivors, there were things not in place around them that they needed. Okay, here’s my last question before I do my wrap-up questions. Where does meaning and purpose come into play with this upstreaming approach to making life worth living?

Kerry Martin:
I know you’ve studied DBT. One of the things, and I’m not just talking about kids, but teenagers going into adulthood and college, is that what pulls us through the darkness back into the light, what keeps us on track, is finding purpose in our lives. I don’t know if you’d call it a calling, but it’s central to building a life worth living. When I’ve been depressed and gotten into trouble, what’s really gotten my life back on track is finding my purpose. For me, that’s always started with volunteer work; it fuels me, this notion of giving back to help others lifts me back up. We have to do whatever we can to help our children find purpose. It’s never too early. I took Sarah to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to feed the homeless in the parks, or to serve food at a shelter on Thanksgiving. If we can instill this notion of volunteering, and give our children a view into how you go about finding deep meaning and purpose, the world would be a lot better off, in addition to our children.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
What I found in my research that I think relates to meaning and purpose: I had twenty-five participants, I don’t love the word “study participants,” over the course of a year at the psychiatric unit. It was research into what they said they needed for wellness. A youth care worker asked them questions, and one was about my little classroom on the unit. We were a ten-bed inpatient unit, very quiet, two teachers, which I was embarrassed to tell colleagues at the time, a ratio of one to five max. The question was, what was the best thing about this little psychiatric classroom? I thought they’d say the Nespresso machine, the books, that they could bring in their stuffy and sit in the comfy chair and listen to music. None of that. What absolutely gobsmacked me was that of the twenty-five, and we were an end-of-the-road unit, I lost eight students that I know of within five and a half years, it was hardcore, I had the highest-risk kids in the country with the highest death rates for their age group, every single one of the twenty-five mentioned something related to success as the best thing about my classroom. “I could read.” “I saw that I read.” “I did some math.” “I handed something in, maybe I can graduate.” One kid said, “I like psychology, maybe I could go to university.” All twenty-five, and nobody has ever guessed this when I ask people to hypothesize about it, because I wasn’t expecting it either. I equated it to meaning and purpose: maybe I can do something with my life. I can get out of this. I can change the past and flip the script for my family. There is hope in my future. That was my analysis.

Kerry Martin:
It’s like, by reaching within themselves, they gave themselves these little sparks of hope, a little bit of light on the horizon, so they find it within themselves to keep moving forward. We all need that, not just kids. That’s an amazing, beautiful story. But the one thing that sticks in my mind is that you lost eight of the twenty-five, and that’s the problem. We need to have these sparks of hope be sustainable. It can’t just be in your beautiful classroom. We need to help our parents; we can’t dump all the responsibility on them. We need to arm parents with the tools, and outside the home, we need to do a much better job with our kids.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
For sure. It was interesting too: not a single one mentioned any sort of framework or worksheet that we do in our classes right now. It was all the connection. Somebody who cared. They all mentioned us as human beings who leaned in, who cared. I always have three wrap-up questions that take us back to my main question about how we upstream making life worth living, for suicide prevention versus just stopping someone from dying. Here’s number one: what comes into your head with this question, the very first thing? How do you start early? With that little tiny newborn baby, what’s the one thing that can start with these growing brains, which we know are completely malleable when they’re born, to begin that process?

Kerry Martin:
I’m not a person who specializes in early childhood development, but I am extremely maternal, so this is a gut answer. I spent a lot of time with my granddaughter Noel when she was born. That kid never, ever, for one second, doubts that she is incredibly loved. It’s turned her into this little angel. I call her my angel, Sarah’s the first one and Noel’s angel number two. When you walk into a room now, the first thing she does is outstretch her little hands because she wants to be picked up, not because she’s in need of love, but because she loves love. She wraps her arms around your neck and won’t let go. We have to make our children feel loved and comfortable with love.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
I could not agree more. You are the best thing on this planet, my child or grandchild or little tiny being. Okay, here’s number two, and this might be tricky. Can you give me three tangible ways we can foster this meaning and purpose, and help kids know they are worthy?

Kerry Martin:
I go back to this notion about kids needing to be seen, heard, and understood. When it comes to seeing kids, we literally just need to see them. If they’ve got a soccer game, go to the soccer game. Be present with your children. Don’t turn on the TV; play a game with them, sit across the board game and look them in the eye. “Honey, how was your day at school?” Really connect and see your children. When it comes to hearing your children, don’t sit there listening just to respond. Sit there and actively listen, validate them, don’t give a lot of advice, don’t control them. And when it comes to understanding them, you have to understand what it’s like to be a kid now; this isn’t what it was like when we grew up, the times have changed. Try to understand with deep empathy, not sympathy. If you haven’t watched Brené Brown’s talk on the difference between sympathy and empathy, watch it. There are lots of different ways to see, hear, and understand our kids. Parents can pick whichever works for them and resonates with their own children; every child has their own inner spark and needs something different. Pay attention, tune in.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
Understanding, in particular, I think there’s so much within that, it’s deep and broad and vast. One of the things about understanding: I did an interview with a teacher I had worked with, up north in northern BC, and she said, “get your head out of your butt.” She said this isn’t about you; to understand, you’ve got to get your own head out of your butt, so that you’re looking at the kid in front of you, and all of your own experiences, history, nuances, responses, and perspectives have to go away, to truly understand.

Kerry Martin:
I’m guilty of that in my personal relationship. I project onto my girlfriend like you would not believe, but we cannot be doing that to our children. We’re grown-ups; we need to behave better. Okay, last question, and you might need to think about this one, it’s a tough one: when talking about the will to live, wanting to be here, versus just stopping death, if you could put that on a t-shirt logo, what would it be about?

Kerry Martin:
That’s a really hard question. Obviously, with the Stay Movement, the logo now is “stay one more day, the world needs you,” partly because suicide is typically very impulsive, and if people could just realize the despair is very fleeting, and just hang in there. A logo for the will to live… the Stay Movement isn’t a plea for people to stay, it’s really about giving children hope. I know the word “hope” is very esoteric, but we’ve got to give our children hope, which is sorely lacking right now, particularly in the United States, given what’s going on politically. We’ve got to give our children hope for a future that gives them a reason to stay. Right now there’s just heaps of dark reasons; there’s no good reason for some people to stick around, and we have got to change that. They should wake up with a smile on their face, feeling like it’s a new day and they’re excited, not with a dreadful feeling about not wanting to go to school because someone’s going to put them in a locker or throw out their lunch. We’ve got to sort that out.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
With all of that, the difference in the world feels to me like when you know you were wanted, then you get up.

Kerry Martin:
Yes. When you are the most important thing to somebody in the world, like the most important thing to your parents, trust me, you’re going to want to get up and go get them a cuddle.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:

Kerry Martin:
, thank you for your time. Tell me where we can find you; I’ll put it in the show notes too.

Kerry Martin:
You can find me at foundationforlife.us. We’ll be launching thestaymovement.org in a couple of weeks. It’s been a real pleasure. I love talking to you, and I’m so excited you’re on our team as our connection scientist, helping us connect with kids.

Dr. Suzanne Simpson:
Thank you, Kerry, for your time.

Kerry Martin:
You’re welcome. Take care.