Walk promotes suicide prevention awareness

Every 13.7 seconds in the United States someone takes his or her own life, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention website.

“Suicide” is a word that carries a lot of stigma, academic adviser Cindy Moore said.

When people die of suicide, Moore said, it is common for the family to conceal the cause of death.

“They tend to hide it, to keep it under wraps, to not talk about it,” she said. “That oftentimes makes their grief worse, and a lot of family lives are disrupted.”

Moore is the co-chair of the Bloomington Out of Darkness Walk, which took place Saturday morning on campus.

The Out of the Darkness Walk was started several years ago by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to raise awareness for suicide and its stigma, Moore said.

Three years ago, Moore’s oldest nephew took his own life.

“If I can help one more person not take their life, then I have helped another family not go through the trauma and hurt that my family went through,” she said.

A group of people stood, huddled in winter scarves, gloves and jackets in the shadows of Memorial Stadium’s North End Zone at 10 a.m.

A table was set up for registration. Free food and drinks were provided, and several educational booths were set up.

Some attendees were students.

Others were families from the surrounding community.

The Out of Darkness Walk was comprised of two routes, a 3K and a 5K, which began at the stadium and ended in central campus.

Mid-route, the walkers had a chalk stop in the Fine Arts Square, where they were encouraged to write messages to their lost loved ones.

Justin Ford, faculty for business communication, went out because he said it was a “laudable cause (that) needs more support and more awareness.”

Ford lost two friends in high school to suicide.

One he didn’t know well. The other was his best friend’s little brother, whom he had also been close with.

“He took his parents’ gun and he just ... yeah,” he said. “My junior year. His freshman year.”

Ford said more people need to be aware of suicide, its risks and the involvement and depth of mental illness involved.

“I don’t think it’s something we think about all the time,” he said. “I think we’re so busy with our lives and complaining about how somebody got the wrong drink at Starbucks that we aren’t thinking about and considering what’s going on with people every day.”

Jordyn Doile stood next to him, a knit cap on her head to ward off the almost-freezing early morning temperature.

She was never directly exposed to suicide, she said, but she had many friends in high school come to her with their problems of depression, self-harm and suicidal tendencies.

“I’ve been on the phone with a friend when she was in the process of taking pills,” she said. “It’s scary. It’s just ... jarring.”

Before the walkers took their places and began their journey, Moore and Irene Vlachos-Weber, a psychology professor at IU, among other speakers, stepped onto a makeshift stage to lend some words of encouragement to the participants.

Vlachos-Weber’s childhood best friend killed herself when she was 16.

She stressed the importance of not only the darkness but the light.

“When we’re in the darkness and we feel lost in the darkness and we feel so alone in the darkness, we want to remember those we’ve lost and think of the light,” she said. “Think of the light they’ve brought to us.”

She said everybody needed to focus on prevention, community and feeling as a group.

“We’ve got some time to walk together,” she said. “Let’s learn about the people that they’ve lost, and let’s celebrate the light those people brought into our lives and the joy they brought.”

Vlachos-Weber also drew attention to the table of different colored beads that sat close by under the cover of the building.

Blue meant the person supported the cause, she explained. Orange, that they had lost a sibling.

Three little boys stood near the table, watching the speakers intently as they talked.

Two of them already had strings of beads around their necks, but one hadn’t gotten his yet.

He reached up to the table for the tangle of gold beads to join his brothers.

On an information sheet on the table, the second line down read: “Gold: Lost a parent.”

The woman next to them put her arm around the closest boy. Her beads, red, meant that she had lost a partner.

At the chalking station in the Fine Arts Square, chalked in blue were two dates, a golden sun and stars, and the words: “Daddy, you found the light.”