Brian Johnson offers direct spoken guidance on supporting a young person navigating suicidal feelings. He urges helpers to show energized compassion, loving encouragement, wisdom and courageous presence, to allow the friend to lead in heroic, grounded ways, and to hold pain alongside practical support without denying harsh realities.
We need you to put on your socks. We need you to be the most energized, compassionate, loving, encouraging version of yourself you've ever been. So as a tribute to your young friend, be your best self right now because he needs to see what a man looks like who can sit in this pain with the appropriate balance of wisdom, self mastery, compassionate love, encouragement and true courage. Expressed compassion is incredibly important obviously, but I believe that to have courage together is a much underutilized virtue that is more in demand in our world today than I could possibly state. So I would encourage his desire to not only help his friends but to be a goosebumps 11th grader who's going to help lead the cause. Let him lead. Encourage him to be heroic, you know, and again in a very grounded, wise, loving, courageous way. Not ignoring the harsh reality which we can't, but using it as fuel for us to do what we're here to do.
