Suicidal Depression
When weight, exhaustion, and hopelessness eclipse coping. We hold that weight together and make slow, steady moves toward relief and connection.
Definitions
I've often heard depression described as a weighted blanket that covers your entire body. It's heavy. Sometimes, getting through the day on autopilot is all you can do. Sometimes there's numbness, there's exhaustion, or there's the quiet decision that nothing matters anymore. Do you feel broken with no hope? Are you always tired? Is your depression both encompassing and inviting?
Suicidal depression is often the result of trying to carry too much for too long.
Ironically, suicidal thoughts aren’t inherently a desire to die - they're more often a desire for the world around you to stop. "I just need everything to stop." or even more common: "I don't want to exist."
These thoughts emerge in response to long-term feelings of overwhelm, whether social, relational, or systemic. They signal that something has gone on too long without support.
Symptoms
Something I’ve seen again and again in my work (and something nobody really talks about) is that no one knows how to talk about suicidal thoughts without fear, bias, or jumping straight into a safety plan.
This silence makes the experience even more isolating. And that isolation can take deep roots in your body and psyche. Suicidal thoughts need space to be named openly, without punishment. Talking about them honestly, in a safe and grounded space, is part of how we process them.
Why Does It Show Up?
Suicidal depression often emerges when something in life becomes untenable, and you need control or to escape from what is. It can be when the old coping strategies stop working or the silence around your pain becomes too loud to ignore. It can also show up during transitions: losing a job, leaving a relationship, aging, illness, or grief. Even moments that look "fine" on the outside can carry enormous internal weight.
Living in a system that values productivity over people can deepen these feelings.
For those navigating chronic marginalization, financial uncertainty, racism, ableism, or queerphobia, depression can be more about the body and mind reacting to very real harm, and less about individual dysfunction.
Our work together creates a space that acknowledges the context you live in.
We begin where things feel most stuck and work gently from there.
Why Now?
Suicidal thoughts often grow louder when the balance between demand and capacity finally tilts.
Years of pushing through can feel manageable until one event tips the scale: a breakup, a layoff, a diagnosis, a birthday that makes the future too visible. Nothing dramatic needs to happen. Sometimes, a quiet Tuesday commute is enough. What changes is the realization that the usual strategies - overwork, caretaking, distraction - no longer hold the weight.
The nervous system treats that tipping point as proof that relief will never come.
Sleepless nights stack up. Appetite shifts. Work feels distant. The body records each unmet need as evidence against another day. At first, the thoughts appear in flashes. Then they linger. Silence feeds them, and without language or witness, they settle in as the option that makes the most sense.
Structural pressures can sharpen the timing.
An unpaid bill, a hostile workplace, a headline that denies your worth. For queer or marginalized folks, each reminder of precarity winds the spring a little tighter. The sense of now turns urgent when tomorrow looks like more of the same. In that moment, a wish to end the pain feels rational, even merciful.
Therapy meets that urgency by creating a pause long enough to notice choices.
We start where the weight feels heaviest and stay until the body registers that it isn’t alone. From there, we trace what closed the other doors and practice opening new ones in steady, manageable steps. Recovery isn’t instant, but it can begin in the first conversation that doesn’t turn away.
How Therapy Can Help
Legally, we have to do a safety plan and talk about creating a care team with a medical provider who can walk you through options with medication. However, once a base for you is built, we shift our focus toward constructing a relationship of trust and safety.
Suicidal thoughts can be talked about openly, without fear of being shut down or pathologized.
We work on training the mind and body to understand that it’s okay to feel pain, and that it’s possible to create connections and stay in connection with others in spite of that pain.
I use Internal Family Systems (IFS) to connect with the parts of folks that feel hopeless, overwhelmed, or numb; and also the parts that are still trying to survive. Somatic work helps ground those feelings in the body, making space for emotion to move without overwhelming. Gestalt therapy allows us to notice what’s happening in the moment, and ERP can support folks navigating compulsive thought patterns or cycles of fear around these thoughts.
This is slow, relational work. It does *not* follow a script, because each person is different. There’s room for silence. There’s room to not know. And there’s no pressure to perform hope if it’s not what’s real.
Our Work Together
Our work together centers on building a steady relationship with the parts of you that feel overwhelmed, invisible, or like they’ve been holding too much for too long.
We aren’t here to push those parts away. We make room for them. We listen. We stay.
Together, we practice what it means to remain in relationship with your body, with your voice, with the quieter internal signals that might still be present. We pay attention to what makes us yearn for everything to stop, and we work on slowly building the capacity to sit with that pain while still staying connected. Eventually, we can work on building a stronger and more connected community around us.
Suicidal depression doesn’t need to be forever, and it doesn’t demand action.
It is, however, a blaring siren in your system telling you that something is wrong. Those parts of you demand to be seen and worked with. We can do that together, at your pace, and work toward feeling more whole.
