Many who struggle feel isolated and unsure where to turn. This session will bring awareness while offering practical ways to find support, take healthy steps forward, and understand the importance of not facing the battle alone.

Hartland Fall Convocation 2025: Engage Clarity Mode

<p>Many who struggle feel isolated and unsure where to turn. This session will bring awareness while offering practical ways to find support, take healthy steps forward, and understand the importance of not facing the battle alone.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Hartland Institute of Health and Education

David Buruchara

Lilena Walker

Breaking Silence on Suicide: Ending the Pain Without Ending Your Life

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing us together to discuss this heavy topic.

Give us wisdom, give us clarity, give us hope.

If anyone in here is struggling with suicidal thought or suicidal desire, we ask that you give them fresh encouragement, Lord, fresh hope and a joy that doesn't even make sense to them.

Walker, I don't know about you, but when I was a student studying to become a counselor, I enjoyed all my classes and was enjoying, you know, Just having fun until we got on the topic of suicide.

So even for a student, studying to be a mental health practitioner, I was completely lost as to how to navigate this topic when we were studying it in school.

So I can imagine for the average lay person, what do we do when we come face to face with this big word called suicide?

Now I work a lot with couples, I work with men, but I hear you work a lot with people dealing with either suicidal thoughts, attempts.

And not only that, but I hear you yourself have your own testimony.

So thankfully, as for me, I never had a suicide attempt.

If anyone was there last night when I was doing the teen mental health, I talked about periods where I would have dissociative episodes where I felt out of body.

So I would be like again, sitting in a room, I'd be grocery shopping, and it would feel like it wasn't me doing it.

It would feel like I'm watching the hand touch things, but I wasn't feeling it.

I would look for things, and I would see myself doing it, but it didn't feel real.

It's 1 of the scariest things you can experience.

And during that time, I thought to myself, if this is what life is going to be like, I would rather not be here.

I don't even know, I was existing, but I wasn't living.

And it got to the point where I was cutting, I was like dicing onions in the kitchen with my mom.

And I had what they call now an intrusive thought.

And the intrusive thought just said, what if you just took the knife and cut your arm.

And I remember I was holding the knife just like this, thinking that thought.

And my mom, praise God for her, she says, Lelena, you're OK.

And I just slowly kind of put the knife down.

She was like, I'll finish chopping the onions.

That moment, right, it told me something.

It told me that my mind sometimes couldn't be trusted.

Right, That sometimes I would have thoughts that were wicked, basically.

That's why they call it intrusive, right?

You're going about your day, you're just cutting onions and all of a sudden, what if I, right?

It didn't start from a place of necessarily deep depression.

So I had that experience at, again, 14, 15.

But thankfully, when I went to Oakwood at 16, I told you all yesterday, 16, of course, is a young age to go to college, but thankfully, because I had the experiences I did in high school, I was ready.

I felt like my friends, I felt like I was on par with them in terms of maturity level.

If you ask them, it might be a different story.

But I thought, I was like, yeah, I belong.

So I had a great time my freshman year to my junior year and onward when I graduated from Oakwood.

So Oakwood, imagine having a period of time of no suicidal thought.

So I was like, oh, maybe it's not going to come back.

And it came back when I got to Loma Linda.

And I'm literally now learning about mental health.

And the thoughts started to come back of just, what if you're really not as needed as people say you are?

Right, these again, just thoughts that would come out of nowhere.

And it got to the point where in 2019, I remember I called my best friend at the time, and I was telling them just how badly I was feeling.

And I mean crying, pouring my heart out to them.

And usually they would answer with, you know, empathy and compassion and comfort.

This time, Their words were, I really can't help you with that.

Because during this time, I'm meeting with 3 different therapists during this time.

And now, The person on the other line is saying, I don't know how to help you.

And I got off the phone with that person, I hung up and I literally laid flat on my bedroom floor and I cried out to God.

For the past, at that time, it had been 4 years of being in Loma Linda, I was like, I feel like this dark cloud is just covering my head.

And people see me as the same kind of joyful Lena you see today, people saw me as that back then.

So imagine being seen by others as like being full of joy, but on the inside, you're like, I'm dead inside.

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Breaking Silence on Suicide: Ending the Pain Without Ending Your Life

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