what happens after “seek help”?

Let’s call her Dawn.

Not her real name, of course.

But perhaps an appropriate one for a story about someone who couldn’t see the morning yet.

I think about her story on World Suicide Prevention Day because every year, we tell people to seek help.

Reach out.

Tell someone.

Call someone.

Get help before it is too late.

And those things matter.

But I think we talk much less about what happens when help doesn’t arrive looking like help.

When it arrives as fear.

Confusion.

Anger.

A police car.

A hospital ward.

Or decisions being made around you before you have even understood what is happening.

Dawn’s story began in February 2020.

They found her sitting beside a drain.

She wasn’t there because she intended to attempt suicide.

But for reasons she still doesn’t fully understand, her parents thought she was going to.

The police were called.

Dawn was told that the security guard at her condo had made the call.

Later, she found out that her parents had.

Even today, they still insist that they didn’t.

Maybe she will never completely understand what happened that day.

But she remembers what happened next.

The police told her she had two choices:

either go to IMH in the police car, where there would be a record because they would have to interrogate her,

or go in the IMH van.

Police car.

Record.

Interrogate.

This was February 2020, barely a month after Singapore had decriminalised attempted suicide.

Dawn hadn’t attempted suicide.

She hadn’t even intended to.

And yet somehow, standing there while people discussed police cars, records and interrogation, she felt like she had done something criminal.

That is one thing about suicide prevention I think we have to be willing to talk about.

Someone can desperately need support and still feel frightened by the way that support reaches them.

Those two things can exist at the same time.

Dawn was told she was going to IMH for a check-up.

So she went.

Then she discovered she was being warded.

She felt absolutely scammed.

She had agreed to a check-up.

Nobody told her that walking into IMH that day meant she might not walk back out that night.

She didn’t even find out about the minimum three-day stay from the people who brought her there.

She learnt it from another patient.

The girl was experiencing psychosis and explained to Dawn that, although there wasn’t much they could immediately do for what she was experiencing, once a patient was admitted, protocol required them to remain for at least three days.

Dawn remembers thinking:

Three days?

Nobody had told her three days.

In the end, she stayed for a month.

And there are things from that month that she will probably never forget.

There was a night when she was sedated and restrained.

She was struggling so much that six male nurses had to be called over from the male ward because the female nurses could not safely restrain her.

She triggered the panic alarm multiple times.

While restrained on the bed, she needed to pee.

They told her she would have to use a bedpan.

She tried.

Her body wouldn’t let her.

She simply wasn’t used to urinating while lying down in a bed, unable to get up.

Eventually she gave up and held it through the night.

The next morning, when she was finally allowed to use a commode because she was considered a fall risk, she still couldn’t pee.

Her body had held it for so long that it seemed to have forgotten how to let go.

It was close to noon before she finally managed to hobble her way to the toilet cubicle, her legs weak from having spent so long restrained.

She remembers that.

She also remembers being annoyed that she had missed supper.

Because the Milo they served at supper was really good.

And maybe that sounds ridiculous after everything I just described.

But that is precisely what makes her memories of the ward so difficult to explain.

There were restraints.

And there was Milo.

There were panic alarms.

And there was pottery.

There were moments she never wants to experience again.

And there were people she still thinks about.

Dawn made friends around her age who were patients too.

She remembers sitting on her friend’s bed and singing worship songs together.

She remembers the ridiculous things that would happen in the ward and how the group of them would laugh about it.

She remembers occupational therapy.

Pottery.

Sudoku.

Crossword puzzles.

Word searches.

Colouring.

Naps.

Books she finished ridiculously quickly because there was only so much you could do.

The television, permanently stuck on Channel 8.

Tiny things that became something to look forward to because, in a psychiatric ward, your world becomes very small.

And sometimes Dawn misses those things.

She misses her friends.

She misses sitting around laughing at nonsense.

She misses pottery.

She misses that Milo.

She does not miss being unwell.

She does not miss restraints or sedation or panic alarms.

She does not want to be warded again.

Both can be true.

You can have good memories of a place you never want to return to.

And somewhere during that month, Dawn met a peer support mentor who had once been an IMH patient himself.

One day, she asked him whether he had ever regretted seeking help.

He told her:

“I regret a lot of things, but never have I ever regretted seeking help.”

Dawn thought he was talking absolute bullshit.

She genuinely believed him because that was what a peer support mentor was supposed to say.

What else was he going to tell someone sitting inside a psychiatric ward?

Of course he was going to say getting help was worth it.

At the time, Dawn couldn’t understand how anyone who had experienced something like this could say that and mean it.

Because this was what “help” looked like to her then.

Being misunderstood.

Police officers.

A choice that didn’t feel particularly like a choice.

An IMH van.

Being told she was going for a check-up and discovering she was being admitted.

Learning the ward’s rules from another patient.

Being sedated.

Being restrained.

Losing control over what was happening to her own body.

She did not feel grateful.

She did not feel inspired.

She certainly did not leave IMH thinking:

Thank God I sought help.

But she never forgot what that man said.

Six years passed.

Today, Dawn no longer has regular psychiatric appointments at IMH.

She no longer goes to therapy.

And she is proud of that.

She is proud of how far she has come.

For a long time, I think there was something reassuring about being able to say she didn’t need those things anymore.

Like it was evidence that she had recovered.

And she has.

But healing is not linear.

Some days, something happens.

A memory.

A trigger.

A particularly difficult period.

And she finds herself leaning slightly towards that old place again.

Not wanting to go back to IMH.

Not wanting to become the person she was six years ago.

Just wondering:

Maybe I need someone to talk to again.

And I think this matters on World Suicide Prevention Day too.

Because sometimes we treat recovery like the goal is to never need help again.

We celebrate the last therapy appointment.

The last psychiatric appointment.

The moment someone gets discharged.

And all of those milestones can absolutely be worth celebrating.

But needing therapy again does not erase the years when you didn’t.

Struggling again does not mean you never recovered.

Asking for help a second time does not send you back to the beginning.

Maybe recovery was never supposed to mean:

“I will never need help again.”

Maybe it can mean:

“I know now that I am allowed to ask for it when I do.”

And somewhere along the way, Dawn finally understood that peer support mentor.

“I regret a lot of things, but never have I ever regretted seeking help.”

She can say that now too.

Not because everything that happened at IMH was good.

It wasn’t.

Not because she believes every decision made for her was handled perfectly.

She doesn’t.

Not because she has rewritten a painful month of her life into a beautiful recovery story.

She hasn’t.

She can acknowledge the things that hurt her and still be glad she survived them.

And that, to me, is where Dawn’s story connects most strongly to World Suicide Prevention Day.

Suicide prevention cannot only mean telling struggling people to seek help.

We also have to ask what happens when they do.

Do they feel heard?

Do they understand what is happening to them?

Are they treated like a person in pain rather than a problem to contain?

Can they say that an intervention frightened or hurt them without people assuming that means intervention should never have happened?

Can we build systems where asking for help feels less like surrendering control?

Can we allow survivors to talk about the complicated parts of being saved without accusing them of being ungrateful for surviving?

Because suicide prevention is not just about keeping somebody alive tonight.

It is also about making tomorrow feel survivable.

It is helping someone build a life they eventually want to stay for.

And it is making sure that, if they struggle again six years later, asking for help does not feel like admitting that the last six years meant nothing.

Dawn does not want to go back.

She hopes she never has to.

But if one day she needs therapy again, I hope she lets herself go.

Because the girl who once sat inside IMH, convinced that her peer support mentor was talking absolute bullshit, lived long enough to understand exactly what he meant.

Six years ago:

“I regret a lot of things, but never have I ever regretted seeking help.”

She didn’t believe him.

Today, she does.

Maybe that is what I want to hold onto this World Suicide Prevention Day.

Seeking help can be frightening.

Recovery can be complicated.

Survival does not automatically make everything that happened to you okay.

And healing does not mean never struggling again.

We can do better than simply telling people to reach out.

We can make it safer to reach out.

We can listen when people tell us what made getting help frightening.

We can make space for recovery that is messy and non-linear.

And for the person wondering whether needing help again means they have failed:

it doesn’t.

Maybe you don’t have to promise yourself that you will never end up struggling again.

Maybe you just need to know that if you do,

you are still allowed to reach for help.

Again.

And again.

For as long as you need it.