Transcript
Speaker: And I think because we live in a culture that is both in an epidemic of suicide, but also in an epidemic of interpersonal violence,
Speaker: Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host, Jennifer Muldowney, a.k.a.
Speaker: the Glam Reaper.
Speaker: And on today's episode, I am very, very excited, not just because of the topic, which is a very, very serious one, but because one of my dear friends is here to discuss it with me.
Speaker: I would love and I am honored to welcome Dr. Sarah Murphy, who is an expert in
Speaker: in suicidology so this one's going to be a deep one today and I am it will touch many people in various different ways and so I would ask if you want to talk about it or you want to talk we are always open here the Glam Reaper podcast um genuinely please reach out but without further ado let's take it away hi Sarah
Speaker: Hi Jennifer, how are you?
Speaker: I am great, I'm good and we have seen each other quite a bit recently.
Speaker: We have.
Speaker: We were at Cana and we were at, we were in Vegas, what stays in Vegas or what should stay in Vegas stays in Vegas and we were at the National Funeral Directors Conference where you were lighting up the presenter screen, were you not?
Speaker: Well, lighting up.
Speaker: I hope so.
Speaker: I mean, I've been speaking for NFDA for about five years, as well as doing some consulting and some writing for them.
Speaker: And this year, I was blessed to have been asked to do multiple presentations.
Speaker: So I did a pre-convention seminar launching the first ever
Speaker: safe zone training for funeral service professionals, which was a half-day workshop that I am excited to share will continue.
Speaker: And I also did a session on suicide risk within the death care professions, which was a build-out of a suicide workshop I gave last year to NFDA, which you came to and was how we initially met.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: full circle here we are that's it and I that believe it or not guys listening to this I have been trying or we have been trying to have Sarah on the podcast for it must be six to nine months now so we have been trying um so I'm delighted that we're finally talking about this because this subject is really and truly um a subject so close to my heart um
Speaker: you know, thank God I've never considered it myself, but I just, I feel like there's so many families that I work with and it's just, it's so prevalent in Ireland where I'm from, especially among young males.
Speaker: And in America, I'm seeing more and more children, I call them, I mean, at 41 years age, I know maybe somebody in their twenties isn't a child anymore, but you know, teenagers and children.
Speaker: And
Speaker: you know, to your point then exactly within this profession, it is such a harrowing profession.
Speaker: You know, it really is.
Speaker: You've got the weight of other people's grief on you and it really touches us in a mentally really difficult way.
Speaker: So I'm delighted to hear that these workshops are continuing on a national scale for funeral directors.
Speaker: And a year ago when I sat in your talk, I was just blown away.
Speaker: the wealth of information.
Speaker: I never even knew there was such a thing as an expert in suicidology.
Speaker: I never knew that was even a thing.
Speaker: So tell us a little bit about how you came to being this, came to being you.
Speaker: Oh gosh.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's, it's not a popular field, right?
Speaker: There's not a lot of us.
Speaker: Even my path toward thanatology, I'm a certified thanatologist under the auspices of the association of
Speaker: for death education and counseling.
Speaker: And that was all very circuitous.
Speaker: I had just gone back to college.
Speaker: I was working in national politics here in the U S and I was working in Congress and I sort of hit a ceiling in terms of promotion and
Speaker: I had dropped out of college initially to work in politics.
Speaker: So I just went back to school and stumbled in the right course at the right time, changed my major, changed my life, decided I wanted to teach, did a very fast master's.
Speaker: And by then, when I was applying for doctoral programs, the one I ultimately went with at the University of Rhode Island, where I've never left, I came to because in part they were encouraging me
Speaker: to, while I was working toward my PhD, tailor my PhD into thanatology and then concurrently be working toward my certification in thanatology.
Speaker: So I did a lot in the years that it took to do the doctorate.
Speaker: And suicide really spoke to me, I think, because
Speaker: I've always been drawn to the most disenfranchised populations.
Speaker: And whether that's social justice movements or thinking about, you know, activism in different ways.
Speaker: Then when you turn to something like death and grief and bereavement, all the three lines of my specializations, whether it's disenfranchised grief very broadly,
Speaker: Or HIV AIDS, which I teach entire academic courses on, or overdose losses, or complications due to gender and social status and suicide.
Speaker: All of them really speak to these through lines of disenfranchisement within an already very silenced human experience of death and bereavement.
Speaker: So unlike a lot of people who come to the field for very personal reasons, I did not really come to the field for personal reasons.
Speaker: I came very academically focused, very scholarly focused, very teaching oriented, although I have been personally affected by suicide death loss since having become a suicidologist.
Speaker: So yeah, I've been doing this for about 16 years now while teaching at the University of Rhode Island and at Marion University's graduate program in thanatology.
Speaker: So I teach entire undergrad and graduate courses on suicide and specialized courses even within that suicide in film and culture, history of suicide, you name it.
Speaker: So it was only really in the last couple of years that I began
Speaker: workshopping these for funeral service professionals and other professionals, nurses, doctors, et cetera.
Speaker: Because I think even though I was being sought out as an educator, a professional educator, suicide was a topic even these professions were kind of shying away from.
Speaker: So like when I saw you at Cana in August, that was the first suicide workshop that had ever been offered at Cana.
Speaker: And the one that I did at NFDA last year was the first that had been given in years on suicide at NFDA.
Speaker: And I find it very hopeful that these dialogues are being looked for.
Speaker: And I am very gratified to be able to do this kind of professional education because, again, there's not a lot of us like suicidology.
Speaker: was a term coined over 50 years ago by Dr. Edmund Schneidman, who we consider like the father of suicidology.
Speaker: He spent 50 years of his life researching suicide.
Speaker: But even most of us in thanatology do not specialize in suicides.
Speaker: I can count on one hand the other suicidologists I know worldwide.
Speaker: So we go where the need is.
Speaker: And thankfully the phone keeps ringing because I will be on a plane every other week if it means getting suicide education online.
Speaker: to the public and to helping professionals.
Speaker: Yeah, it's such an important topic.
Speaker: It really, really is.
Speaker: And it's interesting what you say and even what you've talked about, about, you know, marginalized societies and stuff like that.
Speaker: Like I, you, you're almost the academic version of me, which is probably why we get along so well.
Speaker: Like I'm just like a walking ball of smush.
Speaker: And, you know, a friend of mine joked many, many years ago when I sort of started into this profession where they were like,
Speaker: Not that I like to ignore the problems that are going on in the world, but if I can't feel like I can help, I can't know about it because it hurts my heart so much.
Speaker: Like I get, I get so distraught when like I can't watch, it sounds ridiculous, but I can't watch ads on TV for like starving children in Africa or if I physically can't do something to help.
Speaker: And so, and I know that sounds sort of maybe very, I don't know, privileged.
Speaker: I don't know, but I feel like, you know, the funeral profession and just helping the clients that we deal with, you know, through their grief and LGBTQ plus community and all of that, all of these people who just, you know, kind of get ignored and brushed under the carpet and why aren't you over your grief yet?
Speaker: And oh, for God's sake, you know, so what if she saw herself as a man in real life where, you know, she was born a girl or whatever.
Speaker: you know, all of these issues and these problems that are in this space and the environment and everything are just things I feel like I can impact.
Speaker: So it's, but it's just so fascinating.
Speaker: Whenever I talk to you, you know, it's coming from such an academia part of it.
Speaker: And, you know, what you just said there, I mean, suicidology, like, again, who would have even thought that that was a thing?
Speaker: Now, one of the things I want you to, I think it's really important for you to say or to just talk a little bit about is,
Speaker: how we in the profession or indeed Joe Bloggs as I call us on the street so normal person on the streets not in this profession how we should reference suicide died by suicide like how how should that be because that's been a big topic and you know commissioned suicide was what it was known as for years and you said you know you spoke about that really really eloquently I thought last year and I just you know if you'd like to touch on that a bit as well
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, I typically will start all of my workshops on suicide and all of my courses on suicide talking about the importance of language.
Speaker: The first step being to stop saying committed suicide.
Speaker: I still hear it from random people, of course.
Speaker: And it's so easy in terms of vernacular.
Speaker: I don't think people are usually slowing down to consider that they are criminalizing through language and
Speaker: the pain and suffering that someone did not ask for in becoming suicidal.
Speaker: So yeah, saying that someone died of suicide, saying that someone died by suicide, it takes the weight of the myth of free will off the act of suicide itself.
Speaker: And we do that in a lot of ways with language.
Speaker: People will turn suicide into a verb while they suicided
Speaker: or into an identity.
Speaker: He was a suicide.
Speaker: When we would never say like someone was a heart attack or that they cancered themselves to death.
Speaker: So yeah, making sure the language is parsing and the language is equitable and fair, I think is really important.
Speaker: And along with that, in terms of communication, I will still occasionally hear people joking about suicide, making suicidal gestures, you know, if they've had a bad day or, you know, if I fail, I hear from students sometimes, oh, if I fail this exam, I'm going to throw myself off a cliff.
Speaker: Well, you know.
Speaker: Some of us knew people who threw themselves off cliffs and you don't know who's listening to what you're saying and what that is triggering for them, either in their own mental pain or in their bereavement.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think taking more care with language is at least the very first place for anyone to start in being a more responsible citizen and more informed on suicide.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And what does one of your your classes or your courses and what you know, can you give us a little rundown or a little synopsis of what the class would look like?
Speaker: Oh, gosh.
Speaker: 14 weeks, four hours a week in in person covering everything.
Speaker: from the classical theories about suicide, which mostly came from the Freudian camp, if we look at psychology, and then from Emile Durkheim, if we look at sociology.
Speaker: It was really just in the last 30 years-ish that we've really developed a more holistically integrated theory about suicide.
Speaker: I talk about this in my workshops, David Wendell Mahler's idea of the psychosocial collage or the biopsychosocial collage.
Speaker: This understanding that suicide never comes from or very rarely would come from one stressor, one source of pain, one adverse life event, but that it's coming from all different places.
Speaker: So I usually start the courses with this is what we thought about suicide for 100 years.
Speaker: And we'll do that for a couple of weeks so they know it.
Speaker: And then, well, this is really what we know about suicide now.
Speaker: And then turn to a lot of things like cultural critique, how suicide is represented in film and television, in other forms of media, the ways in which people can develop skills.
Speaker: to become better advocates for suicide prevention and for suicide bereavement care.
Speaker: A lot of these students who come to my courses are survivors of suicide attempts or of suicide loss.
Speaker: So it can be very empowering for them to get real evidence-based knowledge versus what's heard in a PSA or on the street.
Speaker: Yeah, we cover a lot.
Speaker: Literature of suicide.
Speaker: I wrote my entire doctoral dissertation on representations of suicide in the 1990s in American culture.
Speaker: So we'll pull on that.
Speaker: And also deep diving into things like status, social status and privilege status and how that might affect suicidality in ways that are unexpected and others in ways that are expected, which we see
Speaker: Currently in the African-American population, suicide was usually at a much lower rate.
Speaker: And we've seen in the last just two, three years, a really, really alarming climb in Black young men dying of suicide.
Speaker: that did not track previously.
Speaker: So we need to look into that more and the many different social factors of the upheavals of our country in the last few years surrounding race again, and what that impact might look like.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, and in any course with me, if it's a senior seminar, an honor seminar,
Speaker: The students are also going to track the course a lot too, where they want it to go, what they want to get out of it.
Speaker: Many of my kids are nursing students or pre-med or, you know, hoping to become therapists.
Speaker: So there's a lot of professional proxies they want to apply there.
Speaker: And then for my graduate students, they're working in the fields already and they typically will fill a suicide course very fast because none of the helping professions are immune.
Speaker: to needing more of a skill set to working with both the suicidal people and also the bereaved.
Speaker: Sounds incredible.
Speaker: It sounds honestly so interesting.
Speaker: I genuinely, if it was available, part of me is like, I wonder, can I go back to college now?
Speaker: Is it too late?
Speaker: Because it is.
Speaker: It's just something that it breaks my heart and it's just so tragic and it's something I'm fascinated with, though, I'll be honest.
Speaker: I've always been fascinated with sort of psychology and the human brain and just generally what makes us tick and what makes us do certain things and react and
Speaker: you know, all of these, these things.
Speaker: But for me, I am speaking and going back to Ireland, I'm speaking at the Funeral Times trade show.
Speaker: I've been asked to speak.
Speaker: I'm kind of scared in a sense because I've been asked to speak about mental health in the profession.
Speaker: And, you know, for one, I'm I'm not a funeral director.
Speaker: And for two, I'm not a mental, you know, I'm not a therapist or a mental health expert in any way, shape or form.
Speaker: So I find it fascinating.
Speaker: And this has this is one of many that I've been asked to speak about.
Speaker: And yes, am I still in the profession just because I'm not a funeral director?
Speaker: Yes, I am still in this this business and in this industry.
Speaker: But for me, it's, you know, I take the responsibility quite heavily because, you know, I don't want to say anything ahead of turn.
Speaker: And for me, I feel that I think the reason I'm getting asked to maybe do these things is because I'm a good facilitator of just opening the conversation and I'm
Speaker: I kind of I'm diplomatic in sort of I don't weigh heavily on.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Commissioned suicide or oh, yeah.
Speaker: You know, I'm like, well, let's hear everybody.
Speaker: I'm curious.
Speaker: I'm I'm interested to see, you know, what people's experiences are.
Speaker: And we all, you know, have these unique experiences.
Speaker: You have spoken at the NFDA just recently about suicide in the profession, in the funeral profession specifically.
Speaker: How did it go?
Speaker: I mean, you know, did five people show up to, you know, how open were people and what sort of, what was the feedback?
Speaker: Yeah, I had told I realized it was really pushing the envelope to propose this topic.
Speaker: And when I was in conversation with the education team sort of hammering out what I would talk about this year, they encouraged me to push the envelope.
Speaker: And this was where I pushed it because I've been wanting to talk about this for several years now.
Speaker: And I said to someone who was traveling with me, if 20 people come, I'll be happy.
Speaker: I would be more than delighted if 20 people show up at eight o'clock in the morning to talk about suicide risk within death care professions.
Speaker: And we had a really full room.
Speaker: It was, it was very well received.
Speaker: I only wish I had had more time.
Speaker: I only had an hour with them.
Speaker: And honestly, we could have done two, we could have done four.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: A lot of people came up after with personal stories of losing either colleagues, friends, children, spouses, and, you know, some who have had their own struggles with suicidality and not have had that, not have had a space to be able to own that while working in what is usually a very insular, very closed off.
Speaker: very strict work-life appearance of balance profession.
Speaker: So, you know, a lot of the feedback I've gotten since and the emails I've been getting since
Speaker: We're also just, you know, these beautiful expressions of gratitude that what they go through is being recognized by an educator, by a speaker in ways that they aren't usually encouraged to do for themselves or for each other.
Speaker: And I think that's partly step one is start breaking open these silences.
Speaker: And I call it also the open secrets within the profession, whether it is something like still being encouraged to be closeted if you're part of the queer community.
Speaker: The probable high incidences of alcohol use disorders within the professional community that we're not talking about or taking seriously that can contribute to suicidality and just the weight of working this profession.
Speaker: I'm not a fan of this last responders term or phenomenon, and I hadn't said anything about it.
Speaker: And then I was facilitating one of the funeral professional peer support meetings, and a couple of the attendees also started talking about how they don't love it.
Speaker: And I know it's been used before, but pandemic really gave rise to pushing this narrative.
Speaker: And I knew why it was being done, right?
Speaker: Because we were paying attention to nurses.
Speaker: We were paying attention to EMTs.
Speaker: We were paying attention to respiratory therapists, all of whom were like long overdue for recognition for the work they do all the time.
Speaker: And then finally it was like, oh, and let's pay attention to funeral directors.
Speaker: They are our last responders.
Speaker: And I don't think that language has served them well in being quite literally the last that we pay attention to.
Speaker: But also, I don't think it's translated into more transparency about how weighty and how...
Speaker: draining this profession can be for the people in it.
Speaker: And we don't do that with nurses, you know, we, or at least we shouldn't be, you know, I pushed into a couple of hospitals during COVID and helped them set up, you know, debriefing times for nurses to be able to get together and say this week was too much.
Speaker: Like, let's talk about it.
Speaker: That doesn't happen in funeral homes.
Speaker: And you might be burying the child of your next door neighbor, and you aren't necessarily given time to grieve yourself, let alone to process.
Speaker: There's just this messaging, this very stoic messaging that I think has a lot to do with the very longstanding white male patriarchal ownership in this profession that's like,
Speaker: Nope.
Speaker: You keep it together.
Speaker: You get through your day.
Speaker: Then you go home with your family.
Speaker: You leave work at work.
Speaker: You leave home at home.
Speaker: And it's not reasonable.
Speaker: And I think COVID showed the cracks in that more visibly.
Speaker: And I think funeral professionals are still recovering from that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But also are probably thinking like, how did we get left out in all of these dialogues about mental health?
Speaker: I'm speaking in circles a little, Jen, because that's what I do.
Speaker: No, listen.
Speaker: All of which is to say the session went wonderfully and I would love to be bringing it to states and other orgs as well, because I think funeral professionals also need to know that in a way that is not pandering, in a way that is not simplistic or, you know, one more talk about take a mental health day, self-care.
Speaker: That there are people who recognize what they're carrying and there are things we can do to help keep each other safe.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that there are steps they can take within their homes, within their funeral homes to contribute to preventing.
Speaker: the suicidality that we know is happening in the profession that people are not wanting to openly talk about.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And well, thank you for that.
Speaker: I am laughing at you saying you talk in circles.
Speaker: That's what we do here at the Glamour Podcast.
Speaker: anybody knows me it's like shiny penny let's fridge magnet that we'll come back to that in two minutes because we just go down these lovely little rabbit holes so we love that um and and actually I do want to kind of come back a little bit to what you touched on because it we you know it was it was an interesting NFDA for me this year as well I do think mental health was with thanks to you and thanks to other people was coming more to the forefront and and um and as I said you know I myself am getting requests which I kind of can't understand why but
Speaker: I'm happy to facilitate whatever and help in whatever way I can.
Speaker: But, you know, it was interesting talking to a couple of the funeral directors where, just as you said, like with COVID, it was it was a huge thing that was happening.
Speaker: They were a little bit left to the side.
Speaker: I mean, I do remember that, you know, all the nurses got the free Starbucks and all of this kind of, you know, there was all these kind of things.
Speaker: And it was it was very tragic.
Speaker: that, you know, we were just that we were kind of on the periphery of society and it was just don't still don't talk about it.
Speaker: And that really came to the fore when I was chatting to one of the funeral directors whom, you know, and she was sort of saying how, you know, she's been through a school shooting.
Speaker: And not many funeral directors have right now.
Speaker: Sadly, too many have in America.
Speaker: But still not everybody has.
Speaker: And she said, you know, she wished she had somebody to pick up the phone to and be like, what the hell?
Speaker: And she just talked me through the little things like, you know, in this one small town, they had to deal with the funerals of all these small, teeny, tiny little children.
Speaker: And I can only imagine the weight that that must have been on on every physical person that works that.
Speaker: But not only that, they also had to deal with the killer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The killer's body.
Speaker: And, you know, and and that brings its its own headaches and its own emotions.
Speaker: You know, I mean, it's still a family with a child.
Speaker: It's just a child that did something horrendous to other children.
Speaker: And so how is that, you know, and it's still people who are grieving and, you know, and I've worked in funeral homes where, you know, they have had to have a contentious political figure or somebody brought through and it's all.
Speaker: But I just thought, you know,
Speaker: wow on a whole level of of of also you know you touched on a little bit about funeral directors being there for each other and you know there's funeral peer support and stuff just sharing expertise and sort of you know how picking up the phone and saying listen and just make sure that you're involved in every conversation that you know the medical all these people involve you because you need to be a part of
Speaker: movement of things and I just thought that was really fascinating and then also at the NFDA this year we obviously celebrated oh my god I can't believe I was about to say that word we memorialised like September 11th and so we obviously talked about that with the Remembrance Service and you know I know a lot of the funeral directors who partook in having to deal with the Twin Towers coming down here in New York and stuff like that that
Speaker: Nobody's prepared for that.
Speaker: No, that's like an accountant showing up to his nine to five job and suddenly being given, I don't know, like the books from Mars.
Speaker: You know, I mean, it's just it's not something you walk into.
Speaker: You know, your day to day job, you know, you're rolling the community, your role in society, you know, everything.
Speaker: And all of a sudden you're landed with, you know, so and but nobody thinks of the school shooting and nobody thinks you're sorry, the funeral directors of during a school shooting.
Speaker: Nobody thinks of the funeral directors during the.
Speaker: And I'm not saying that they should, you know, and we're not saying that the nurses shouldn't have gotten the Starbucks or anything like that.
Speaker: But I'll bring it back to a little bit of a personal one for me that just sort of it all kind of came came full circle.
Speaker: is when I was about 12 years old, we were living in a rented house.
Speaker: We were a moving house.
Speaker: We were in the middle and we were living in a rented house.
Speaker: And so my dad had to sort of drive me and my brother into the city, into school every day.
Speaker: And so it was a little bit of a different detour.
Speaker: And we were there for about nine months.
Speaker: And on our way into school, we this there was an accident and there was an articulated truck and there was the man.
Speaker: The driver was standing outside the articulated truck by the time we, you know, we were stuck in the traffic by the time we got past.
Speaker: And there was a piece of body, the torso under a blanket and.
Speaker: That was all that was left.
Speaker: And then there was bits of skin and there was a runner or trainer, you guys call it, all over the road.
Speaker: And I was 12 years old and I was just like, I looked at the driver's face and I looked down and it was just horrific.
Speaker: And I was traumatized.
Speaker: And then later I heard that apparently, so it was suicide.
Speaker: And this gentleman had axed his daughter and his wife in bed that morning.
Speaker: And then had thrown himself under the truck to die.
Speaker: And I just it was just such an interesting time for me in terms of I must be relatively advanced for my 12 years of age.
Speaker: And it's kind of stuck with me since.
Speaker: But I just remember thinking, you know, how much terrible how much sympathy and empathy I had when I first saw it and witnessed the whole thing.
Speaker: And then when I heard about it, he became sort of this murderous character and this horrendous person, you know, and it was absolutely mental health, you know, was just off the charts, you know, and it was anyway.
Speaker: My point, the point of it is that a couple of years later, I was in a car accident myself and I knocked somebody down and I will never forget it.
Speaker: I won't go into it because this podcast will go on too long.
Speaker: But I knocked somebody down and again, stuck with me for life.
Speaker: And I immediately thought back to that scene when I was 12 years old.
Speaker: And I thought to myself, and thankfully, sorry, the girl that I knocked down survived and she only broke a leg and it was fine.
Speaker: She was running for a bus and it was, you know, everything, thank God, was fine.
Speaker: But what I was fascinated with the situation I experienced and then the one for when I was 12 years old is that no one thought of the driver.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So whenever I hear of an accident now on the radio, I think, yeah, OK, is the person survived?
Speaker: Are they OK?
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: That's what you want to know.
Speaker: But what about the mental health of the person driving?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So she was running for her bus.
Speaker: Nobody gave a
Speaker: Crap about me and what, you know, because I looked like the murderous person, right?
Speaker: You know, I ran her over.
Speaker: And so, but I was traumatized for years after that.
Speaker: Could still be, you could say.
Speaker: And the same with the, as a 12 year old, I remember looking at that driver's face.
Speaker: He did nothing other than drive to work that day.
Speaker: And he got involved in a situation that was not his.
Speaker: And then he and he probably never drove again, I'll be honest.
Speaker: Anyway, that's a very long way to personalize story to share insofar as that, you know, with these children, you know, these school shootings and with everything, there's so many facets to it is the point that it's not just clear cut.
Speaker: It's not black and white.
Speaker: It's not just the victims of of 9-11.
Speaker: It's not just, you know, the children who were shot.
Speaker: in the classrooms and the teachers that save them and maybe the one brave child, you know, there's just so many different facets.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I just, yeah.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: What's your thoughts on that?
Speaker: I guess is.
Speaker: Well, yeah, I mean, actually I teach an entire course on mass death in American culture.
Speaker: And we, we start by going back to like 1978 and Jonestown and, and move from there into units on mass deaths of terrorism and
Speaker: public shootings, school shootings, hate crimes, you name it.
Speaker: Students get very into it.
Speaker: And cult deaths also, which they're all very into.
Speaker: I think that's why half of them sign up for the course.
Speaker: Like we get to study cults.
Speaker: Sounds like me.
Speaker: So yes, they're very excited.
Speaker: But yeah,
Speaker: You know, I think of many things.
Speaker: I mean, many threads to pull on and what you're talking about.
Speaker: But I think to in addition to sort of those people who are involved but not involved when these things are happening, the community impact.
Speaker: And this goes back to funeral directors.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The community impact is not generally acknowledged.
Speaker: The mental health of people in the community is not generally acknowledged.
Speaker: that something does shift in you if there is a shooting in your town or a town away, or I'm here in Southern Rhode Island when the shooting happened at Sandy Hook.
Speaker: I mean, that's less than an hour away from us.
Speaker: We all felt it as a very much a neighborhood sort of adjacent situation.
Speaker: phenomenon and little children, right?
Speaker: There was just something palpably horrid about that.
Speaker: And I think because we live in a culture that is both in an epidemic of suicide, but also in an epidemic of interpersonal violence, there is this weird shifting between horror and normativization of living like this.
Speaker: And I see that with my undergrads, you know, they're 18 to 24 years old around there.
Speaker: And when school shootings happen, unlike 10 years ago or 15 years ago, when I started teaching, it's not the first thing they're talking about when I walk into a classroom.
Speaker: It's like, oh, yeah, there was another school shooting somewhere.
Speaker: Like, we're so used to this.
Speaker: And that's something that our generation, yours and mine, we didn't grow up with lockdown drills and how to protect yourself from a shooter.
Speaker: We had like fire drills.
Speaker: That was about it.
Speaker: And I think what that also does to mental health is something that we overlook and how every unique psyche, as we are all unique little biopsychosocial creatures,
Speaker: is going to respond to the culture we're living in differently in terms of interpersonal violence, mass violence, and suicide risk.
Speaker: I mean, I was definitely a club kid.
Speaker: I still am in some ways.
Speaker: We saw each other at the LGBTQ plus an ally meetup that I co-hosted and organized with Tim McClune out in Las Vegas last week.
Speaker: I have students who have never been to a gay establishment who are gay because they're afraid that someone will shoot up the place.
Speaker: And I am in no position to say to them, no, you're fine.
Speaker: I mean, Club Q just last year, Pulse, not long ago.
Speaker: And I have students who won't go to a movie theater.
Speaker: I have, you know, because of different acts of violence and mass violence that happened there.
Speaker: I have students who clock where all the emergency exits are whenever they walk into an academic building.
Speaker: And at some point I started automatically doing that because we thankfully have never had an issue on our campus.
Speaker: But there was a threat years ago that turned out to be false.
Speaker: And from that point on, it was like, we don't know our emergency plan.
Speaker: Maybe we should.
Speaker: Maybe I should know how to get these kids out of my classroom or to lock down my classroom.
Speaker: Those are things I never thought I'd have to think about.
Speaker: And, you know, I'm in my 40s.
Speaker: These students, their brains are still developing.
Speaker: And this has been their entire consciousness.
Speaker: And then if we look again to someone like a funeral director, who is oftentimes not, I think, seen as the civic leader that they would have 50 years ago looked like, or 70 years ago, when funeral directors occupied a very different role in communities than they often do now.
Speaker: They're the people that are going to be turned to when these things happen, but their own pain, their own suffering, their own grief, even within the profession,
Speaker: isn't necessarily going to be validated.
Speaker: I think there is a sea change happening.
Speaker: And I think I see that amongst people our age and younger, pretty much.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Who are like the time for stoicism is over.
Speaker: The time for hiding our feelings is over.
Speaker: The time for pretending that everything's okay when it's not has got to be over because funeral directors are as susceptible to suicidality and suicide risk as anyone else.
Speaker: And I would argue based on adjacent research, since we have no research on suicide and funeral directors, which I hope to repair at some point,
Speaker: But it is I can easily probably with probability project that funeral directors are at higher risk.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just like doctors, med students, nurses, veterinarians, EMTs, military, all at higher risk for all the same sets of reasons that we can observe in funeral service professionals.
Speaker: But the fact that there hasn't even been an IRB approved research study in this country, specifically on suicidality and funeral directors, says it all.
Speaker: Like that there's this perception that somehow they're immune to this.
Speaker: Yeah, it's true.
Speaker: Or that they won't be affected when they are literally dealing with death and grief every single day.
Speaker: I mean, at least doctors...
Speaker: much of the time get to go home and say well I saved a life today even if they lost someone right that was never an option yeah yeah that never happens for a funeral director they're not like oh no grief today well there's the odd person the odd funeral home that has that person who comes back to life
Speaker: I guess.
Speaker: That sounds like an Irish folklore.
Speaker: I'm pretty sure there's some drinking songs about that.
Speaker: There are, actually.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, my God.
Speaker: We're going to end up doing Finnegan's Wake by the end of this podcast.
Speaker: Oh, stop.
Speaker: That bar is up on the Upper East Side.
Speaker: Every time I pass, I'm like, oh, there you are.
Speaker: And it's actually funny.
Speaker: The first hub I worked in, my first job straight out of school was a bar called The Morgue.
Speaker: So I was always destined for this business.
Speaker: Yeah, it's really, the work you're doing is just so amazing, genuinely.
Speaker: And I could spend all time
Speaker: evening speaking with you about this I'm just so obsessed with this topic and just you know what you bring to the table and I feel like you know you're just the academic version of my brain you know I've gone back to college and sort of instead of studying business and just gotten into all of the the great stuff that you've done like it really is and I'm just it's so important for funeral directors to talk and it is a predominantly male business and
Speaker: typically men are that little bit harder to crack the nut of getting them to talk and I do think it's a little bit more prevalent now you know I think we are opening these conversations and I just think we you just have to keep trying you know and um yeah so thank you for coming on the show um I have no doubt we will have you back again we just have to coordinate our extremely busy our crazy schedules my god yes but in in that interim
Speaker: please check out Sarah Murphy.
Speaker: Tell us your websites and where people can find you.
Speaker: We will include all the links below.
Speaker: But yeah, tell us where people can find out more.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Thank you for having me on.
Speaker: My website is probably the easiest way to...
Speaker: to contact me through it's just www.deafdoc.com I chose the domain on a dare from a friend of mine Dr. Death was taken thankfully so yeah www.deafdoc.com and you can contact me to email from there excellent excellent well thank you thank you thank you so much and we will look forward to talking to you again soon Sarah thanks for having me
