Shrinking It Down: Mental Health Made Simple · Gene Beresin, MD, MA and Khadijah Booth Watkins, MD, MPH

Facing the Loss of a Child to Suicide - A Father's Account

·52 min·3 clips

Tony says suicide is sometimes preventable, but not always reducible to one fix.

Gene Bresson and Khadija Booth-Watkins begin by naming the scale of suicide in the United States. They reference every 11 minutes, the 2023 numbers, and the troubling figures among teens, including one in five students, one in four girls, about one in seven boys, and the highest rate of suicide attempts among Black youth. The hosts stay grounded in the realities families and caregivers face when a young person is at risk, instead of letting the topic drift into abstraction. A father then tells the story of his son, Julian. He remembers him as a super smart guy, and the memory opens into ordinary details like a conversation about restaurants and a phone call that turned toward music. The conversation slows here. He sings Bridge Over Troubled Water and then Pack Up Your Sorrows, and he recalls his son responding with gratitude. That was the last time they spoke. The father says Julian was gone the next day, and the line lands as a blunt marker of how quickly life changed. The episode does not rush past that fact. Instead, it treats the memory as something to sit with, because the father explains that remembering conversations has become part of his daily life and that he began writing about Julian and sending letters to friends as a way of holding grief in words. He also wrote to Julian. On his 70th birthday, he wrote a letter to his son saying how much he missed him and wanted him there. For him, that became one way to live with grief: not by erasing pain, but by naming it directly and letting other people witness it. The hosts respond with care. They reflect on how the story honors Julian as a person, a sibling, a son, and a chef, and they note how moving it is to hear a child remembered for a life as well as a loss. Community returns at the end. The closing message is that people need one another through overwhelming times, and that support from family and community can help carry suffering that should not be borne alone.

As heard by us

A hard conversation that stays close to memory, grief, and community.

The episode moves carefully from public health statistics into one father's private memory. It starts with stark suicide numbers for adults and teens, then settles into Julian's last conversation with his father, the songs he sang, and the small daily work of remembering him.

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Why you'd press play

You want a father's memory, clinical clarity, and a hard talk about suicide loss and staying connected.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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