On the morning of 25 June 2018, Jenny Teo woke up to find her only child, Josh Isaac Ng, lying lifeless on the sofa in the study of their home. He was barely 21, and he had taken his own life.

Jenny’s pain is palpable as she relates how she found her son’s body; how she called for an ambulance; how she was instructed over the phone to do CPR on him while waiting for help to arrive; and how, when he was pronounced dead, she was so distraught the whole neighbourhood could hear her wailing. But she bravely shares this difficult story over and over again because it is what drives her in her mission, as a suicide loss survivor, to educate the public on suicide prevention.

Josh: strong and courageous

Josh was a miracle baby who was conceived after much difficulty and born on 13 Nov 1997. When Josh, who was named Bradley at birth, was baptised at the age of 12, Jenny chose the name “Joshua” because she wanted him to be strong and courageous like the Joshua of the Bible.

He was a playful and active toddler, and enjoyed music and rhythm, so Jenny enrolled him in a drum class. One of her fondest memories of him is when he performed a New Creation Church worship song for his drum school performance and received a standing ovation. He was also interested in making movies—he enlisted his school friends, his mother and their domestic helper to act in his amateur films, which came with sound and visual effects that he, as an avid amateur movie producer and director, added himself.

He was a funny and humorous child who never failed to make his mother laugh. “He was my Mr Bean,” she recalls with a laugh. That was also why she chose the name “Isaac” as his baptism name, as it means “laughter”.

When he was 12, he experienced a traumatic incident during which his father scolded him for two solid hours over his exam results. That distressed him so much that he fell sick with high fever, and after that, he refused to go to school even after he had recovered. Instead, he started hiding behind sofas and in his wardrobe. Jenny started seeing a drastic change in his personality and behaviour. His mental health deteriorated; he did not do well for his Primary School Leaving Examination and struggled with his studies in secondary school, particularly in Mathematics and Chinese. Jenny decided to quit her job to stay home and care for him.

Fortunately, Josh did fairly well in his Secondary 4 N-level examinations. He qualified for the ITE Higher Nitec course, where his creative side led him to pursue a course in games design and development.

Losing Josh

By then, Jenny’s marriage had fallen apart and she, too, struggled with depression and suicidal ideation for two years as she went through a difficult divorce. Josh had started dating a schoolmate, but following their first breakup, he fell into a depression. An extremely reserved and introverted young man, he did not talk about his feelings even though he was overwhelmed with having to deal with the breakup of his family, his own relationship issues and his enlistment in National Service, among other things. At the time, Jenny was herself struggling to stay afloat mentally and could not support him emotionally.

About a year after they first broke up, the girl initiated a reconciliation. But after she broke up with him a second time in Dec 2017, he was utterly devastated. In Feb 2018, he attempted suicide for the first time. Even though he had been consulting a psychiatrist and was prescribed antidepressants, by the middle of 2018 he was in so much unbearable psychological pain and felt so depreciated as a human being that he wanted to put an end to that pain—suicide was the only way he knew how.

“When you lose someone to a disease or an illness, the doctor treating the patient will have to answer many of your questions. But when you lose someone to suicide, who do you ask?” Jenny recounts. After she lost Josh, she was tormented with sorrow, guilt and unanswered questions. It had taken her two years to recover from her earlier depression, and she says it was only by the grace of God that her grief did not cause her to fall back into it.

Healing while grieving

In the immediate aftermath of Josh’s death, Jenny had to go through the motions of identifying his body, planning the funeral service and his cremation. She also had to write a eulogy and place his urn at the columbarium. Being divorced and Josh being her only child made everything all the more difficult. She cried almost every day for many months.

When she was going through his things, Jenny realised that Josh had left her several suicide notes: some were audio notes, others on his phone and some written on paper. He spoke about how tired and exhausted he was, and how he wanted to end the pain. In the adjustment stage of her grief journey, Jenny began to meet face to face with his friends, one by one, because she wanted to find out more about what her son was like when he was with them. Talking to Josh’s friends about him also helped her as she struggled to find closure while living with the indescribable pain of losing her only child.

In Dec 2018, she was connected to a TV production company who wanted to make a video about suicide loss. The video, “Silent Cry”, was uploaded to various social medial channels on April 2019.¹ In September the same year, at an event for caregivers by Caregivers Alliance Ltd (who had supported her after her son’s first suicide attempt), Jenny spoke about the loss of her son to suicide to a live audience of about 80 people. “I shared that the best thing I ever did for Josh as his mother on earth was to get him saved and baptised, because that’s the only hope that I can cling to now—knowing that I will be reunited with him again one day.”

The day after that talk, God spoke to her. “What are you grieving?” He said. “Your son is still with you. Every time you open up and share, he’s with you. He’s alive in you.” She then realised that to her Josh was not “lost”—he has become her silent partner now whenever she shares about suicide prevention based on her lived experience in educating the public on suicide intervention.

In order to better understand more about the suicidal mind and behaviour, and what Josh went through, Jenny started doing intensive research into suicidology² and found correlations between the textbook answers and her “lived experience”, which eventually led her to start Stigma2Strength Singapore In Memory of Josh Isaac,³ a ground-up educational initiative that aims to increase awareness of suicide prevention by helping people to understand the suicidal mind and behaviour, and reduce the social stigma surrounding the topics of suicide.

“How can I help?”

Most people do not want to talk about depression and suicide because they are considered taboo subjects. But Jenny believes that “the primary prevention of suicide lies in public education. One needs to understand the 10 commonalities of suicide. These commonalities tell us what suicide is like on the inside and what is sensible about it to the person who does it at the moment of its doing. It’s an aspect of thought, feeling and behaviour that occurs in almost every suicide—95 out of 100—based on contemporary suicidology. Knowledge of this is crucial in empowering the parent, caregiver or anyone in suicide intervention during crisis situations. For example, a common stressor of suicide is frustrated psychological needs. To help a suicidal person, you need to fulfil those needs. In the case of unbearable psychological pain—the common stimulus of suicide—you need to reduce the pain.”

“Suicide is so complex,” she explains. “It’s not only multi-faceted and multi-dimensional, it’s also multi-disciplinary involving elements that are psychological, biological, sociological, epidemiological, philosophical, pharmaceutical, theological and physiological… There is no single cause. Suicide prevention starts with understanding the suicidal mind, and especially on behavioural clues.”

For young people who are struggling, Jenny implores, “Please stay. Even if it’s just for one more day, every day.” Suicidal thoughts are transient; they last for hours and days, not months or years. But it is difficult for the suicidal person to “see” beyond the day or, for that matter, the next half an hour. They need someone to help them to get through the crisis, to widen their mental blinders and not dwell on their constricted mind of thinking that suicide is the only solution to their intense suffering.

And if someone asks for help, she says that the best thing we can do is to ask them: “Where does it hurt? How can I help?” The way to help is to address the pain, reduce the pain and then redefine the pain. We need to empathise with them instead of rationalising their pain or telling them to pray more, read the Bible more, speak in tongues more, pray more or go to church as it may not always work for the suicidal mind or for a person who is in clinical depression. It will simply cause them to feel more alienated. “And if you don’t try to understand what they are going through and listen with empathy and compassion, they will stop opening up to you.”

Josh is the focal point in the suicide prevention work that Jenny does now. “This is my second closure,” she says. “As a mother, my identity has been redefined. I have a new purpose in life—I can still do something for my son, by being his mouthpiece and helping him to say what he couldn’t when he was still alive. And I am passionate about saving lives so that they can live long enough to hear the gospel of Christ and be eternally saved, if they haven’t already, because it is not God’s will that any should perish.”

That is why, for the Stigma2StrengthSingapore, Jenny has chosen a slogan based on the parable of the lost sheep: “One life lost is one too many, one life saved all worth it”.

¹ https://youtu.be/s7D4dlv0ldw

² Suicidology is the scientific study of suicidal behaviour, the causes of suicide and suicide prevention.

³ Stigma2Strength Singapore’s Facebook page: www.facebook.com/S2SJJ

Sheri Goh is the Editor of Methodist Message. / Photos courtesy of Jenny Teo