You killed Stephen "Twitch" Boss!

Let me begin by saying, I had no idea who Stephen “Twitch” Boss was before he committed suicide. But when he did, I couldn’t escape all of the posts on social media about his death; from sympathies to his

family to encouragement for those struggling with hopelessness. This just goes to show the level of impact he had when it came to spreading joy to the world! It got my thinking. After watching all of the support being spewed out on social media, I was ANGRY. And here’s why!

As much as we post about mental health awareness and being gentle with people because we don’t know what everyone is going through, we contribute to this kind of hopelessness that ultimately leads to suicide. We post negatively on social media. We treat each other like premium thrash all year round by throwing shade, posting subliminally, and even direct attacks on people’s characters. Even in our personal lives, we treat each other horribly and don’t even think twice about it. Supervisors and administrators deal harshly with their employees in a variety of ways. Embedded in this type of behavior is the need to inflict pain. We even deal harshly with public figures and celebrities with our comments as if they aren’t human. We let our emotions and sense of entitlement take over so much, that we forget that the person we don’t like, or that may have caused us frustration is another human being.

But as soon as a celebrity commits suicide, we turn around and post support saying things like “I stand against suicide”. But do we really stand against suicide? If we evaluated our own actions towards the people in your lives, will our actions stand against suicide? We’re always posting things like “If you’re reading this and you’re contemplating suicide, call me. I’d rather talk to you than you take your life”. Yet some of us don’t even check up on the people who are actually in our lives. We've only adopted politically and socially correct statuses for social media. Our behavior cancels out our post 1 suicide at a time. Some are avoiding conversations we should be having with other people in our lives who are suffering. Some have intentionally made ourselves unavailable by presenting ourselves inauthentically to work through conflict; not even considering how that is affecting them, and how it contributes to suicide, and how it ultimately effects our human ecosystem;

My message to the world is this! The same people who contributed to Twitch’s suicide, could be the role we play in the life of another person who decides to take their life! We post, but consider where it really matters? Who do you actually need to reach out to? Who have you dealt with harshly? Who have you caused to experience trauma?