Suicidal ideation is terrifying and isolating. This survivor is ‘living proof’ recovery is possible.

Mary Lawal was 8 years old the first time she tried to take her own life.

Time has blurred the details for Lawal, now a 22-year-old psychology student at Prince George’s Community College. She doesn’t remember the circumstances that led up to her attempt — Did she have a fight with her parents? An argument with her siblings? — or how, as a child, she even knew suicide was possible. She has only a vague memory of feeling lonely and unlovable.

“I don’t think I had a full understanding of what I was doing,” she said.

In the last two decades, overall suicide rates in the U.S. have risen by more than a third. They are also up for children ages 8 to 12 — especially among young girls. Nearly 1 in 10 Maryland high school students reported having attempted suicide at least once in the year leading up to fall of 2022, according to results from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey.

But there are reasons to be hopeful. For two years, in Maryland and across the country, the 988 suicide and crisis hotline has made it easier to ask for help. And earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, introduced legislation that would create a federal grant program to support evidence-based models for stabilizing people with serious thoughts of suicide. Raskin lost his son to suicide in December 2020.

While suicidal ideation — thinking about or formulating plans for suicide — can be terrifying and isolating, research shows it also is treatable through psychotherapy, medication, family and social support, and other treatments. Nine out of 10 people who attempt to take their own lives do not die during that acute period of crisis, and do not go on to die of suicide in the future. Research shows that most people who make one attempt do not try to end their own lives again.

But Lawal did try again. After her first attempt as a child, she tried to take her own life four more times, most recently in 2021.

Lawal survived. And today, after several years of intensive treatment, hospital stays, medication and therapy, she considers herself to be in recovery from suicidal ideation and self-harm. She’s now an outspoken mental health advocate who shares her story with thousands of people on her Instagram, as well as with lawmakers, mental health workers and educators as a volunteer and youth adviser for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

She wants to bring people in crisis the message she so desperately needed when she was younger — that there is hope of getting better.

“I’m living proof that recovery is possible,” Lawal said. “Mental illness does not have to be a death sentence.”

Lawal remembers struggling with her mental health from the time she was little. She spent her childhood moving between Bowie and Nigeria, where her dad grew up and ran a business. She switched schools four or five times while growing up, sometimes in the middle of the school year.

Ezekiel Adegbola met Lawal while they were both in high school in Nigeria. He remembers her as someone who quickly adapted to the “Nigerian way of life” and was very bright and funny. They quickly became friends, Adegbola said, and stayed close even after Mary returned to Maryland.

But inside, Lawal felt like she didn’t belong anywhere — like nobody truly understood her. At 13, she began to self-harm. She knew she needed help, but she didn’t know how to put what she was feeling into words. Mental health wasn’t something her teachers or classmates talked about at school.

“I felt as though I was just in this cycle of doom,” she said.

When it comes to preventing suicide — and most other public health crises — it’s key to implement upstream interventions, said Holly Wilcox, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That means tackling the first seeds of the problem before it becomes a crisis, and teaching people about how to recognize those seeds and what to do when they spot them.

Suicide may seem like too big and scary of a topic to broach with children, but there are age-appropriate — and effective — ways of doing so, Wilcox said. She and other researchers are currently testing out programs in Maryland schools, where kids are given tools for approaching sensitive situations and conversations with their friends, and taught when to involve a responsible adult.

“One thing we’ve been noticing is that students, even as young as middle school, really like having the space and time to talk about mental health,” said Wilcox, who has spent her career advancing public health approaches to suicide prevention.

“By allowing them to talk about it, our hope is that it addresses mental health stigma,” Wilcox said. “They can learn practical skills and learn about different mental health conditions. That should help them when they or someone else in their lives are facing any type of mental health problem or crisis; they’ll have something to draw from to be able to work toward a solution.”

Without a similar program in her school, Lawal turned to YouTube and social media to learn about mental health. Hearing others share experiences similar to her own was helpful, but she still wasn’t sure how to get better. While living in Nigeria, she considered walking to a nearby pharmacy to ask for help.

“I wanted to ask the pharmacist,” she recalled, “‘Do you guys have something for depression or suicidal ideation? Something to help?’”

When she got up the nerve to tell her parents how much she was hurting, they didn’t understand. They were a family of faith — Why couldn’t she trust that God would take care of her?

Lawal’s father, Wasiu Lawal, said he initially attributed his daughter’s mental health struggles to her youth. But things got worse, not better, as she got older, he said. Eventually, even though he didn’t understand therapy — mental health was never something people talked about when he was growing up in Nigeria — he knew his daughter needed serious intervention.

“I was willing to do anything that would help her,” Lawal said.

Toward the end of Lawal’s high school years, her mental health got even worse. In her lowest moments, she would scream and cry to her mother, asking her why she had brought her into the world.

But when Lawal was 19, after years of suicide attempts and terrifying intrusive thoughts regularly sending her to the hospital, a doctor suggested a partial hospitalization program to her family. For several weeks, Lawal spent hours each day participating in group and individual therapy. A few months later, she did the program again. This time, even though it was virtual, Lawal felt more prepared to be open with others in the program — to share her experiences and add her input during group therapy.

After several years of treatment and learning about mental health, it felt like everything clicked, Lawal said. She left the program with a deeper understanding of herself that became even deeper as she explored her relationship with her faith. She came to believe that everything she had gone through had a purpose — to help her understand others who were struggling and help them feel less alone.

“God, he had me then. He has me now,” she said. “In my darkest moments, in my darkest times, where I felt lonely, I felt like I had no one, he was still there with me and the reason why I’m still alive today.”

Rolly Orebote, a preacher and spiritual mentor based in London, remembers meeting Lawal through Instagram about four years ago. She could tell how much the young girl was struggling, she said, but over the past few years, she has been amazed at the person she has become.

“When I first met Sister Mary, she was a totally different person. Someone that was not understood, someone that didn’t have confidence in herself,” Orebote said. “I can’t really say how impressed and how proud of her that I am, because she’s grown so much in such a short space of time.”

Now, Lawal is well-practiced at sharing her story. In 2023, she addressed lawmakers in the Maryland General Assembly to ask them to fully fund the 988 hotline. She’s also helped facilitate support groups for NAMI and regularly volunteers to speak with journalists about mental health issues. As a psychology student at Prince George’s Community College, she’s not quite sure yet whether she wants to continue her studies and become a therapist or stay in advocacy.

Whatever Lawal decides to do, her father said, she is going to help many people. She’s taught him a lot about mental health, he said. Now, when he meets a parent whose child is struggling with their mental health, he knows how to talk to them about it — and helps them figure out how to support their child.

“She is amazing. Amazing,” he said of his daughter. “She can tell her story anywhere. She is not ashamed. She’s bold. I’m really proud of her.”