Tammy Powder - Losing My Daughter to Suicide Taught Me We've Been Getting Suicide Prevention Wrong

Tammy Powder is a mental health advocate, author of Mamas Need Love and Compassion Too, and a mother whose daughter Ruby died by suicide after a long struggle with mental health. When your child is hurting, every instinct says to fix it — offer solutions, share your own experience, make the pain go away. Tammy used to be a fixer, and for years she believed that was love. But here's the problem: trying to fix someone's pain doesn't land as support — it lands as "I don't trust you to handle this yourself." Tammy learned that the hardest way possible, watching her daughter Ruby fight her own mental health battles before losing her to suicide. What she took from that loss has reshaped how she talks to grieving and struggling parents everywhere: you cannot climb the ladder for someone you love. You can only stand at the bottom and hold it steady. Expect to learn why trying to fix someone's pain shuts them down instead of helping, what the "ladder" analogy teaches about supporting a loved one through mental health struggles without taking over, why "I've been there, just listen to me" can make a child stop opening up altogether, how a single code word — "apple" — created enough safety for her kids to bring her their scariest thoughts, why suicide prevention needs to shift toward suicide awareness because the numbers aren't moving, how the suicidal brain operates fundamentally differently from a mind making rational decisions, why isolation quietly compounds grief for mothers especially, why honoring grief matters more than rushing to move past it, how to respond when a child says they're anxious or depressed without minimizing it, why parents have to refill their own tank before they can support anyone else, and what it means to "check on the gentle ones" — the kids who mask their pain best — and much more. This conversation will change how you think about suicide prevention, grief, and what it actually means to support someone you love.