It’s an emergency. It’s a sheer enormity. It grosses you out to imagine it happening in all the graphic details, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s your reality. You’re standing in front of, sitting across from, talking on the phone to, or texting with someone who’s contemplating suicide.

Now, instead of bombarding you with mental health statistics, I just ask you to take my word for it: this is not an imaginary situation or one that can happen to anyone but you. Chances are, at least once in your life, you will be across a person contemplating suicide. Hopefully, you will not be one, though that's possible as well. Either way, you will need to know something that feels counterintuitive from the place of sanity.

It has to do with empathy, and I had to learn it the hard way. First, I learned it surviving two attacks of multi-drug-resistant clinical depression with eleven months of daily suicidal ideation. I came to know what I needed because I almost never got it. Then, I learned far more about it counseling hundreds of people in the three following years, on my social media pages and in real life. Mind you, I’m not pretending to be a mental health expert. I’m a surgeon, and I don’t have any formal credentials in mental health. Like any human being, I learned what I know by research, trial, and error. Yes, I did make mistakes. Yes, I wasn't perfect at empathy and communication. Yes, sometimes my empathic failures cost people their lives, and I can’t dismiss it just because they were people I only communicated with on Instagram and never met in person. People who were many time zones away from me. People who I didn’t formally owe anything to. People whose shattered lives were hidden behind cute profile pictures and 'beautiful life' galleries, now meant to be never updated. I made lessons from my mistakes, and I think those lessons are worth sharing with you in this article. Because one day you can be me. Maybe you already are.

So what is empathy? I define it as the capacity and willingness to be fully present with a person in whatever it is that they’re feeling. Empathy lies at the core of human connection, and it is vulnerable and uncomfortable both to ask and to give. That’s why in the culture equating vulnerability with weakness, and discomfort with a threat to survival, practicing real empathy requires skills and effort. When you’re dealing with someone who’s suicidal, the vulnerability of giving them empathy literally feels like a threat to your own survival. And yet, it remains the only thing that can change their outcome.

British scholar and researcher Theresa Wiseman identified four skills informing empathy: perspective-taking, staying out of judgment, recognizing emotion, and communicating back emotion. This list alone debunks a few common myths about empathy. It shows how empathy is different from sympathy. It shows that empathy is not about relating to the circumstances of an experience but relating to emotions, so it’s unnecessary and indeed dangerous to reserve our empathy for people whose situations mirror our past or our present. And when it comes to dealing with a suicidal person, the most difficult yet the most important element is staying out of judgment.

Make no mistake: most times, judgment isn’t our reaction because we’re bad people. It’s because we just can’t handle the discomfort and vulnerability that real presence with someone implies. If you choose to be present with someone who’s actually contemplating suicide, your discomfort will be huge. In fact, terminal. It'll be so overwhelming that you'll want to give the situation a quick fix. You'll want to go into the first-aid mode and extend some palliative solutions before professionals arrive at the scene and take over. Your discomfort will rush you into saying things that you think are helpful that are actually the opposite.

So before I tell you what to say, let me tell you what to not say.

1. Don’t judge their story.

Their story is theirs, not yours. They lived it. You didn’t. They, not you, confronted bullies on a daily basis. They, not you, went through cycles of abuse. They, not you, endured discrimination and oppression and stigma, institutionalized and normalized in our society. They, not you, were told for years that they're worthless, useless, and unlovable. They, not you, were made to feel like they didn’t belong anywhere and had no right to exist. They, not you, were for no fault of their own constantly put in situations where their voice was misheard and their story was misjudged. So don’t you create the same situation now when there’s a very real possibility they’re approaching the end of their life and you don’t know whether you'll ever get a chance to fix your mistake. Don’t unload statistics, data, and numbers onto them to make them compare their life to that of "the less fortunate". Don't pity them. Don’t trivialize their struggle. Don’t try to draw parallels to your own experience and one-up them with your stories. Even if you lived it all at one point, they are contemplating suicide now, not you.

2. Don’t judge their perspective.

We all see the world through different lenses, and most of them are informed by lotteries: race, class, gender, ability, ethnicity, sexual orientation, family background, religion, citizenship, and others. Some of those lotteries grant us privilege, and some put us at disadvantage. There aren't two people in the world who have the exact same lens. Everyone’s perspective on life events is different, and you have to honor that. You can’t put down your lens and pick up theirs. That’s a freaking myth. And running their story through your lens won’t help. Don’t talk to them about how beautiful and amazing life actually is, and how it always gets better. Right now, you have to appreciate that the world they’re seeing through their eyes, contemplating taking their life at the bottom of their desperation, is every bit as truthful, honest, and real as the world you’re seeing through your eyes. Because the moment you doubt the validity of their perspective, you another time make them feel like they don’t belong here. You only reinforce their intention to leave.

3. Don’t talk to them about power and choice.

According to Martin Luther King, power is simply the ability to effect change. When someone contemplates leaving this world, I can assure you: they’re feeling totally powerless, i.e. totally unable to effect change in their lives. And, as hard and heartbreaking as it is, you have to appreciate that they didn’t get that feeling out of nowhere, but they were forced into situations, places, and relationships that effectively stripped them of trust in their power. Those were the situations, places, and relationships where they got chronically hurt and couldn’t change anything. Mental health scientists call it learned helplessness. You just can’t make a person who's endured abuse for years unlearn it in a couple of sentences. Do you think they have a choice? You’re fucking wrong. No one makes a choice to end his or her life unless they're convinced that they can’t change anything for better. So don’t talk about choice. You now have a choice; they don’t. Don’t talk about power either. Paradoxically, talking about power to a person who’s feeling terminally powerless robs them of the last piece of power they actually have. Don’t be that thief. Your power in this situation lies in surrendering to being present with them in their powerlessness. That's part of human experience. You have to climb down to that murky place and hold their hand over there. Only after that can you guide their way back up to their power.

4. Don’t take away their right and their freedom.

Their life is theirs, not yours. And so is their right to take it. Yes, I know this sounds horrible. I know you want to save them, but don’t blackmail them with setting yourself on fire if they do that first. Don’t talk to them about how much you’re gonna miss them and how great of a friend you’re gonna lose in them. Don’t say you’re gonna call police, their parents, their spouse, or their children. Don’t make them feel weak or inadequate — that’s the very reason why they ended up in this place of terminal misery. Don’t make them feel like a perpetrator. They aren’t going to commit suicide; they’re about to die by it. In order to help them reclaim their last piece of power, you have to give them the freedom to decide and have the courage to be in it with them, no matter how dreadful the outcome promises to be.

Now, what to say in this conversation to maximize the chance of the right outcome?

First, don’t freak out when you hear the word suicide from them. As overwhelming as it is, don’t gasp, don’t bury your head in your hands, and don’t demand imploringly, Honey, are you serious? Hell, they are. Just be ready to listen, and let them know it. By calmly expressing your willingness to be present and hold space, you quickly cut off people trying to manipulate and blackmail you through suicide talk. Then, go straight into the empathy mode. Tell them that you see it’s hard like hell for them, that you honor their right to leave, and that it’s okay if they do so. And, before they do so, you want to hear their story — because you believe their story matters. Yes, even if they jump off the bridge right after telling it, it still matters — because our stories shape the world to be the way it is, and that’s truth, not just poetic bullshit. Mean it when you say it. And then, just shut the fuck up and listen. Brave the discomfort and stay engaged with what they tell you. Cry if you feel like crying. Cuss if you feel like cussing. Recognize their emotions, connect with the same emotions inside of you, and communicate them back, as difficult as they are. But don’t judge. Don’t fix. Don’t interrupt. Just be present and listening.

It doesn’t matter if that person is your best friend or a stranger. It doesn’t matter what differences exist between you in terms of age, gender, race, class, religion, sexuality, and other parameters we’re conditioned to see as divides in our humanity. If you do your job properly, most of the time it works. By simply listening and being present, you give them back the power they’re convinced they've lost. That is the power of inextricable human connection, the one we always have but so often forget about. Sometimes, we’re allowed an opportunity to remember and celebrate it. Sometimes, that is meant to happen through talking to a suicidal person. Sometimes, we just need to be reminded that we’re all in this together, both in struggle and in healing.

And, lastly, if you, the person reading this, are the one who’s now contemplating suicide, there’s a short message from my heart to yours. I fucking get it. I’ve been you. For quite a long time. And some days, I’m still you. I appreciate that you have the right to leave. You absolutely do. You don’t deserve this much pain and never have. You deserve peace. You have the right to end it all, and I’m not going to take it away from you. But before you do, stop yourself for a moment and ask yourself three questions:

1. “Have I asked for help everywhere I could get it?”
2. “Have I told my story in every place where it could make an impact?”
3. “Have I done everything I could do to leave a mark on this world that only I can leave?”

If you’re honest with yourself and any of the answers is no, then go for the opportunities that remained. It’s never too late to put an end to your life. For today, you can put away the razor, flush down the pills, or climb back off the railings. Tomorrow you are free to get back here. But now that there is still is hope, give yourself a chance for the life that you deserve. Only you have the power to give it to yourself.