Eliyahu Gasson | editor-in-chief

On a gloomy Saturday morning on Pittsburgh’s South Shore, hundreds packed  into Highmark Stadium, home of the Riverhounds and the Riveters. There was no soccer game scheduled for the day. Instead roughly 2,000 visitors were there to show their support for a cause that affects millions of people in the United States annually.

Last weekend was host to this year’s Pittsburgh Out of the Darkness Community Walk, a fundraising event hosted by the Western Pennsylvania chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). Participants were encouraged to sign up as teams – 237 registered, according to organizers.

Among the teams was one from Duquesne — the Music Therapy Student Association led by club President Anna Hladio, a fourth-year music therapy major at Duquesne. For her, she said, suicide prevention and mental health awareness is a personal issue.

“In high school, my own mental health journey started. I spent some time in and out of psychiatric hospitals up until about a year ago,” she said.

Hladio communicated her relation to the issue through colored beads — referred to as honor beads — around her neck: Green standing for personal attempt or struggle, teal for supporting someone who struggles or made an attempt, rainbow beads to honor the LGBTQ+ community and blue to show general support for the fundraiser’s cause. All together, there were 10 colors participants could wear, including one symbolizing the loss of a sibling and the loss of a first responder or military member.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is the second leading cause of death for people ages 10-14, 15-24 and 25-35 and is the 11th leading cause of death overall in the U.S.

According to Jessie Goicoechea, the director of the Rita M. McGinley Psychology Clinic at Duquesne, events like this go a long way toward ending the stigma around suicide and the effects it can have on people close to someone who has dealt with or is dealing with suicide.

“I think it’s really helpful for everyone to feel like they can talk about whatever difficulties that they’re having and that it’s not taboo or shameful to do so,” she said. “We’ve come a long way in terms of reducing stigma with regards to mental health, but I suppose it’s still a little scary to talk with friends or family members or professionals.”

About an hour-and-a-half after the 9 a.m. event check-in, speakers began to take the stage. One of the first was Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, who asked the crowd to take a moment of silence to think about the people who have been affected by suicide and mental health struggles.

“Sometimes it’s not just the individual that’s going through the darkness,” he told the crowd. “It’s the family that stands in the middle and tries to make sense out of it.”

The rest of the event leading up to the walk itself included a poetry reading, speeches from organizers, a non-denominational prayer led by a pastor from the Unitarian Church and a ceremony in which everyone was encouraged to raise their beads when a color was called.

Doves were released from the stage under Highmark Stadium’s score board, and participants were directed to the blue inflatable gate near the eastern entrance where they would start the walk around the South Shore.

The route was around one mile long. Participants were encouraged to walk it three times — a distance equal to a 5k.

“It’s intentional,” said Doug Bishop, treasurer for the Western Pennsylvania chapter of the AFSP. “The main thing that we were trying to get through on that day is not only just fundraising, but to provide hope to all folks that have lost somebody or who are suffering themselves or have family and friends who might be suffering.”

Bishop, a certified public accountant, said he lost his son to suicide in 2014. He was aware of the walk but wasn’t sure he was ready to do it. However, he said, a close friend of his gave him a “gentle nudge to register.” He wanted to raise funds for the AFSP with a goal of reaching $2,100 to correlate with his son’s age of 21-years-old. Bishop met his goal.

“I reached out to friends and family and coworkers and clients,” he said. “And long story short, I ended up being the top fundraiser for that year’s walk. So that felt to me like some sort of calling.”

The rituals and religious elements present at the walk make for a well rounded approach to healing, Goicoechea said.

“That’s not to say that there isn’t someone for whom that very ritual is further alienating because they’re angry at God for letting this happen or something like that,” she said. “But in general, I think that those rituals speak to the event in a holistic way, rather than collapsing mental health into a medical issue.”

Goicoechea also said that walking helps to round out the holistic approach to dealing with suicide.

“Marches have a long history of being incredibly important sociopolitical,” she said. “We’re creatures that are meant to move and part of health and wellness is in mobility.

Leanna Creighton attended the walk for her sister Jamila Harris, who died of suicide in 2021. Creighton said she was accompanied by over 25 family and friends who together formed team Queen’s Light, a nod to Harris’s tendency to refer to people she met as kings and queens.

“She always saw the positive in folks even when she dealt with her struggles,” Creighton said. “She always took care of others and worried about herself less.”

Creighton said that this is an event that her family does every year to remember her sister and do their part in bringing awareness to an issue that affected them. 

“You want answers, but it’s hard to get answers because you never know what someone is going [through] and what they’re dealing with and why they’ve taken their life,” she said. “This is a healing time for us to be able to do the different activities and for us to come together as a community and keep spreading hope.”

Caroline Muthoka participated in the walk on Saturday. She was there for her brother, Matthew Motiso, who died of suicide. She said she was living in Pittsburgh when she received a call from her brother in Kenya.

“I told him, because my mother lived there, my mom is coming, so don’t go anywhere. Then he said, ‘my life is in danger,’ and he hung up,” she said. “And I feel so bad because I never even got a chance to ask him what happened? Or what’s going on? … The next thing I was told is that he was found at his house dead. That shocked me. It shocked the whole family.”

Muthoka said she remembers her brother as a kind and welcoming person. She recalled his love of cooking, and his favorite thing to make — chapati, a flat bread that she said is similar to a tortilla.

“He’s always our chef because he loves cooking,” she said. “Everybody would come to our home and eat those chapati. Even the last video I have of him is making chapati.”

Muthoka went to Kenya for Motiso’s funeral. She said she hasn’t been back since, but wants to go back to spread awareness about mental health and suicide in her home country, where she said it is talked about even less than in the U.S. 

“There’s no awareness. People just do it, and they are buried and it’s forgotten. But today, after seeing all these people that came and looking at how they are creating awareness, I feel like we should extend that to Kenya,” she said.

The Western Pennsylvania AFSP is looking to raise $350,000 by Dec. 31. At press time, they have received 2,506 donations totaling $206,985. Bishop said the money raised by the Western Pennsylvania chapter will go toward the national AFSP to design programming and fund suicide prevention research. Some of the money will stay in the Western Pennsylvania chapter to fund programs like the Pittsburgh Out of the Darkness Community Walk.

If you or someone you know is in emotional distress or suicide crisis, please call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or visit 988lifeline.org to chat with a trained crisis counselor. 

Eliyahu Gasson can be reached at gassone@duq.edu