If you need support right now: call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, 24/7, free, confidential). In Tampa Bay, dial 211 for the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay.
Not All Struggles Can Be Seen: Remembering Matthew Kraus
This September we have written about what thoughts of suicide actually are, and about why the struggle so often is not visible from the outside, even to the people standing closest. The Kraus family has lived that truth for sixteen years. This month we are sharing their son Matthew’s story with our community.
Before you read it, we want to say plainly what Matthew’s story does not mean. It does not mean that suicide arrives without signals, and it does not mean that anyone who loved Matthew failed him. Some signals are never shown, and love is not omniscience. What the story asks of us is something each of us can actually do: make it safe, in our families and friendships, to say “I am not okay.”
Not All Struggles Can Be Seen: Remembering Matthew Kraus
![[TBD: alt text for photo 1; the family confirms who is pictured before any name is used]](https://assets.cdn.filesafe.space/o6tzb21Prg8cjWoTZAxo/media/6ab2b8847f434ba2c08035bd.jpeg)
Sixteen years have passed since the Kraus family lost their beloved son and brother, Matthew, to suicide. Yet time does not erase the grief surrounding a loss to suicide, or the love for someone who meant so much to so many.
Matthew was the kind of person who could light up a room. He was handsome, he was funny, and he had the type of energy that was simply magnetic. People were drawn to him, and everyone wanted to be around him. To those who knew and loved him, there were no obvious signs of just how deeply he was struggling with his mental health. His mother, Lisa, spoke to her son every day, including the very night he took his life, and was unaware of just how much pain he was carrying.
The reality is that oftentimes the signs that someone is struggling with their mental health aren’t obvious.
![[TBD: alt text for photo 2; must not assert who the family member is unless the family confirms]](https://assets.cdn.filesafe.space/o6tzb21Prg8cjWoTZAxo/media/6ab2bd29372453112fcd6162.jpg)
Matthew is survived by his parents, David and Lisa Kraus, his brother, Brent, and countless family members and friends who still grieve his immeasurable loss. In the years since his passing, his family has worked to turn unimaginable loss into a message that may help others: Mental health struggles should never be suffered in silence, and there are resources available if you need help.
Their hope is to help break the stigma surrounding mental health and remind people that there is no shame in saying, “I am not okay.” Those words can be the beginning of a conversation, a connection, and, sometimes, the first step toward getting help.
Resources such as the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay are available for people experiencing emotional distress, suicidal thoughts, or simply a moment when life feels too overwhelming to face alone. Help exists, even when it may not feel that way.
Sixteen years later, Matthew is still deeply loved and painfully missed. The ripple effect of grief surrounding his loss will never completely disappear. But neither will the impact of his life.
By continuing to share Matthew’s story, his family hopes to bring awareness to the resources available to those who may be struggling and, perhaps most importantly, to remind others that asking for help is a sign of courage, not weakness. If telling Matthew’s story helps even one person feel less alone or find the courage to reach out, then sharing it is worth it.
In memory of Matthew Kraus, may we have the courage to say “I am not okay,” the compassion to truly listen when someone does, and the understanding that no one should ever have to carry their pain alone.
We are grateful to David, Lisa, and Brent for trusting our community with Matthew’s story.
If Matthew’s story met something in you, the first sentence can be small. “I am not okay” is enough, said to one person, or to a counselor at 988, any hour, by call or text. It is a conversation, and it counts even when things feel “not that bad.”
Why struggle so often looks like fine
You’ve read the warning-signs list. Maybe you read ours earlier this month. And somewhere in the reading, without deciding to, you ran the people you love against it. Your spouse. Your kid at college. The friend who’s been quieter lately. Your dad. Nobody matched, or nobody matched cleanly, and something in your chest loosened a little.
That relief deserves a second look. Not because the list was wrong. Because a list can only teach you what distress looks like when it decides to be visible, and it says nothing about how often it doesn’t. Most of us carry a quiet decision rule about the people we love: I’ll say something when I see something. The rest of this page is about what to do instead, because the sign you’re waiting for, aimed at you, at full volume, in a form you’d recognize, may never come.
That is not a reason for despair. It is a reason to stop waiting.
The movie version of crisis
We inherit our picture of suicidal struggle from film, from headlines, from the one story everyone in town told for years afterward. In that picture the decline is visible: a dramatic statement, an unraveling that everyone can see and everyone remembers. So that is what we watch for, usually without noticing that we’re watching for it.
Real distress is under no obligation to perform itself. It goes to work. It picks up the kids. It makes the joke at dinner, closes the deal, remembers your birthday. It answers “how are you” with “good, busy” and means at least the second half. The person most visibly falling apart is not the only person struggling, and the one nobody would ever suspect is sometimes carrying the heaviest thing in the room.
A warning-signs list tells you what distress looks like when it becomes visible. It tells you nothing about how often it stays invisible, or who gets to see it when it doesn’t.
Why the signs may never reach you
Masking is a skill, and suffering people are often expert at it.
“Smiling depression” isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a phrase people reach for because it names something clinicians see constantly: a person whose outward life is functioning, sometimes impressively, while the inner one is not. Masking is learned the way any skill is learned, through years of practice, often starting young. Competence is not evidence of wellness. Sometimes it’s the costume distress wears to work.
The strong one carries a double load.
Every family has one. The caretaker, the eldest daughter, the nurse, the pastor, the friend everyone calls at 2am. The love inside the role is real, and the role itself forbids the disclosure. If your whole identity, to everyone around you, is “the one who holds it together,” then the number of people who have ever seen you not holding it is very small. That isn’t a character flaw. It’s the design of the role, and the more a person is needed, the fewer people ever think to ask what they need.
The scripts of manhood.
Men die by suicide at several times the rate of women, and they disclose distress far less often. Many men, midlife and older men in particular, were never handed a vocabulary for being not okay, so it comes out sideways: irritability, overwork, a shorter fuse, a few more drinks than usual. It rarely looks like sadness. If you’re waiting for a man in your life to look sad, you may be waiting for a language he was never taught to speak. And if you’re that man, the sideways version counts. It’s allowed to be the thing you name first.
Distress speaks in code.
“I’m just tired.” “I’m fine, work is a lot.” The dark joke that lands a half-second heavy. “You’d all be fine without me,” delivered as banter so it can be taken back. Distress rarely says its own name. It floats something deniable, and the deniability is the point; it lets a person test the water without committing to the swim. If you’re listening only for the plain statement, the coded one goes right past you, and it was built to.
The signal goes somewhere, just not everywhere.
Sometimes the truth reaches exactly one person: a friend from years ago, a group chat, an online community of strangers, a journal, no one at all. Every other channel reads normal, because it is normal, as far as that channel can tell. The CDC’s surveillance data makes the same point at scale: roughly half of people who die by suicide had no mental health diagnosis on record. Read that precisely. It does not mean no one could have known. It means the struggle never entered the systems built to see it. The absence was in the paperwork, not the person.
Improvement can be ambiguous.
One more, said once, carefully. A sudden lift after a long low stretch is, most of the time, exactly what it looks like: improvement, and worth being glad about. Clinicians also treat it as a moment for closer attention rather than less, because change in either direction is information. If someone you love seems abruptly lighter after a hard season, that’s a good moment to ask how they actually are. It is not a reason to stop.
A note before you keep reading: if any of this is landing closer to home than you expected, 988 is there by call or text, any hour, and it counts even when things feel “not that bad.” The rest of this page will still be here.
What this does not mean
Read this section twice, because everything above it can be misheard.
It does not mean suicide is unpredictable or unpreventable. Connection protects. Asking protects. Treatment works; most people who have thoughts of suicide never act on them, and the conditions underneath those thoughts are treatable. Prevention is possible. It just can’t be a surveillance activity. It has to be a relational one.
It does not mean warning signs are useless. When they’re present, they matter enormously, and our guide to suicidal ideation walks through them plainly. This page is about the times they aren’t present for you. It is not a case against noticing.
And it does not mean that anyone who loved someone and never saw a sign failed them. Some signals are shown to no one. Some are shown in a language the people closest could not have been expected to know. Love is not omniscience, and it was never supposed to be. If you’re reading this as someone who has lost a person, please hear that paragraph as the one we most wanted to write.
Stop scanning. Start asking.
If visibility can’t be trusted, then visibility can’t be the trigger for care. That’s the whole shift, and it’s smaller than it sounds.
Ask without a reason. Clinics learned this a long time ago. If you only screen the patients who “seem depressed,” you find the ones the eye already found. Screening everyone, every visit, is how you find the rest. A family or a friend group can run the same protocol. You don’t need probable cause to ask someone how they actually are. You don’t need a sign. The asking is allowed to be routine, and routine is exactly what makes it safe to answer, because a routine question doesn’t announce that something is wrong with you.
Ask twice. The first “how are you” is a greeting, and everyone knows it. It gets the performance: “good, busy, you?” The second one, a beat later, in a slightly different voice, “no, really, how are you,” is a different question. It gets a decision. The person has to choose, in that half-second, whether to hand you the true version, and a surprising number of people, given a real opening, will. Make it a habit, not an intervention. If you ask twice every time, then the time it matters isn’t marked as strange.
Ask the direct question when anything snags. A joke that sat wrong, a “you’d all be fine without me,” a stretch of code you can’t decode: ask, in these words, “Are you thinking about suicide?” The fear is that the question plants the idea. It doesn’t. A 2014 review in Psychological Medicine looked across the published studies and found none in which asking about suicide increased suicidal thoughts; if anything, the evidence pointed toward relief. The question tells a person that the unspeakable thing is speakable with you. You are allowed to ask it when nothing visible justifies it. The cost of asking and being wrong is thirty seconds of awkward. Price that honestly against the alternative.
Be the person it’s safe to tell
Disclosure is almost never a cold open. People test. They float a small true thing, “work’s been dark lately,” a heavier-than-usual joke, a sigh with a little too much in it, and they watch what you do with it. If you panic, they retreat. If you lecture, they retreat. If you change the subject, or say “but your life is so good,” the bigger sentence never comes. It may not come to anyone.
Receive it steadily. “That sounds heavy. Tell me more.” Then be quiet and let them. Don’t rush to fix; the fixing can wait, and rushing to it tells them you needed the problem to be smaller than it is. Don’t audit their reasons. Don’t promise secrecy, because you may need to bring in help and you don’t want to have lied; promise to stay instead. If it goes deeper, offer to sit with them while they call or text 988. And follow up a few days later, unprompted, with no agenda beyond “still thinking about you.” The follow-up is the part almost everyone skips, and it’s the part that turns a conversation into a lifeline.
If you’re the one nobody would suspect
Maybe you started reading this for someone else. That’s often how the strong one reads a page like this one.
So, plainly: if you are the capable one, the funny one, the one with the good job and the full calendar and the friends who lean on you, no one is going to guess. That is not their failure. It is also not proof that you’re fine. It means the telling has to start with you, and telling isn’t weakness. It is the single most skilled thing a person in your position can do, because it’s the one thing nobody else can do for you.
The first sentence can be small. “I’ve been in a darker place than I’ve let on.” “I’m not okay, and I don’t know how to say it.” “Can I tell you something and you just listen?” Say it to one person, the true version rather than the polite one. Or say it to a counselor at 988, by call or text, any hour. What happens next is a conversation: someone trained picks up, gives their name, asks whether you’re safe right now, and listens. Free, confidential, and it counts for “not that bad” too. You do not have to earn help with visible wreckage. You’ve spent years being the reason other people are okay. You’re allowed to hand someone a turn.
If your thoughts have moved toward a plan, please treat that as the emergency it is and reach 988 now.
A culture that doesn’t wait
September ends. The practice shouldn’t.
The theme of this year’s World Suicide Prevention Day, for the third and final year, is “Changing the Narrative on Suicide,” and its call to action is three words: start the conversation. It’s tempting to hear that as “talk about suicide more openly,” and it is that. But the narrative that most needs changing is quieter. It’s the one that says we get personal only after we’ve seen enough evidence.
Families, friend groups, and workplaces can make the real check-in ambient rather than triggered. The second question at every dinner. The unprompted text. The coworker who asks the strong one how she’s holding up, not just what she’s holding. None of it requires a crisis to justify it, and that’s the point. If care is only ever triggered by proof, then the people best at hiding will always be the last to receive it.
If you’ve been waiting for a sign, consider this it.
Resources
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline
call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. 24/7, free, confidential. Spanish: press 2 or text AYUDA. Veterans: press 1.
Crisis Text Line
text HOME to 741741 (Spanish: HOLA). 24/7.
Crisis Center of Tampa Bay
dial 211, 24/7. Direct: (813) 964-1964.
For those grieving a loss to suicide
AFSP’s loss survivor resources, afsp.org/ive-lost-someone.
AFSP, “Have a Real Convo”
plain-language guidance for talking with someone you’re worried about. afsp.org/realconvo
NAMI HelpLine
1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or text “HelpLine” to 62640, Monday through Friday, 10am to 10pm ET.
Our guide
Suicidal Ideation, Explained, a plain-language guide to what these thoughts are, written to be read, saved, and forwarded.
This page is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for individualized medical advice or emergency care. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.
