Episode 94: Vanita Halliburton on suicide prevention

This is a story everyone needs to know. Vanita Halliburton shares about the loss of her son's life and the work of the Grant Halliburton Foundation to prevent suicide. Vanita and George explore the theological depths of grief and how our faith can be shattered and restored.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason: Why does mental illness have such a stigma in our society? It may be that you know someone who is struggling with mental illness, maybe even a young person. The statistics are staggering of how often that leads to them taking their own life.

George Mason: Vanita Halliburton will be with us from the Grant Halliburton Foundation and she'll be talking about her own story with her son, Grant, and how you can get help through the Halliburton Foundation. Stay tuned.

George Mason: Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason, and it's an honor to welcome to the program today Vanita Halliburton. Vanita, we're glad to have you with us.

Vanita Hallibur...: George, I'm just so delighted to be here. Thank you.

George Mason: Vanita is the co-founder of the Grant Halliburton Foundation, which works especially in the area of mental health and particularly with youth as well and with families. I think this is one of those subjects that has gotten far less attention in our society, especially in the healthcare realm than it deserves because of the amount of struggle that people have in their personal lives, in their families, about this. You came to this work through a very personal experience and painful as well. Tell us about your son Grant, for whom the Foundation is named?

Vanita Hallibur...: Certainly. Well, I was blessed with two children; a daughter named Amy and three years younger, a boy named Grant. They were both just highly creative, full of life, spark plug kinds of kids. Grant was an absolute bolt of energy. He was very outgoing. He had tons of friends. He'd befriended everyone, especially the friendless. He was just that kid. And from the outside, his life looked golden, truly it did.

Vanita Hallibur...: But one day when he was in eighth grade, I got a call from the middle school counselor and she said, "Ms. Halliburton, I'm calling to tell you that your son has been self-harming. He's been cutting." I was flabbergasted. Yes, I had no idea what cutting was. I didn't know that it was kind of self-injury linked to emotional pain. To look at that child, you would not have thought he had a care in the world.

Vanita Hallibur...: We got him the help that he needed and for the next five years our family did everything we knew to do to help him manage or deal with his depression.

Vanita Hallibur...: Grant turned down scholarships to the top art schools in the country when he graduated from high school. He had in his senior year began to lose interest in a lot of things. There were a lot of behaviors I did not understand. Drugs and alcohol came on the scene, where they'd previously not been a part of his life. He agreed to go to UT Austin for a very short time. And one day he came home from college and he said, "Mom, I'm not going to be able to live a normal life if I don't get some serious help." So we checked him immediately into a psychiatric hospital here in Dallas where he stayed for 30 days. That's a long hospital stay for Dallas healthcare.

Vanita Hallibur...: He was immediately diagnosed with bipolar disorder. One was psychosis, which is a very serious form of that illness and which explained a lot of the behaviors I'd been seeing in the year leading up to that. At the end of 30 days, he was discharged and over the next two weeks I just continued to see behaviors that seemed so strange, but I did not know what I was looking at. Two weeks out of the hospital Grant jumped to his death from a 10 story building a block from home.

Vanita Hallibur...: I was left reeling with questions, but the main question was what happened here? We did everything we knew to do to help him to be whole and well and he wanted to be whole and well, so what happened here? And I found my answer in the question, it was everything we knew to do. Like many families and many people today, we did not know everything we needed to know about mental illness, about finding help, about the warning signs of suicide, we didn't know all those things at the time we needed to know it.

George Mason: Now before we get into all the things you have learned since then and the things you want to share with people about things they don't know yet that could help, let's talk about the ... Our program is called Good God and it intersects faith and our public life. In this case, this was a private life sort of experience, but there are people probably who would say under the circumstances that you were dealing with Grant, if only you prayed more, if only you had more faith and maybe you had enlisted people to pray and it didn't work in the sense of getting him whole and healthy and making that happen. Tell us about the way you think through the role of faith in how it worked or didn't work in your own life and what you would say to people about that as a result.

Vanita Hallibur...: Yes. Well, for as far back as I can remember, I've been a person of strong faith. I prayed so hard in those five years that Grant was dealing with his mental illnesses and I was camping constantly on the grounds of ask and you shall receive. And as Grant's condition worsened and became more confusing and more complex, I just remember every day my first waking thought was, "God, keep Grant in your grip today." That's all I can pray. "You've got this. You've got my children. Take care of Grant today." And so when tragically and suddenly and unexpectedly we lost Grant, I just, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that my faith hadn't somehow been the magic charm that kept him here and I was devastated.

Vanita Hallibur...: I read in a journal that I kept for about five years after Grant died, I read something yesterday in that journal that said, "Your faith can be strong. Your faith can be shattered." And my faith was shattered. I felt like it was in shards around me and I didn't know how to pick up the pieces. I didn't know what to do with my whole belief system shaken that way and shattered. Even with a deep faith, it took a long time for me to put those pieces back together and to find my peace with it. For a time I felt like I had not only lost my son, but my Father, my Heavenly Father, and I felt orphaned by these bookends in my life and it just left me-

George Mason: So I'm curious Vanita, now looking back on it all, would you say if you were counseling people about how to exercise their faith during a time of dealing with a child's mental illness, would you say go ahead and pray the way you did and learn to accept that the outcome is out of your control, or would you counsel to pray differently in some way? Do you have a sense about that? How would you tell people?

Vanita Hallibur...: I don't have a sense about that, so I want to ask you that. But I would say, I don't think it was anything about the way I prayed. I didn't do any bargaining with God. I didn't say if you'll only do this, if you'll only save my son. But remember I had no idea that his ultimate demise, that his death was part of the picture. I was just praying for God to keep him safe and to get him through this period of his life so that he'd come out on the other end well. So I was completely blindsided by the fact that I was going to lose my son. So I was praying for healing. I was praying for wholeness.

George Mason: I think that's a beautiful thing to do. I think it's a legitimate prayer. And I would, yes, why would we pray for anything other than the complete healing of our child under those circumstances. If we believe that in the end, in whatever way is in God's future for us, that healing is the goal, that God's promise, what's a heaven for if not a place of healing. But we certainly would pray before we get to heaven, that we have an experience of heaven and healing now, a taste of that, and that God can bring about wellness and wholeness and all of that on this side of the grave. So I still think it's the right kind of prayer.

George Mason: I do think sometimes our theology however tends to over promise and we have to really think through that, that if our faith is strong enough, if our prayers are clear enough, if we name the problem and claim the answer and those sorts of things, then God is somehow obligated to then answer our prayers the way we have asked them.

George Mason: I also think sometimes that we wrongly think that God is actually orchestrating specifically everything that takes place. And so sometimes we also have this feeling that well, God took his life and we just simply have to find a higher purpose. I think that's also overstepping in our theology.

George Mason: William Sloane Coffin was the famous pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City, and he lost his son. His son was driving on a wet highway and went off the road and over a ravine and cliff and into the water and he was lost that night. And Coffin said, "Many people have come to me with all sorts of platitudes saying we don't understand the will of God and why he did such a thing." He called them well-meaning quiche-bearing Christians. But he said, "My understanding of God is not that God did that, but that, first of all, my son was drinking that night, you know, and he shouldn't have had that much to drink." "And secondly," he said, "There was no guardrail on that road and there should have been." He said, "When we get through with all the human agency, still when the waters came over the car that night," he said, "I believe God's was the first heart to break." Now that's a theology I can believe in.

Vanita Hallibur...: Yeah, that's beautiful. That's beautiful.

Vanita Hallibur...: The minute the pastor at Grant's funeral said, "When Grant fell from that building," and I have the same things; why was the door of this 10 story business building, why was the door of the roof unlocked. It was supposed to be locked all the time. How did he have access that day? It's like the guardrail wasn't there, kind of the same thing going on. But when Grant fell, God caught him.

George Mason: There you are.

Vanita Hallibur...: And I know where Grant is. My greatest peace is, and I never doubted this for one second, Grant is in heaven and I will see him again one day.

George Mason: And this is very important for people who are grieving a suicide because the history of the church is not always kind to families in an effort to prevent people from taking their own lives, and in an effort to be pro-life, you might say, the church has sometimes gone farther than it should in threatening an eternal damnation to suicides. And that's not, I think a biblical reading that is wise, nor is it a spiritually healthy reading. It presumes again, to know the outcome when the Bible itself says that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. So even suicide, that's true.

George Mason: And so it occurs to me that the story of Grant's life is not over, and even though he is in the arms of God today, the script didn't come to an end the moment he jumped off that building. It has continued and it's still his story, isn't it? It's not even your story alone, although you are part of it, but it's still Grant's story that is playing out now and it is helping so many people.

Vanita Hallibur...: That's true. And I want to say one more thing about the faith thing. I wrote in that journal, "Faith is strong. Faith can be shaken. Faith can be shattered. Faith can be restored."

George Mason: Beautiful.

Vanita Hallibur...: And so God has restored my faith.

George Mason: Lovely.

Vanita Hallibur...: We had a fight there for a while, but it's okay to be mad at God. I found that out.

George Mason: This is so important too. It really is.

Vanita Hallibur...: It's okay to be mad at God.

George Mason: If anyone has ever read the book of Psalms, you could see that it's not all hallelujahs. It's not all about praise and worship. This is the prayer book of the Hebrew Bible and for Christians as well, and often the anguish of the Psalmist, the sadness, the anger, it just jumps off the page, doesn't it?

Vanita Hallibur...: Yes.

George Mason: It is so honest. And one of the things that I think we learn in the spiritual life is that to fear God is to trust God so much that we can be completely honest with God, that we don't have to protect ourselves by speaking to God in a way that we think somehow will make God friendlier toward us. It's already that way and it can't be otherwise.

George Mason: When we come back from the break Vanita, I'd like to talk about how Grant's story continues through the Foundation.

Vanita Hallibur...: Sure. Thank you.

George Mason: The Good God program is a project of Faith Commons, a nonprofit organization that I founded in 2018 to promote the common good. Think of a commons on a campus and how you can bring all your faith and people from all corners of the campus together. Think of the city that way. Think of the country that way. Faith Commons aims to bring people together to promote greater understanding and peace throughout our communities. You can find more information about it at faithcommons.org.

George Mason: We're back with Vanita Halliburton of the Grant Halliburton Foundation. We had this wonderful conversation going about your faith being restored in the wake of Grant's, your son's, suicide that culminated five years of his dealing with mental illness. You were saying that you did everything you knew to do, but what you've come to realize is there were a lot of things you didn't know and that really helped you come to the place of creating this Foundation and the work it does.

George Mason: The Foundation is in Grant's name to honor his story, but I think we should clarify also that although it's a foundation, it's not the place where you go to make grant requests to the Grant Halliburton Foundation, right?

Vanita Hallibur...: Right.

George Mason: It is a working foundation that is a service organization in a sense providing services to people. So tell us more about what now you know that you didn't know and how the Foundation helps.

Vanita Hallibur...: Well, I always tell the story of Grant whenever I speak. I do a lot of public speaking. And I always tell that story not because it's unique, but because it's all too common. After Grant died and I was left with that question and it was pretty clear what I didn't know, all the things I needed to know. It's been a long time since we ... You started by saying we don't talk about mental health very much. Well, the only other medical condition that ever in recent history has had that distinction was cancer. 40 years ago it had a stigma and people didn't talk about it. And when there's stigma, people don't understand the disease, they don't understand the symptoms and they don't understand what to do because you don't talk about it.

Vanita Hallibur...: So the first thing I felt like was that I felt like I was a little matchbox car and God just picked me up for my career and said, "You're going to go this way now." And so I said, "If our family couldn't figure this out, there must be other people who also don't know everything they need to know."

Vanita Hallibur...: So we started the Grant Halliburton Foundation with a mission to help promote better mental health primarily among young people to prevent suicide and to strengthen the network of mental health resources that are available for people. We do that three ways. Number one has got to be education. Stigma is born, a lot of times out of ignorance. What people don't understand, they fear and they put shame around. So education is huge with us. We're in the schools and the community all year round teaching students and all the adults in their lives about the symptoms of depression, how to deal with stress, the warning signs of suicide, how to talk to a person that you think is struggling and how to connect them with help. Even children can learn this, how to be alert to the warning signs in another person.

George Mason: Wonderful.

Vanita Hallibur...: This year alone, we have trained over 47,000 students, parents, teachers-

George Mason: This is such an important part of your work isn't it.

Vanita Hallibur...: It's critical.

George Mason: I think people probably think that this is just about meeting with people who are going through this in a private setting, but this is a broad educational outreach that you do.

Vanita Hallibur...: Right. Right. It's really spreading. I mean, we work with the Girl Scouts, we work with YMCAs. I go to Girl Scout camps and train the leaders, the staff and leaders before camp starts in the summer. So many people ... there's no one that does not need this information.

George Mason: Including by the way, church staff, congregations of all religions as well, where they are dealing with young people and they can pick up on the signs if they know what to look for.

Vanita Hallibur...: I think a valid question is, is suicide really that prevalent or is it just an occasional terrible tragedy, horrible when it happens? But should we be that concerned about it? Does it need to be brought out of the shadows and into the light? Maybe it's fine that we don't talk about it, but the statistics tell us otherwise. According to the Centers for Disease Control among all ages in the US suicide is the 10th leading cause of death. But if you look at a 10 year old to 34 year olds, it's the second leading cause of death in that whole bracket. 10 year olds, shocking, to 34 year olds.

George Mason: Let me just stop and say I think there's a kind of correlation here. One of the things that we talk about in ministry at times with people who are going through divorce and people who are watching people go through a divorce is that they sometimes think divorce is somehow the thing to focus on when in effect it's not really the death of the marriage, it's the death certificate. What we should be looking at is not that moment in time as with suicide for instance, but rather all the things that led up to that, right?

Vanita Hallibur...: Right.

George Mason: And so if we zero in on just that point in time, the end result of all of this and don't take a look at everything behind it, we really will have missed it and the stigma can't be overcome if we don't go back a bit.

Vanita Hallibur...: That's right. Another analogy that we use a lot is it's great to learn CPR so that if you encounter someone who is having a heart attack, you might be able to save them until they can get better help, but it doesn't do anything to prevent heart attacks if we don't back up and talk about diet and exercise and heart health. Suicide is the same way. That's the outcome, most people don't understand, that's why it's important to pay attention.

Vanita Hallibur...: In the last decade, the suicide rate among 10 to 14 year olds has tripled. So it is trending younger. It's getting to be more. We're losing a young person to suicide at the rate of one a day in Texas. I often like to say, "Let's pretend like we're not talking about suicide. Let's say we're talking about a mosquito borne virus, and it's taken the lives of one of our young people a day in Texas." What would happen? It would be on the news every night, every day. We'd all know what that virus looks like, how important it is to get to the hospital, how to prevent all of that. And we would hear it every day on the news until the statistic began to change. But it's suicide and we're just not talking about it enough.

George Mason: Among the reasons we don't talk about it enough, certainly I think the stigma aspect is one of those things, the feeling of shame, the sense that we don't actually know how to talk about it yet. And so this is part of the challenge of the Foundation of course.

George Mason: I also think that some of the way the healthcare system is developed, the insurance industry and the like, also contributes to that because it seems to me that in our enlightenment legacy, we kind of chop the head of the body and anything that we think has to do with the brain or the emotions, that sort of thing must be of one category over here, and we'll call it mental health, but it's really not health, it's sort of another thing. Instead of seeing the body as whole, and that there is brain chemistry involved in all of this, that sometimes drug therapy is important because we get chemically imbalanced and need the benefit of that. But when we go to an internist, my internist talks to me also. It's not just about, well, let's see what your lipids are today. It's also, let's talk about your stress. Let's talk about what's going on in your life. That's what caring mental health professionals do.

George Mason: Why do you think we separate these things in that way?

Vanita Hallibur...: Well, because mental health still has that stigma. It's mysterious. We don't understand it. What we tell kids, students who we've talked to, "We want you to be the first generation that grows up treating illnesses above the neck the same way you treat diseases below the neck, because the brain is an organ of the body."

George Mason: Of the whole body.

Vanita Hallibur...: You have a heart, you have lungs, you have a stomach, you have a brain. And you know what? It's the only one that God saw fit to encase in a bony structure to protect it. It's arguably the most critical organ of the body because it controls everything, and yet we just don't want to talk about that.

George Mason: In the few minutes we have remaining, I really want people to know how the Foundation can be a place where they can find help. And I know that if we go to your website, which is granthalliburton.org, they can actually remarkably find access to resources because of the wizardry of your network and the technology involved. Say a little more about that.

Vanita Hallibur...: Of course. Well, the day I got that phone call from the school counselor and Grant was in eighth grade, which began our mental health journey, I was a thousand miles away from home at a business meeting, and I saw that it was from the school and I walked out. And when I hung up from listening to her tell me I needed to get help for my son, I sat down on a curb on the street and cried. Not only because my son was struggling and I didn't know it, but also because I had no idea where to find help. And so we wanted to do something about that as a Foundation.

Vanita Hallibur...: So five years ago we started another website besides our Foundation website. We started a website called herefortexas.com, herefortexas.com. It is a searchable database of over 800 North Texas mental health providers. You can search by all these filters; your zip code, how close you need to be, what language a therapist might speak, do you need a therapist, a psychiatrist, do you need someone who takes insurance. You put all those in and out of that 800 plus providers, it pulls up the list that meets your criteria. And then you can click on any one of those names and it pulls up a long page of details that the provider has generated himself about the practice or about the hospital or the group so that people can make informed decisions.

George Mason: That's beautiful. And then if someone is a principal of a school say, or a pastor of a church or the human resources leader of a corporation, what would you say to them is available to them?

Vanita Hallibur...: I would say that that website is not just for individuals or families who are looking for help for themselves, but it's certainly for school teachers, for clergy, for counselors, therapists, psychiatrists, mental health professionals themselves who are looking to refer to some of a different kind, law enforcement, juvenile justice, hospitals, discharging parents. It's for anyone who's looking to connect with those resources.

George Mason: So specifically in those resources, would put people in touch so that they could deal with a particular situation, say for their child or a sibling or some such thing-

Vanita Hallibur...: A person of any age. It's not just about youth.

George Mason: All right. If they want training for people in their corporation, in their church, in their congregation, how do they contact you about it?

Vanita Hallibur...: They can just contact the Foundation. We have four educators on our staff. I do a lot of the adult trainings. I speak to church groups, PTAs, parents at conferences.

George Mason: It's very expensive isn't it?

Vanita Hallibur...: It's absolutely free.

George Mason: Right. That was a softball.

Vanita Hallibur...: Yeah. Yeah. We have another resource too. Just this year we launched a mental health navigation line because sometimes you just need to talk to somebody. Another free resource. We have trained navigators who take these calls, they listen with empathy, give encouragement, give information, but they get the information we need to internally case manage every call. We have three mental health professionals on staff and we tailor the information for each caller to their needs, insurance, all those filters again, and we get back to them with resources and providers that we think might help their situation. That's a free number as well.

George Mason: So you're doing all of these things to address brokenness in the system and to be an agent of healing. Is there a big dream about this? Of the things that are broken, the things that you're addressing, if you could state, here's my big dream, what would it be?

Vanita Hallibur...: My big dream would be that someday we're standing where we are now talking about cancer; how ridiculous it was that we would whisper the word cancer. There was so much stigma around it. Stigma keeps people from getting help, seeking help, finding help. Well that's where we are with mental health. And my dream is that one day we go, "Remember when we used to treat mental illness as something different from other illnesses?" And just to say, "That's ridiculous." And the generation that we're telling it to is going, ""I can't even imagine. That makes no sense." It's certainly does make no sense.

George Mason: Yeah. If someone is listening or watching this program and they suspect that they have a child who is dealing with this or a sibling or someone in their school or some such thing, would you look into that camera and speak to them, what would you say?

Vanita Hallibur...: Oh, I surely would. I would say it's a lonely place to be where you are right now. It's so lonely. You feel like sometimes you cannot talk to anyone about it. You can't ask a neighbor, the PTA president or even family sometimes to help you support you through this.

Vanita Hallibur...: Now that we're here, we can help you. The phone number for the navigation line is (972) 525-8181. Call us anytime. You'll find a listening ear there. The other thing I would say to you is we have support groups for parents who may want to talk to other parents going through the same thing and that is very helpful. Lots of encouragement, lots of information shared there. So feel free to get information about that on our website.

Vanita Hallibur...: And if I may, I would just like to say, if you've lost a child to any reason, I know how dark and how isolating that feeling is and I would just say to you, keep walking toward the light. In the darkest of days just keep walking toward the light you'll get there.

George Mason: Wonderful. Thank you so much Vanita.

Vanita Hallibur...: Thank you.

George Mason: We're so grateful for your work, for your life and for Grant's story, his life continuing among us in this way.

Vanita Hallibur...: Thank you.

George Mason: God bless you.

Vanita Hallibur...: Thanks.

Jim White: Good God is created by Dr. George Mason, produced and directed by Jim White, social media coordination by Cameron Vickery. Good God, conversations with George Mason is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God and faith and the common good. All material copyright 2020 by Faith Commons.