Like Tommy Raskin, I concealed my pain. Suicide prevention requires professional help.

On the last day of December, 25-year-old Harvard law student Thomas Raskin died by suicide. He left a short note for his family, which read: "Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy."

His broken-hearted parents, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Sarah Bloom Raskin, memorialized Tommy in a lengthy post on Medium, introducing many of us to their brilliant and much-loved son. Tommy “had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind,” they wrote. He also had a secret, which ultimately took his life.

At the end of the statement, the Raskins named the disease that killed their son. His depression was "a kind of relentless torture in the brain for him, and despite very fine doctors and a loving family … the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last.”

Misunderstanding depression

A friend sent me the Raskins’ message because she knows I’ve been an advocate for openness about not only mental illness — especially depression, which I also suffer from — but also the plague of suicides in this country, which took nearly 50,000 Americans in 2018. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the annual suicide rate increased 35% from 1999 through 2018, with the suicide rate among men nearly four times higher than women.

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Because of the stigma surrounding suicide, many researchers say these numbers are underreported.

It took courage for the Raskins to come forward. The family continued to show courage when, the day after Raskin buried his son, the grieving father found himself caught in the Trump-fueled insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, where the congressman was present because he believed it was his duty to count the electoral votes and confirm Joe Biden’s presidential victory.

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As much as I was pained by Tommy’s death, I also found myself vexed as I read comments on his public Facebook page, because some posts highlighted wrong notions about depression and suicide. As one blogger wrote a few years ago for a mental health campaign, “People suffering from mental health problems (pull) a shroud of secrecy over their lives in the hope that people don’t find out how they’re really feeling.”

Indeed, depression turns us into secretive people who conceal their pain — and their risk.

One posted that she wished she could have been there for him, as if she had a superpower that might have saved him. It’s not that Tommy was alone — he had an army of family and friends who loved him dearly. The Raskins said their son had been “enveloped in the love not only of his bedazzled and starstruck parents but of his remarkable and adoring sisters.”

Alas, not even that was enough to prevent his death.

'Being there' isn't enough

I, once, had to learn the limits of “being there” in the hardest way imaginable many years ago when I lost a friend to suicide. We had met at the University of California, Berkeley, when I was in the throes of depression and she had suffered what she understood to be a concussion. Her condition turned out to be much more serious than that; still it was the openness about our mutual maladies that brought us together.

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Five years later, my friend was suffering from hallucinations and most likely bipolar disorder. She spent her last year in and out of the psychiatric ward at a major medical center, where she had the best of care. For what turned out to be her final months, I spoke with her every day, thinking that my attentions would help safeguard her. I even sent her an airplane ticket, to be used any time, to visit me.

Only later did I understand this folly. Someone consumed by a severe mental health illness is not able to make a reservation, pack a suitcase, go to the airport and get on a plane.

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One night, she swallowed her stockpile of meds and died a few hours later. I had failed. We all had.

After her death, her parents allowed me to read her journal, which highlighted the terrifying hallucinations that plagued her, devouring her at night when everyone else was safely in bed. I better understood why my calls — even that plane ticket — could not have prevented this disease from taking its course. I even thought to myself, “Under those circumstances, with such excellent care, I might have made the same decision.”

Illness forces your hand

Another troubling discussion started on Tommy’s Facebook page underneath a post he had made 10 days before he died, encouraging Georgia voters to turn out in the Senate runoffs on Jan. 5. Someone couldn’t understand how he could die from suicide while looking to the future. A different friend replied that it made perfect sense to those with depression, that it could take over suddenly.

I understand what that second friend posted all too well. Three years ago, I wrote a column for The Washington Post with the headline, “I wasn’t suicidal, until suddenly, terrifyingly I was.” Trying to taper off my medication, with the supervision of a doctor, something went wrong and I went into a free fall. As I wrote: “I could not find my emotional — or physical — balance. ... For about a month, I found myself treading water in a vast sea of hopelessness.” I was lucky not to be near a cliff or to have access to a gun.

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On my worst day, I showed up as planned at a local bookstore reading to a group of queer kids. I see a photo of that event every August when it pops up in my Facebook memories. I am smiling, in a polo shirt and shorts, but appearances can be deceiving. I really wanted to throw my arms around any one of the other participants, whom I didn’t know well, and ask for help. But I couldn’t — too embarrassing.

So I understand how Tommy could be urging Georgians to vote as he engaged in a life-and-death struggle with his illness. No one would ever have been the wiser — until the illness forced his hand.

If you suffer from depression, I can tell you not to be ashamed of your illness and to reach out when you need help. I can advise friends and family members to know the warning signs of suicide. But here’s what I learned: That moment when I wanted to take my own life was short-lived, and had the scales tipped ever so slightly there would have been no one able to stop me.

It took a psychiatrist to help me gain mastery of my illness, and to convince me that I would not always be on that precipice.

I wish someone could have convinced Tommy Raskin of that, too. His parents called him “a radiant light in this broken world,” and it’s a tragedy that such a light went out. But depression operates in the dark, and its wiles create secrets that sometimes cannot be uncovered until it’s too late.

Steven Petrow, a writer on civility and manners and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is the author of five etiquette books. His new book, "Stupid Things I Won't Do When I Get Old," will be published in June. Follow him on Twitter: @stevenpetrow

If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Tommy Raskin's suicide shows still how little we understand depression