On a fall day in my freshman year of high school, my English teacher decide to go on an anti-suicide rant.

It was in the aftermath of a student’s attempt and near success at slitting her wrists. Most of the school had heard of the intervention and there were whispers of the lesser known successful attempts.

She described those who commit the act as purely selfish. Suicidal people had an obligation to stay alive and face their problems instead of “running away” and “taking the easy way out.” They were cowards. They were weak. They had created whatever haunted them.

I still replay this scene because of the ignorance and cruelty. Gossip and bullies and mob mentality swirled in the halls outside. Yet here she preached the same — in the room where we read Romeo and Juliet, where we were expected to see and respect their suicidal tragedy as art in literature.

How could she see or help anyone suffering from the spectre of depression among us? Where was the compassion?

With clenched fists I sat through the diatribe. She spat in the face of the uncle I never knew, of my family, of friends who came close or lost family to “cowardness.” I remembered my mother collapsed in an inconsolable sadness. I held her and told her not to cry. I was 5 or 6 years old. She had read one of her brother’s last letters before he jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Sitting in this English class at 14, I could not accept her false psychology. I knew there was nothing cowardly about overcoming the core survival instinct to survive, to do everything possible to not die. There were forces and emotions greater than the fake stoicism and smirk my teacher wore with a sick pride. She simplified and diminished the pain we all can feel — beyond age, poverty, and our capacity to live.