Back from the Brink of Suicide

Kristen says that while she was growing up, she had a great family, wasn't plagued with tragedy and wasn't abused as a child. She was smart, athletic and even dated the prom king.

Then at 15, four of her friends and her grandmother died within a year. As she struggled to deal with these deaths, she began drinking, smoking and skipping school. Then, she says, a trusted friend raped her. "I really started to hate myself; I really started to blame myself," Kristen says. "I kind of went numb inside. I felt like I was a walking dead person for six months. I felt like, 'I don't want to live my life. What's the point anymore?'"

Because one of her friends had committed suicide, Kristen says she had entertained thoughts about how she would kill herself. "I really was thinking hypothetically, so I went through a lot of different [methods] in my head and none of them seemed good enough right at that moment," she says. "I live right by the train tracks and a train went by and it just snapped in my mind—'That's one way I would never live through it.'"

Though she was depressed for a year and a half, Kristen says she didn't seriously consider killing herself. Then in a moment of total hopelessness one night, Kristen slipped out of her house to a nearby park. When she heard the sound of an approaching train, she made a decision to end her life. "I was like, 'I'm going to do it because if I don't do it now, I never will,'" she says. "That's when I laid on the tracks."