Journey Forward With Joree Rose

With 4 family suicides, Rachel Steinman had wondered, “why would someone who was seemingly healthy die by suicide?” In an effort to understand her family - and therefore understand herself - she delved into her family history with the intention of being able to break family patterns of trauma and mental health. After writing an essay about suicide that went viral, she is continuing to uncover the story that spans 5 generations of trauma and is writing a memoir, piecing together the family secrets left behind from a manuscript of her grandfather’s. Rachel now has become a mental health advocate, speaking to teens on how to model and reframe language around mental health, to get rid of stigma and shame, and to normalize mental health struggles and help to create more open conversations. In this conversation, Rachel and I share many of our commonalities, including experiencing suicide in our families, and talk through the importance of understanding trauma and mental health, as we know it gets passed on in our D