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Dennis Gillan never wanted to talk about suicide. For years, when someone told him a friend was struggling and he ought to say something, he found a way out of the conversation.
“I never wanted to talk about this,” Gillan told the crowd Saturday night at the Vada Sheid Community Development Center. “I would try to get out of the conversation.”
He joked that if he had announced on career day in third grade that he wanted to do suicide prevention work, he would have been sent to the office. Now he does it for a living.
Gillan, executive director of the Half a Sorrow Foundation, spoke for about an hour at the free talk hosted by Baxter Health, the same day the Run for Tomorrow 5K ran across the Arkansas State University-Mountain Home campus. He said he spent the afternoon at Bull Shoals Dam.
The talk, “It’s a Tough Subject,” was built around the two brothers he lost. He opened by thanking the audience for walking through the door, which he said takes more nerve than most people admit.
Then he caught himself stalling. He told the crowd his therapist had once pointed out that every time she answered a question, he asked her another one.
“You know what I’m doing right now?” he said. “I’m deflecting.”
Gillan grew up in New York, one of five children: Sheila, Mark, Dennis, Janice and Matthew. The first call came while he was a student at West Virginia University, in the middle of a week packed with exams. His sister Janice was on the line, telling him he needed to come home.
He was eight hours away. His family told him his brother Mark had died in a car accident, because that was easier to say over the phone. Later that day, he learned Mark, who had dealt with depression for years, had died by suicide.
Gillan buried his brother that weekend and was back in class on Tuesday. He told the audience there were counselors, prayer groups and support groups waiting for him on campus, and he used none of them. He drank instead.
“I wake up hungover, and guess what? I still don’t have Mark,” he said. He called those years a blur.
Eleven years later, he had a good job in pharmaceutical sales and was living in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He thought he had climbed out of the hole. Then Janice called again.
Matthew, the youngest, was gone. Matt had been the best man at Gillan’s wedding. To this day, he said, a call from Janice makes his heart skip a beat.
Gillan said the United States records roughly 48,000 suicides a year, and he has no interest in arguing over the count.
“Two’s awful. One is too many,” he said. “The number should be zero.”
What stays with him is what he and Matt did not do. Alcohol is a depressant, he said, and in the years between the two deaths the brothers drank together and never once brought up Mark.
“We never talked about Mark,” he said. “People get drunk together.”
He drove the four hours home from Pennsylvania after Matt’s funeral asking himself what he was going to do with his life. The answer started with a timeout from drinking.
Gillan told the crowd he does not count days, but he knows the exact date and the internet does the math for him: 32 years, one month and 23 days, or 11,742 days. He crossed a billion seconds sober this year.
The only thing that bothers him about the number, he said, is that it is not higher. He was still drinking when Matt died.
He is quick to say he is not against having fun. He drinks non-alcoholic beer now, and he told the audience that if anyone ever sees him with something in a glass, they should call him out. He keeps the receipts.
He also went to counseling, and admitted he looked over his shoulder on the way in to make sure nobody saw him. The counselor’s office was in the back of a doctor’s building. Half his tennis team was in the medical field and knew exactly why he was there.
He thinks younger people are further along than his generation on that front. His father’s generation, he said, never talked about it at all.
“There’s no stigma in asking for help,” he said.
He put a picture on the screen of a man at a ballgame with his hat on backwards and sunglasses on the back of his head, squinting into the sun. Turn the hat around and put the glasses on, and you can enjoy the game.
“Use the resources you got,” he said. The game, he said, is your life.
Gillan worked the suicide prevention lifeline in Chicago, taking the Thursday night shift from 8 to midnight even though he cannot stay up past 10. He called it some of the most rewarding work he has done.
That is where he learned the first rule of talking to someone in crisis: do not offer solutions. Callers need a sounding board. He admitted the rule is hard for him, because his solutions are always excellent.
Much of the second half of the talk was practical. Gillan walked through warning signs in three buckets: talk, behavior and mood.
On talk, he addressed people who joke about suicide. Since losing two brothers, he said, he does not get in anyone’s face about it in public. He waits for a private moment before he leaves the party and asks whether everything is OK.
Usually they say they were kidding. Sometimes, he said, you can feel the temperature of the conversation drop.
On behavior, he pointed to sleep, substance use and isolation. For him, lying awake at 3:30 a.m. is the first sign something is wrong. He passed along three sleep tips he got from a friend: keep the room dark, keep it cold, and run some kind of white noise.
He wears a sleep mask in hotels. He keeps the bedroom between 64 and 68 degrees. He said he falls asleep on airplanes before takeoff because the engines sound like his white noise machine.
Then he turned to being alone. Both of his brothers were alone when they died.
“A stick alone can be broken by a child,” he said. A bundle of sticks cannot. His bundle is a tennis doubles group; if he does not show up, somebody calls the house.
He told the crowd that if a friend said they were coming Saturday night and did not show, it would be worth a phone call. He also described a monthly men’s breakfast group with a running text chain, an idea he said he stole from the women.
On mood, he said to watch for sudden changes and to trust your gut. He goes to survivor of suicide loss meetings, and he told of a man there whose brother had seemed happier than ever in the weeks before he died.
“I’d rather you say something super embarrassing than lose someone to suicide,” he said. “Step in before they step out.”
He put up a slide of risk factors and said he checks a lot of the boxes: family history, loss of a sibling, a history of drinking. That does not mean he will die by suicide, he said. It means he has to take better care of himself.
The same slide covered the pandemic. Gillan said suicides in the United States dropped in 2020 while people sheltered in place, then returned to pre-COVID levels. Last year brought a small decline of about 2%.
“Little victories,” he said.
He told the crowd he is really only talking to two people in any audience. One will be near someone in crisis and needs to be ready. The other is the person in crisis, and Gillan said he has been in both spots.
“Self-care is not selfish,” he said.
He also warned about what he calls the blind side, the people who look fine and are not. He said he has heard too many stories of families who had no clue, and that some people are very good at hiding it.
He did not want anyone to give up on them. He told of a friend who lost both a father and a brother to suicide and spent years in and out of treatment before he came out the other side. That friend, Gillan said, is a shining example of a guy who would not quit.
Gillan tied his own work to what is happening in Baxter County. His foundation started a Local Outreach to Survivors of Suicide team in South Carolina. When the coroner calls, the team offers the family a visit from someone who has lost a loved one to suicide, and he said every family so far has said yes.
The team brings a folder of local resources and sits with the family. He said walking into a house where someone has just died is hard for him, and that on one visit the family started crying and so did he.
That husband called him back months later to say he had bounced all the way back. Gillan cited Louisiana researcher Frank Campbell’s finding that suicide loss survivors wait an average of four and a half years before seeking help. The goal, he said, is to close that gap.
When his family lost Mark and Matt, nobody showed up at the house. He does not hold a grudge, he said. Nobody knew what to do.
Baxter County now has a similar team, funded in part by last year’s Run for Tomorrow. Gillan thanked Jamie Leach and Summer Sasser, who he said made the night happen, and urged the crowd to stop at the resource tables on the way out.
He also recognized Dan Hall and his wife for their work with veterans, and said the county recorded zero veteran suicides in 2025.
“That’s a good number,” he said. “It’s preventable.”
Gillan said he has lobbied in Washington and at his statehouse for more psychiatric beds. He does not care what letter follows a lawmaker’s name as long as they show up.
His speaking career started by accident. After moving to South Carolina, he got involved with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and joined the committee for an Out of the Darkness walk. Three weeks out, his fundraising page had $125 on it.
He posted a photo of his brothers and wrote about them for the first time. Then he clicked a button that emailed everyone he had ever corresponded with. He had not yet told his parents, and that was a hard phone call.
More than $9,000 came in. Organizers asked him to speak for five minutes. Before he took the stage, a microphone was passed through the crowd for people to say the names of those they had lost.
His mother could not get out the names Mark and Matthew. His father had stayed in the car. Then a little boy pulled the microphone down and said, “My daddy.”
Gillan cried behind his sunglasses through his talk. Afterward, a woman told him he needed to keep telling that story. He has been telling it since.
He said his parents, who have both since died, stayed married for 61 years after losing two sons.
Not long after that first talk, a public radio station taped an interview with him about the walk. It aired at 6:30 on a Sunday morning, and he assumed nobody heard it. Then a stranger walked up to him.
The man was from New York. He lived in South Carolina. He had lost two brothers to suicide.
“You’re not alone,” Gillan told the crowd. “That’s why we got to talk.”
He spent a few minutes on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, asking the audience to name the toys on the Island of Misfit Toys and why each one was there. The train had square wheels. The bird swam. The cowboy rode an ostrich.
Then he got to the doll, the one that looks normal. He said producer Arthur Rankin explained decades ago that she was there for psychological reasons. She cried a lot.
“The wounds are invisible, but they’re there,” Gillan said. If a 1960s cartoon could talk about depression, he said, so can we.
The foundation’s name comes from an old saying printed on the back of his business card: a shared joy is a double joy, a shared sorrow is half a sorrow.
“Every time I talk about my brothers, I cut my sorrow in half,” he said. It never gets to zero, he added. There is always a remainder, which means his brothers still matter.
He has turned a friend’s story into a children’s book called “Nice Shoes.” The friend was suicidal in high school when a classmate complimented his shoes, and he walked out of the building with a smile. Gillan said kids can convince themselves a bad day means every day will be that bad.
He told of taking his sons to play paintball on New Year’s Day. One got hit in the hand and declared it the worst year ever. It was Jan. 1, Gillan said, and there were 364 days left to fix it.
He keeps a purple folder on his desk. It holds notes from people who have heard him speak and a note from his mother saying she was proud of him. He said the work is hard, and on the bad days the folder is what pulls him out.
After Entrepreneur magazine ran a piece he wrote about that folder, a woman called from Arizona to say she was glad they picked his article. He asked her why. She had lost someone too.
“That’s an invitation,” he said. He told the crowd that when someone drops a line like that, take it.
He closed with sunflowers. He plants them along his driveway in South Carolina so he sees something pretty after a hard day. Rabbits ate all but one, a plant near the garage that had been chewed down and then sent a bud out the side.
He called it proof of life, watered it and watched it grow to his waist. It became his favorite in the yard.
“Life isn’t all Skittles and unicorns,” he said. “You don’t give up.”
The last slide was a photo of the Gillan children, Mark and Matt among them. He said the goal is to move from surviving to thriving.
“It does get better,” he said.
Anyone in crisis can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
