Jason B.

i'm a drug addict and alcoholic, i've been ion recovery for 17 years now, i've battled depression and have attempted suicide once and came real close to trying again 4 years ago but my wife and daughter talked me through it luckily. I've been wanting to fill this form out for a while now and after this past week i'm not delaying anymore. So a little back story on me and my life, ill start at present time and work backwards, on January 20th 2025 out of the blue i talked to my wife about going and seeing our oldest and third oldest grand children so we traveled about 30 minutes from our home and had dinner and was enjoying our time , I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and while i was out there i received a text message from a very close friend (we referred to each other as cousin since at 1 point my aunt and his uncle ,married and me and his older brother which is my age have been friends since before kindergarten) that i have known all his life and the messages said "Can you come over please....." and immediately i knew something was not right as we always had a purpose with our messages like " can you come help me do this or that" and this message was just very usual so i texted back immediately and tried calling 5-6 times back to back with no response. So i went in and told my wife that i think we need to leave because something wasn't right and while we said bye to our grand babies i called my other daughter who lives about 2 minutes from our home and asked her if she would go check on him, and in the mean time my wife called our son who was at our house when we left to ask him to do the same , at least someone would be there with him until i was able to get over there but our son was at a store a block away and once he heard what was goin on he ran to my cousins house, so i have security cameras all around my home and when we finally were able to check them heres what we saw. You see my cousin open his door and looked towards my house like he was looking to see if i was home, then the door closed but didn't latch which caused it to slowly open, and about 5 minutes later our son comes into the picture and we see him knock, and then he opened the outside door and he entered and within 3-4 seconds he ran out screaming and yelling in total distress he made it to the corner and right at that time my daughter made the turn onto his street and you can hear him yelling at her "he shot himself, he's fucking dead oh my god" and at that point my daughter called 911 and our son call his mother, we were already on the way home and once i heard the distress i automatically knew in my heart what happened so i knew i just had to get home and started driving 100MPH and at the same time i called his brother and told him that his brother just shot himself and felt like i was never going to make it home and so for the past week we've been trying to deal with that, we've been battling regret, my wife regrets calling our 17 year old son and being the reason he saw what he saw, me regretting calling my daughter who is currently pregnant and for me deciding to go somewhere and not being home, even after finding out after watching my cameras that when he texted me at 8:19pm, he pulled the trigger at 8:21PM because you can hear it on the cameras, i just wished i was here and everyone has told me there was nothing i could have done and if i was actually here there were (3) possible out comes, (1) i found him, (2) i catch him as he does it, (3) i get there in time to fight him for the gun and i possible become a victim fighting for the gun with him. its knowing i couldn't have done anything to change the out come but still believing by some miracle i could have. Ok thats all have on that one, so lets rewind back to 2022 one of my friends that again i've known since elementary school, and me and him were the really outgoing drug addicts of our group as in every weekend we were on everything you could possibly think of, put it this way i haven't done heroin and thats it. Well after my daughter was born i finally get cleaned for the most partand that left us not having much in common anymore and i started improving my life and getting off the drugs and transitioned to alcohol, and while i did that he went to prison and did a little time and was released into a halfway house which he did great at and was constancy bragging about his sobriety on facebook and i watched but never reached out to him in fear that we were each others fuel source and together we would both spiral, he ended up becoming house leader and then posted he was 600 days clean, so i figured once he got out we could rekindle our friendship only to receive a call 2 days later telling me that he decided to ingest all of his prescription medication and he OD'ed and passed away, and that was devastating to the point that at his funeral i was face to face with his mother and couldn't build the courage to say anything to her, yet again i put some of the blame on myself because if was a better friend i would have fought to bring him with me when i cleaned up and i wouldn't had been by his side all the time helping to fuel our addiction, and still ill always have the regret of not reaching out before he got released and let him know we were here for him. Ok i'm going to wrap these last 2 together and now the year is 1996 i'm a junior in high school, my best friend decided to crash at my place after our Friday night of running around and as far as i knew we had our normal fun time he never mentioned anything to me about sad, upset, depressed nothing. So around noon or 1 on Saturday he went home and the net thing i knew around 9am Sunday morning i recieved a call from his father telling me that he decided sometime Saturday morning to put a gun to his head and end thing, then around a honth and a half after that i got a call from another friend telling me we needed to go save Ronnie and to meet him at an old bridge which was a common hang out for us and when i arrived i saw Ronnie on the side with some rope around his neck an d the other end tied to the bridge, we staied out there around 3-4 hours attempting to persuade him it wasn't worth it and finally got him down and to my friends house for the nightstand a couple days, afterwards we did our best to never leave him alone and constantly tried to keep an eye on him, Until we were in school one day and we couldn't, due to having to attend class, in which his aunt was the teacher and that day we didn't see him when we got to school that day and made it to my class.Well durning that class the principale came and pulled the teacher out into the hallway`, and i knew something has happened so i pushed my way out there and was then quickly stopped, i was informed them that my friend drove to a girl he was seeng house and stood out front of it and put a gun to his head and shot himself. SSo i tell all of this because mental health is something i am passionate about and wish to do more, I saw your product on-line, and instantly fell in love with it and your mission, and if theres any way i could possibly help in any way i can, iI have lost people i hold near and dear to me still this day and would love the oppertunity to hopefully help in some way or fashion.