Dese’Rae L. Stage

Dese’Rae L. Stage is an artist, mom, suicidologist, social worker, educator, advocate/activist (which of the latter depends on how angry she is), and therapist. Stage is a writer and self-taught photographer with experience in music journalism. She has an academic background in psychology and suicidology, is trained in crisis intervention (ASIST, QPR), and is a certified QPR trainer. She also has lived experience with chronic suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and suicide loss—experiences that she centers on in her work.

Stage ties these threads together with Live Through This, a multimedia storytelling series that aims to reduce prejudice and discrimination against suicide attempt survivors. It reminds us that suicide is a human issue by elevating and amplifying survivors’ voices through raw, honest stories of survival and pairing them with portraits—putting faces and names to statistics that have been the only representation of attempted survivors in the past. Stage has interviewed and photographed 188 attempt survivors in 36 US cities since 2010.

Live Through This is used as a resource by clinicians and as a teaching tool at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Stage has partnered and published with research teams in an effort to bring attempt survivor experiences to the forefront of suicide research. Live Through This has received media coverage from the New York Times, TIME, CNN, CBS Evening News, VICE, People Magazine, and many, many more.

Stage is a queer, white, cisgender single parent living with a number of psychiatric diagnoses she both agrees with and disagrees with, depending on which. It’s important to her to be transparent about her positionality in terms of her identity and lived experiences, as well as being someone who seeks mental health services herself—she knows what it’s like to be in the therapy chair and sitting across from it. To that end, she comes to her work as a partner and a support rather than an expert.

Her practice is trauma-informed, anti-oppressive, and person-centered. Using an eclectic approach, mainly rooted in relational and attachment-based work, alongside some CBT techniques and DBT skills training, she works with teens and adults with concerns related to suicidal ideation and self-injury, grief/traumatic loss, ADHD, depression, anxiety, mood and personality disorders, gender and sexual identity, fertility challenges (especially for those who are visibly queer), queer family-building, and pregnancy loss.

Stage speaks about her work and experiences at universities and suicide prevention events nationwide. Highlights, for her, have been sharing a bill with Kay Redfield Jamison at the NIMH Director’s Innovation Speaker Series, being invited to speak at a roundtable event on Capitol Hill by Congresswoman Susan Wild, and delivering a Thought Leader Session at the American Association of Suicidology’s annual conference in 2020.

Stage produces and co-hosts the "Suicide ‘n’ Stuff" vidcast with Jess Stohlmann-Rainey. She also hosts the "Grief TV" vidcast. Stage is the main protagonist in a documentary about suicide prevention advocates called The S Word, currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Her byline has appeared in Cosmopolitan (gay divorce), CNN (suicide), Romper (infertility), and more.

Before she had kids, her hobbies included Netflix marathons, dive bar jukebox takeovers, live music, beer (opaque, viscous, sweet stouts or the funkiest of sours) cocktails, and talking about suicide. Now, her hobbies are naps, talking about suicide, and talking about infertility.