How a Mother Learned to Live After Her Son’s Suicide
Key takeaways:
World boxing champion Mia St. John’s son died by suicide.
After her son’s death, she experienced her own mental health crises.
Mia has learned several ways to process the grief and support her mental health.
November 23, 2014, was the last time world boxing champion Mia St. John would talk to her son, Julian.
Julian died by suicide during a stay at a mental health facility in Los Angeles. He was 24 years old.
“When I got the news — it’s hard to describe. There are no words. My whole world fell apart,” Mia says. “I just couldn’t imagine going on living without my son.”
Losing someone to suicide is a severe trauma, and survivors often have their own mental health crises in the aftermath. Mia experienced mental breakdowns and an alcohol use relapse while grieving the deaths of Julian and her ex-husband, actor Kristoff St. John, who died in 2019.
“I, myself, had to be 5150’d twice,” Mia says.
Save over 40% on Qsymia with GoodRx
Discover the once daily Qsymia for weight management. Qsymia is for adults and children 12-17 in combination with a healthy diet and regular exercise.
5150 refers to a section in the California Welfare and Institutions Code that legally allows for a person who is a danger to themselves or others to be taken into custody or placed in a treatment facility for up to 3 days to undergo “assessment, evaluation, and crisis intervention, or placement for evaluation and treatment” in a state-approved center.
After the mandatory medical care, Mia built an arsenal of treatments and practices to support her mental health. In 2021, she wrote a book, “Fighting for My Life,” about how she dealt with loss and grief. She has also become a mental health advocate and appeared on morning talk shows and late-night television.
These are the five tips she has for others who are mourning a similar loss.
1. Lean on your community
Mia regularly attends group grief counseling and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
“Having that support system is vital to me,” she says. “I have to go to … about three meetings a day. I self-medicated with alcohol, and that does not make it go away. That just temporarily eases the pain, but then it comes back twice as hard when you get sober.”
2. Talk to a therapist
Mia meets with a psychotherapist who helps her process her day-to-day thoughts and emotions and prescribes medication for her anxiety and panic disorders.
Psychotherapy is “sitting with your fear, sitting with your anxiety, sitting with the thoughts, and not trying to push it away,” Mia says. “Because I did that for years after my son died.”
Read more like this
Explore these related articles, suggested for readers like you.
3. Care for your body
As an international boxing champion and black-belt martial artist, Mia has long incorporated physical activity and healthy eating into her life. The discipline became even more important after Julian’s death.
“I hike a lot. I lift weights every day. I can’t stress enough the importance of being physically active,” she says. “I stay away from sugars, anything that can mess with my mental health. I try to stay on natural foods and not have too many processed foods.”
She also learned that maintaining a schedule is an effective way to manage anxiety.
“I have to know what I’m doing every hour of the day, so I make sure the night before that my day is planned hour by hour. And I can’t stray from that.”
4. Create safe spaces for others
In 2010, Mia founded the Mia St. John Foundation to help young people living with mental illness and addictions.
She explains that her foundation also provides shelter if people don’t have a home. That’s meaningful for her because her son went through periods of homelessness.
“That’s why I take into heart the homeless who are mentally ill,” she says. “We have programs for them. We have a lot of physical fitness programs for them — meditation, yoga, boxing, dance.”
5. Be honest with yourself
Grieving after losing someone to suicide is different for everyone. There is no “right way” to grieve, but for Mia, her focus is on acceptance.
“I did whatever I could to stay alive for my daughter. But what people don’t tell you when you lose a child is there is no recovery. I soon learned that there wasn’t going to be recovery for me. There was only going to be learning to live with the pain, and the grief, and moving forward despite that.”
Mia moves forward by using her platform to talk about grief and advocate for people like Julian.
“It’s a win-win situation,” Mia says. “When I work with kids, I’m helping myself along with helping them ... Speaking out about it helps me.”
“I haven’t reached a point where I can say, ‘Oh, I feel so much joy and I’m so happy.’ I'm not there, and I may never get there,” she says. “And that’s OK, because my focus now is to help others.”
If you are a suicide loss survivor in need of assistance, visit the 988 Lifeline.
Why trust our experts?
