Mental health awareness is an important topic at any time of year, but one brave woman on TikTok recently shared how she saved her father from the unimaginable in honor of Suicide Prevention Month in September. The TikToker, who goes by @melanncoley online, was skipping school on the day that she found her dad — and had she not been there, things would’ve ended tragically.
The now 30-something mom recalled the incident which happened back when she was 17 in December 2004.
It was a random Tuesday, when her father unexpectedly came home from work at around 9:30 a.m., she wrote in her now-viral video’s caption.
“Neither one of us expected the other to be home,” she wrote in the caption of the footage from September 21, 2021.
The TikToker was eating breakfast and chatting with her dad — but she noticed he was off.
“He was acting strange and pacing around,” she recalled.
Her dad told her to go to her room to finish her cereal, but soon the house felt “too quiet” so she decided to look for him.
Their house was empty, but his truck was in the driveway.
So she opened the basement door and called his name but got no answer.
“I went down to the basement anyway and found him unconscious, hanging from the ceiling,” she remembered. “I grabbed hedge clippers and cut him down then ran to call 911.”
It really looked like the worst was happening.
First responders came to their house and took the father out of the house on a stretcher “with a sheet over it.”
But don’t worry — this story has a happy ending.
In the video, the mom then panned her camera around to her daughter and shared that not only did her father recover — he “got to walk me down the aisle and is the best papa to my baby,” she wrote.
People in the comments section were heartbroken by the TikToker's story.
"I have chills," wrote one commenter. "I'm so glad you were home. Sending you so much love."
Another commenter wrote: "Oh my goodness. You we're so brave. Still are."
"This was really the whole world saying 'no not yet' glad you were there," chimed in someone else.
In a follow-up video from September 24, the daughter shared that her father was first rushed to the ICU and then taken to a mental health facility while she stayed with family.
Eventually they did return home, but naturally “I had an aversion to the basement, of course, for quite some time,” she explained in the video.
“When he did finally come back home, we had family move in with us temporarily because there was that initial feelings of ‘will it happen again’ or a repeat situation. So we had to work through that while he was getting the help he needed.”
Thankfully, her father made it, but her story is an important reminder that we all need to be making our mental health, and the mental health of our loved ones, a priority.
If you or someone you know if struggling with your mental health, there is help out there. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline is a free, confidential service that has operators 24/7. Call 1-800-273-8255.
