Before Don Ryan wrote a single word of The Secret Struggle, he had to do something no one should ever have to — tell six cousins that their father—Ryan’s uncle—had died by suicide.
Four of them never knew. Their parents had kept it from them.
That searing silence, that stigma, that hush around loss and mental illness—would become the very reason Ryan eventually put pen to paper.
“The honest answer is I would be a very different person today without those experiences,” Ryan told Lianne Castelino during an interview for Where Parents Talk. “I know that I would be a much healthier person over the last 30 years had I not experienced them, but in a very odd way, it also made me who I am.”
The silence that gripped Ryan’s family and many others would mark a tipping point for him — years later.
A Life Marked by Loss
A Minneapolis-based social worker, speaker, author, and father of two teens, Ryan has spent more than three decades living with the reality of suicide. He’s lost three family members this way—his cousin Vinny in 2013, his brother Brendan in 2022, and the first loss: his own father in the 1980s.
That first death changed everything.
“I had such significant guilt being a part of this suicide story,” he recounts. “And that guilt really turned to shame very quickly.”
“I Thought It Was My Fault”
Ryan was a senior in college. He had just told his estranged father—at his mother’s request—that he didn’t want him to attend graduation. He wanted to honour his mom, who had raised him alone after years of alcoholism and absence from his dad. The conversation was honest. Two hours later, his father died by suicide.
“If I didn’t have that conversation with him, he wouldn’t have died that day,” Ryan says, searching for reasons why his father would take his own life.
“I could tell you that there had to be numerous other contributors to his suicide. He was a veteran of the U. S. Army and he was in the Korean War. And of course we know that veterans experience a lot of PTSD. Maybe he was depressed all of his life, like my youngest brother, Brendan, was. There had to be tons of contributors to him looking to alcohol as a way to cope with some of his, issues,” Ryan shares.
A Code of Silence
Growing up in a traditional Irish household, talking about emotions, trauma, or mental illness was out of the question.
“Those feelings were coupled with my family’s Irish culture of not wanting to talk about negative things outside the family and even things that were taboo like alcoholism and mental health,” says Ryan.
“We weren’t even allowed to talk about it amongst ourselves. So this led to me completely shutting down. I shoved all those feelings of guilt because I thought it was my fault. Down so deep, and it affected me in a dramatic way.”
He buried his grief. For 25 years, he told only a handful of people the truth. The pain of that secret burrowed deep—until it finally began to break him open.
The Breaking Point
In 2022, Don lost his youngest brother, Brendan. That grief—the third suicide in the family—nearly crushed him.
“I was such a mess that year,” he admits. “I couldn’t think.”
Despite having spent a career in child welfare, homeless services, and suicide prevention, this felt different. This was personal. Brendan was young, loved, and seemingly full of life. “We have a genuinely loving family… I just kept looking around saying, ‘Why are we going through this again?’”
Long before Brendan’s death, Ryan had quietly started to unpack his trauma. It was during a divorce that he began seeing a therapist, who urged him to talk about his father’s suicide for the first time. “That process changed me,” he says. “It made me a healthier person.”
Turning Pain Into Purpose
Over time, Ryan realized he couldn’t be the only one carrying this kind of pain. So he began to speak. To write. To share the truth of what it’s like to live in the aftermath of suicide—and what healing can actually look like.
His book, The Secret Struggle: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One, is part memoir, part self-help guide. It’s written in short chapters—on purpose.
“I wanted people to actually read it. To come back to it. To know they’re not broken, and they’re not alone.”
A Father First
Despite his professional profile, Ryan is most proud of being a dad. He’s raising two teenage boys with the openness and emotional honesty he didn’t grow up with.
“My message to them is simple: You can always come home. No matter what happens—a breakup, a job loss, a mistake—you can come home without fear or shame.”
He also emphasizes the lifelong power of sibling bonds. “Their relationship with each other is more important than their relationship with me. I hope they’ll be there for each other for the next 80 years,” he says.
What Every Parent Needs to Hear
For parents thinking: How do I even start this conversation? The truth is, many of us don’t know how—because our parents never had those conversations with us. “But that has to change,” says Ryan.
His advice? Talk. Don’t wait for a crisis. Don’t wait for a diagnosis. Don’t wait until it’s too late. “Talk about suicide.Talk about mental health. Talk about what hurts. Teach kids that emotions are okay. That needing help is okay.”
The Power of Telling the Truth
Today, Ryan speaks across North America at schools, community centres, and organizations. He calls The Secret Struggle “the hardest thing” he’s ever done—but also, the most healing. “I thought writing it would be cathartic. It wasn’t—at least, not while I was writing. But now, hearing from people who say the book made them feel seen or less alone… that’s the catharsis.”
He adds, “Pain doesn’t disappear when we talk about it. But it becomes lighter when we don’t carry it alone.”
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