Article in Psychiatric Times

[Tintypographer]

An article in Psychiatric Times shared a conversation with The Chief Medical Officer for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention


From the article, the doctor highlighted her recommendations to slow the rate increases in suicide:

There may have been factors specific to 2020 at play, in light of the fact that March and April are typically the time of year when suicide rates are highest. It may have been that the early months of the pandemic from March to June, when the lockdown period was occurring, may have conferred a psychological girding of sorts with communal cohesion and feeling of being in it together that may have protected against the sudden changes in routines, employment, and sense of certainty. That said, clinicians should prioritize suicide prevention not only in the spring or summertime, but all year round! On an individual level, there a few steps clinicians can take to reduce suicide risk, including:

-Incorporate routine suicide and mental health screening/rating scales into their practice.

-Use the Safety Planning Intervention and Lethal Means Counseling as an ongoing practice with all patients who have any level of suicidal ideation or suicide risk factors.

-Become familiar with Counseling on Lethal Means, and practice this with patients during periods of increased suicide risk.

-Increase the frequency of outpatient visits or communication during periods of increased risk.

-Involve the patient's family in supportive actions to every extent possible with patient permission (for example, with helping make the home environment safe of lethal means).

-Have a referral list ready to go for CBT-, DBT- or CAMS-specific suicide risk-reducing forms of therapy.

-Learn the data related to treatments including medications and suicide prevention. You can read more here.

-Use AFSP resources to help patients and families learn more (eg, After an Attempt, Surviving a Suicide Loss, Have a #RealConvo).

-Advocate with the leadership of your health care organization to make suicide prevention a priority of the health system.

My curiosity is that the leading authority as a medical doctor in the US regarding suicide prevention outlined her most critical initiatives to slow suicide rates and no where included was "stop sanctioned suicide" or @fixthe26 parroted by @kelli

As a father of a child who took her own life and a suicide attempt survivor myself, my cause in this world of depression is to make the key problems of poor access, poorly understood and inadequate mental healthcare known to as many people as possible. It's clear the rise in suicide has been going on since well before the forums of people trying to find relief to their mental health, severe depression and suicidal ideation began. The rise in suicide is not the result of sanctioned suicide. It is a lagging indicator of a health crisis.

 

[hans0solo]

people don't want to kill themselves for 'no reason'. There are plenty of reasons. But the issues are not paramount to the people who fund the system. Not having access to a place to live, food, education, employment, training, dealing with oppression like racism, transphobia, etc. And health care. Access to any 'talk therapy' is limited to those who can pay out of pocket. Access to decent talk therapy is even less available. And access to specialized therapy is rare. Meds are useful if they do anything other then cause diabetes, impotence, sedation, drooling, mental confusion, body pain, etc. People often don't have access to supportive people in their life once given a diagnosis. If your are rejected by your family, it's worse. And lastly trauma. The mental health system does little to help with people who deal with abuse by family, the church, rape or any violence. Being sedated is not useful for that. Caring is what is needed.

 

[Meretlein]

I wouldn't put it past the psychiatric system to say "ban sodium nitrite" despite it being a sliver of suicides. We might just have to wait a little lol.

As side note, does losing a child to suicide change your view on fixthe26?

 

[Dot]

I wouldn't put it past the psychiatric system to say "ban sodium nitrite" despite it being a sliver of suicides. We might just have to wait a little lol.

As side note, does losing a child to suicide change your view on fixthe26?

All abt p.r thgh - if Sdm Nitrte = in paprs thn thy nd 2 b shwn 2 tke srsly - evn if c.t.bs r vry lw

 

[Tintypographer]

I wouldn't put it past the psychiatric system to say "ban sodium nitrite" despite it being a sliver of suicides. We might just have to wait a little lol.

As side note, does losing a child to suicide change your view on fixthe26?

No. What happened to me with fixthe26 is that I honestly and openly logged in to their community and shared. I discussed how I had come to SS, what it had done and what I had seen and not seen and I had a discussion about being banned for two weeks on suicideforum.com when I became suicidal. I mentioned that I had never been banned here and was attacked. Several people leaped on me stating that they "know the mods at suicide forum and if I was banned it was for a good reason and help lines should have been where I went and sanctioned suicide is a child predator death cult". The next day I was banned from their group. I could tell that it is a situation of logic and reason not existing. Then I became angry. I live with difficult to treat severe suicidal ideation. I am straight, not an incel, make plenty of money, am not a pedophile and lost a child to suicide. The "system" as it is called is broken, more and more people are in despair and feeling hopeless for many reasons and what they need is access to long term help. Fixthe26 is a group of upset bullies who hope the problems in reality will just disappear.

 

[My_name_is_Luka]

No. What happened to me with fixthe26 is that I honestly and openly logged in to their community and shared. I discussed how I had come to SS, what it had done and what I had seen and not seen and I had a discussion about being banned for two weeks on suicideforum.com when I became suicidal. I mentioned that I had never been banned here and was attacked. Several people leaped on me stating that they "know the mods at suicide forum and if I was banned it was for a good reason and help lines should have been where I went and sanctioned suicide is a child predator death cult". The next day I was banned from their group. I could tell that it is a situation of logic and reason not existing. Then I became angry. I live with difficult to treat severe suicidal ideation. I am straight, not an incel, make plenty of money, am not a pedophile and lost a child to suicide. The "system" as it is called is broken, more and more people are in despair and feeling hopeless for many reasons and what they need is access to long term help. Fixthe26 is a group of upset bullies who hope the problems in reality will just disappear.

if those people were really worried about suicide and they really knew anything about it (and they even tried to understand why they children committed suicide), they would have realized that insulting, arguing, excluding, banning a person from a discussion can cause severe anxiety. If this happens to someone that has already depression and had suffered any sort of mental abuse, it could lead to an extreme outcome and danger.
It's so sad that they have never learned from what has happened to their families and I'm sorry for the ones that had to deal with such psychological abusers and brainwashers.
It is quite clear that such people do not intend to listen to suicidal individuals, guide them, understand their reason and open their mind to contemplate conditions that they can't imagine. They don't care about fixing what is broken in the society (especially legally, for those crimes of abuses and harassment that never go punished; or support to children growing up with disfunctional families). They just think that suicide is a crime and there must be a law that forces people to withdraw from that choice; so that no victim might get caught in this lack of legislation.
Such a pity that they are not thinking that there is always a cause that brings someone to suicide idealization and those are the causes that should be analyzed and fixed; otherwise it is like keeping a pet dog tied to a chain in a shelter for all his life and forcing it to stay alive by all means.

I remember going through a similar experience years ago in real.
I met this person and for some reason they revealed to me that they broke up from a previous relationship and the ex lover committed suicide, due to known psychological conditions. I immediately felt disgusted that a stranger told me such a private episode as if they tried to win my compassion, especially because the most dramatic event in my eyes was the one that led the suicidal person to be pushed over the cliff.
But the person that I knew depicted themselves as the real victim.
We had a few dates and they started dissecting me to learn about my past, as if they were a psychologist.
I could very well see the mental abuse and manipulation that they were using on me, with blames, self-made diagnosis and definitions of me. Until they abruptly made an unexpected summary on why they preferred to cut things with me.
This caused me months of anxiety, self blaming and suicide idealization.

Sorry for the long story; it's just to say that many of such people never learn how destructive they are. They pretend to care for the suicide cases while in reality they are just pitying themselves, without realizing that if they really wanted to make a difference and "save a life", they should start by being more open minded and open to unbiased discussion, with no blames and constrictions.

 

[KuriGohan&Kamehameha]

Unfortunately none of those options that they list involve transforming existing protocols in any way.

Safety plans exist in nearly all mental health practices, as does disclosure to family members even if the suicidal person does not consent- the police/paramedics bursting through the doorway sure were chipper to announce to my boyfriend's entire family that I was suicidal, without any regard for how humiliating that was.

Most suicidal people have already tried CBT, DBT and other forms of talk therapy. Many of them have had multiple referrals for counseling and medication. Psychiatrists are very hesitant to acknowledge current methodologies are failing thousands of people. In many cases, there is a clear, palpable need for socioeconomic support, experimental treatments that do not fall under the umbrella of serotonergic drugs, antipsychotics, and tranquillisers, and freedom from abusive or exploitative situations in the home and workplace.

It's always more more more of the existing resources, and never the slightest consideration for whether or not there are epistemological flaws with how psychiatrists evaluate the efficacy of measures that are useless or damaging for many demographics of patients.

 

[hans0solo]

It's always more more more of the existing resources, and never the slightest consideration for whether or not there are epistemological flaws with how psychiatrists evaluate the efficacy of measures that are useless or damaging for many demographics of patients.

When all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail. Our current paradigm is biopsychaitry. The notion that environment is part of peoples issues is hardly considered or that that treatment of trauma is worth it. Or how living paycheck to paycheck is stressful. Or some people worry about failing school exams as life or death.

 

[Tintypographer]

One thing I've noticed over the years is that in most big systems, there is always an undercurrent to make sure that the program, whatever it is, is a success because of it is big enough to be mainstream then the money that an organization has spent on it demands accountability. .what I mean is that since we have suicide hotlines and they are in place and staffed and a lot is spent on them then we have metrics like "how many people call them" rather than "how many people are not suicidal now vs before" because the second is harder to.measure and it likely puts the suicide hotlines in a negative light.

The same thing can be said for cognitive therapy. Because it is a powerful and well understood psychological technique that does help people, saying it doesn't work for a growing population who are getting worse puts that in a negative light. It would be hard and expensive to develop a new means of helping people with chronic depression, anxiety, pain that leads to suicidal ideation so you have to couch it as "maybe it just hasnt.worked for you yet"