Discussion How is therapy even supposed to work if you got good reasons to not live anymore?

[kji821]

I am 25 years old at the moment. I've been living with severe depression since i was like 6 years old. I always wanted to die because i saw no point of living and my only desire all this time was to just die. I had to waste so many years going to school and do homework all day just to see myself working a stupid full time job until i will retire or i die. Everytime i see someone asking for suicide advice, i see lots of people saying things like "oh, get help", or "you need to talk to someone" or "you need specialized help" or "you need to go to a psychologist" or "things will get better".

Now i am extremely curious, how is this "help" supposed to look like? You sit in front of a specialist and he will tell you that you have to be grateful for being healthy and having a roof above your head and to tell you things like kids from Africa are starving and that you have to be useful to the society and that you have to find fun activities to do? I mean what kind of fun activities can you even do with a full time job? Going to the gym? watching tv series?

I am not going to write all the things that i went through in this and all the problems that i have and all the health problems that i have but you have to trust me, i am not one of those people who are just bored of life or they had an argument with their girlfriends or who have a problem like they are short heighted and they want to die just because of that.

Oh and i tried, i really tried. I started going seriously to the gym since i was like 14 years old and i was extremely dedicated until i was 24 years old. I tried to use the gym to distract myself and to make the time to pass faster because i always thought the "oh it gets better one day" bs. I also tried to occupy my time with watching movies and tv series, with gaming, but i feel like i was just trying to invent ways to make myself to want to continue living.

And honestly, most psychologists are just a bunch of useless scammers when it comes to people who want to die for good, they are very useful for people with problems like autism or all kinds of similar problems because they can help them to function better in the society and get jobs and stuff like that, they are good for cases like people who lost a hand or a leg and they have to get over that, but they are completely useless when it comes to people who have no more reasons to live.

When i was younger, my parents sent me to 6 different psychologists because i said that school is useless and i want to go to school just to pass the year and that high grades are useless and all the psychologists told me that i have a problem and that school is useless and that i must score high grades at school. The only psychologist that was really fine was the one that i had as a teacher during college who said that there are people with depression that can't be treated in any kind of way.


I have a friend who kept telling me FOR YEARS that he wants to kill himself and that he feels like such a coward that he can't do it but he has no idea how and he went to a psychologist who completely destroyed him and now basically every 2 or 3 weeks he tells me that he wants to kill himself but if i tell him 1 month later that i want to die then he literally tells me something like "why would you want to die?" the poor guy started to suffer from multiple personality disorder and now he is even worse than he was before going to the psychologist and when i told him another time that i am thinking about dying he literally told me that i should go to a psychologist and 6 days later he proposed me to try a suicide method together.

 

[TransilvanianHunger]

Now i am extremely curious, how is this "help" supposed to look like? You sit in front of a specialist and he will tell you that you have to be grateful for being healthy and having a roof above your head and to tell you things like kids from Africa are starving and that you have to be useful to the society and that you have to find fun activities to do?

Unfortunately, it does look like that fairly often. Psychology training, at least in my experience, rarely touches on issues like suicide in any depth beyond "convince the patient to stay alive no matter what it takes", and it doesn't really give you any insight into the subjective experience of the suicidal person. So, psychologists tend to react much in the same way as everyone else when confronted with the words "I want to die"—they'll reach out for platitudes like "it gets better" or "you just have to realise how good you actually have it".

The thing that helped me was being able to openly discuss these thoughts and feelings with my therapist, session after session. She listened, asked questions now and again, and simply sat there with me as I went through the whole thing out loud. Eventually, I found something that seemed like a decent-enough reason to stick it out, and I resolved to start over and focus on that. She did not suggest a solution, or offer meaningless time-wasting activities to keep my mind off things. She let me dive right into the thick of it, and went right along with me. The way she framed it was: "it would be stupid to think that I can stop you if you really want to kill yourself, all I ask is that you give yourself time to explore all of this in depth, and figure out what you *really* want. If it turns out that there is nothing you want but to die, what I think about it doesn't matter."

With time, I found something I wanted that wasn't death. Very few people really want that.

Nietzsche wrote that "he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how". This "help" you ask about ought not to be about convincing you that you can or should bear any "how", but rather, it should walk with you as you search for a "why".

 

[sciatic214899]

I oftentimes feel like referring suicidal people to professional help is an abdication of responsibility. The 'normal person' (nonsuicidal person?) has no frame of reference for what it is like to want to die, does not want to be bothered at all by the pain of people who think about it, does not want to be legally responsible for if that person commits suicide.

There is use for psychiatry, therapy, etc, I'm told: studies say medication and treatment can reduce the severity of depression in suicidal people. Some therapy is predicated on solving real problems within the person's life, or altering their brain such that life feels worth living. I (would say that I) am not lucky enough to have received tangible benefit from my decade plus in therapy, much like you.

Love and peace to you and to your friend. I hope both of your struggles become easier with time, if you do decide to stay here.