Sounds like a good pathway for recovery! I am not good at meditation but I have learned a lot about the topic through decades of study. It is a question of 'how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?'
Meditation in various forms has become mainstream as of recent decades, since calming the nervous system will bring innumerable benefits compared to being endlessly abused by our own internal thoughts. This can be a healthy part of a routine, but with the right understanding and guidance, also has the potential to go far deeper.
Ego death has two distinct definitions that I'm aware of. In the psychedelic community, it refers to an expansive and possibly blissful state that is experienced. By contrast, in the field of spirituality, it refers to a direct-experience, non-intellectual realisation that our normal sense of self is a total fiction. This leads to a radical and permanent shift in identity. This, too, is also likely to become mainstream in future decades.
To quickly cover your other questions.
Can you stay there forever? Two contradictory answers. At a practical level, there can still be a need for conventional therapies and problem-solving. But from the perspective of an awakened person, the meditative place of alive stillness is our timeless true nature; a substratum onto which the normal human experience is superimposed like a projection. Thus meditation the ONLY place we remain forever.
Changing suicidal thoughts? Again, two answers. Meditation can help people to stop 'buying into' harmful thoughts and thus reduce their intensity. The second, advanced answer is that the self at the centre of the turbulent human experience, and the identity as the human body-mind that is born and dies, will be exposed as never having existed; analogous to watching a TV and mistaking the image as real events.
Have people recovered this way? Definitely. The best example is Eckhart Tolle, who is a rare case of someone undergoing a spontaneous spiritual awakening in the midst of suicidal despair. The permanent awakening process is far slower for most people, though the benefits of dis-identifying from the mind (one of Eckhart's core teachings) are instantaneous.
