Why is the state of the suicide prevention as bad as it is?

[noname223]

I don't get why the suicide prevention is as bad as it is in many societies. Probably in most of them. I would prefer when people could really get help for their problems. It is no wonder this website gets 6 million views a month. The people are really desperate. In so many countries the health care system is a joke. It is easy to call the suicide hotline but to find a therapist is often really difficult. Especially when the insurance does not pay for it. In my country there is free health care but I am really angry that so many people in this forum can't pay for their therapy. And then the governments have the arrogance to spam the suicide hotline. If you don't deliver good health care no wonder the people are suicidal...

Even when there is free health care the psychiatry is absolutely overstrained with that topic. They seem for me to be very desperate when someone is longterm severly suicidal. They must be anti-choice in every imaginable scenario. This makes it for me quite absurd. Sorry I don't feel taken serious if my therapist must have one exact opinion. And he must have this opinion no matter what. I feel treated as a child.
Nevertheless I would advice people to try therapy or medication before ctb (if it is available). Sometimes it really helps. I am seeing now my third therapist. I am complaining a lot about him but it helps to open up to him. And he helps me to cope with my life even though he cannot solve my problems.

Yeah but when someone expresses severe suicidality they seem to be quite...speechless. They don't really know what to say...my current therapist is quite young. I had the feeling he just said the exact same words which he learned at college. DON'T DO IT! He said that with some pathos.
I told another therapist I compare myself a lot to people who have commitedt suicide and I am quite obsessed about it. He called people who ctb insane and he said to me "you don't want to be part of these insane people". I am sure he did it mean well. But I think he was quite desperate and very helpful...

I have experienced a lot. Some people want to give you a guilty conscience about the people you leave behind. Some people are religious and believe you will go to hell for it or that suicidal people have something evil inside them. I heard a lot of remarks about my suicidality during my innumerable clinic stays. One time a staff member (a young man) even joked "You should not drink the whole bottle of the antidepressant." He really said that as a joke. To this time I felt extremely suicidal and extreme pain. I just hid it from many people. Yeah and then he made that joke...

I now come to my conclusion. As I have mentioned it a thousand times before I think me need to implement liberal assisted suicide laws. To give people an official way out without having the possibily of longterm damage. If this happened I would feel more taken serious than being locked up in the psych ward in case I want to exit.
But I also have to say one thing. This is only my experience. But you can talk openly with your therapist about suicidal thoughts without the fear of getting locked up. As long as you are not acute suicidal they won't do something bad. Some might have had other experiences. I am always very transparant towards my therapists. Maybe in other cases they don't trust in your honesty. I don't know.

The therapists should carefully think about why suicidal people don't want to open up to them in order to change that and improving the system. Not being scared when opening up is really necessary. This topic is way too stigmatized.

 

[Pain In The Ass]

Strangers don't care if miserable people die very much. They're mostly in their jobs to get paid and feed their families, despite the bullshit they tell themselves and others about how they want to help people, and that their jobs give them satisfaction because they make a difference to others. It's all virtue signalling bullshit. People are much more selfish than they let people know, me included. All those posters on the wall in the surgery telling people to reach out for help are just virtue signalling bullshit. People mostly just give you a phone number to ring so you can 'talk to someone', to try to look compassionate, but really so they don't have to deal with you.

 

[FuneralCry]

I do not think it is good advice saying things like 'everyone should try therapy and medication before ctb'. Many people want to ctb because of physical illnesses or they simply just have a horrible life. Wanting suicide can be perfectly rational in a life like this. Some people like me have come to the conclusion that life is meaningless and is simply not worth living. In all of these situations, therapy and medication would be useless.

I just think that euthanasia should be legalised, and suicide should not be so stigmatised. People should be able to exit this world without all the secrecy and the fear of failure. If someone does not want to live, then they should be able to exit peacefully, it is their life and their decision. It is nothing to do with anyone else. If the anti choicers want to live, then good for them but they should not try to force others to.

 

[Dr Iron Arc]

Humans tend to always want problems to be solved but rarely will they be able to muster the effort it would take to actually solve them.

Best they can do is create more problems while attempting to solve the original one and hope that fixing these smaller problems will be enough.

 

[whatevs]

Strangers don't care if miserable people die very much. They're mostly in their jobs to get paid and feed their families, despite the bullshit they tell themselves and others about how they want to help people, and that their jobs give them satisfaction because they make a difference to others. It's all virtue signalling bullshit. People are much more selfish than they let people know, me included. All those posters on the wall in the surgery telling people to reach out for help are just virtue signalling bullshit. People mostly just give you a phone number to ring so you can 'talk to someone', to try to look compassionate, but really so they don't have to deal with you.

Listen to this man.

 

[Pain In The Ass]

Humans tend to always want problems to be solved but rarely will they be able to muster the effort it would take to actually solve them.

Best they can do is create more problems while attempting to solve the original one and hope that fixing these smaller problems will be enough.

The story of my life - instead of moving out of my parent's home when I couldn't sleep due to noisy family, I instead decided to 'solve' the problem by taking sleeping tablets every night for a few years, which seriously messed up my health - addiction, blood sugar issues, fat gain, muscle loss, chronic pain began - all because I was too cowardly to leave the nest and stop hiding under Mummy's skirt, and actually fix the problem - now I'm stuck with my mollycoddling spineless mother, my idiotic, retard father, who I'd rather like to hit with a hammer, and my mentally ill brother

 

[Symbiote]

From my observations, mental health practitioners and society are divided into two different camps. MH Practitioners want to bring awareness and help end the stigmatization of mental illnesses and suicide, but also provide an avenue of help for those suffering. Society, whom either never experienced suicide or mental illness, or they recovered and became "life coaches", have a lackadaisical approach to mental illness and suicide. Most of it seems lazy or they get some sort of gratification from social media virtue signalling. Society will post the suicide hotline, memes, attend social walks, etc. but will never take the time to listen to sufferers or open their mind to euthanasia. They really do follow in the same path as the NIMBY folks, all caring from a distance until it encroaches in their life and social circle.

Therapists believe that throwing medications and inpatient/outpatient services at us would DETER would-be suiciders. But therapists strategies are outdated or overwhelmed with the amount of people requesting services. Also the availability for therapy is out of reach for many. No wonder most of us turn to online suicide forums for help because society and therapists are blinded in their old ways.

Edit: not sure if any of this makes sense, I suck at writing my thoughts out on it.

 

[whatevs]

The story of my life - instead of moving out of my parent's home when I couldn't sleep due to noisy family, I instead decided to 'solve' the problem by taking sleeping tablets every night for a few years, which seriously messed up my health - addiction, blood sugar issues, fat gain, muscle loss, chronic pain began - all because I was too cowardly to leave the nest and stop hiding under Mummy's skirt, and actually fix the problem - now I'm stuck with my mollycoddling spineless mother, my idiotic, retard father, who I'd rather like to hit with a hammer, and my mentally ill brother

U still in the nest then, Anal Pain? Same here, but moving out might be in the cards in the future. In the best or the worst way... If you catch my drift.

 

[Pain In The Ass]

U still in the nest then, Anal Pain? Same here, but moving out might be in the cards in the future. In the best or the worst way... If you catch my drift.

Yeah, I was working on a plan to save up and buy a cheap house outright by the coast up in northern England, where you can still buy one for 60K - the dream of having no rent or mortgage, being able to survive by only working 3 hours a day in a little evening office cleaning job on my own, away from people, and have my daytimes to myself to do whatever I want, to escape the hell of the 9 till 5 - that was my dream before the pain began - I got to 35K before the dream died - but now I have 35K to spend on expensive darknet drugs and a really pleasant CTB plan (and my leave my brother 10K), so I'm lucky really compared to some!

Do you get on with your family, or do they drive you insane and make you fantasize about familicide, like mine?!

 

[whatevs]

Yeah, I was working on a plan to save up and buy a cheap house outright by the coast up in northern England, where you can still buy one for 60K - the dream of having no rent or mortgage, being able to survive by only working 3 hours a day in a little evening office cleaning job on my own, away from people, and have my daytimes to myself to do whatever I want, to escape the hell of the 9 till 5 - that was my dream before the pain began - I got to 35K before the dream died - but now I have 35K to spend on expensive darknet drugs and a really pleasant CTB plan (and my leave my brother 10K), so I'm lucky really compared to some!

Do you get on with your family, or do they drive you insane and make you fantasize about familicide, like mine?!

Let´s not derail threads, I am doing that today more than usual. I will message you.

 

[demuic]

This is just another of the things that society sees as a "problem" for one reason or another but doesn't truly care about enough to do the things necessary to actually solve it. So it gets swept under the rug or gets a bandaid slapped on it while people pat themselves on the back.

 

[WiltedSoul]

It's bad because it's a complex issue. Some people can legitimately be helped via therapy, medication .etc., or even through less involved means such as simple lifestyle changes, getting their shit together and so on, but many others cannot and at that point, what do you expect anyone to do for them? It's not just indifference to suffering or stigma surrounding the topic, though those are problems as well, it's just that the only thing they can do for some people is to stop them from committing suicide.

Look at it from the perspective of a psychiatrist, psychologist, therapist, whatever: you have this person sitting in front of you and their life is a trainwreck. Nothing you're doing has worked and they're really having a rough time right now. They say they're going to go home and kill themselves. What are you meant to do in that situation?

You can't give them money. You can't make them beautiful. You can't make them successful. You can't undo their past, you can't fix the problems they have with their family or lack thereof. And if they suffer from something physical, like chronic pain? You're left even more helpless. All you can do for that person in that moment is to section them.

Laypeople are even less capable. Not necessarily because they want to be apathetic or to give someone empty, meaningless platitudes, but because they don't understand you and they can't do anything else. All they can do is make an effort to motivate you (you'll go to hell if you commit suicide, so don't, you're a coward if you commit suicide, so don't .etc.), comfort you (it gets better, I promise! Life is what you make of it! .etc.) or pass you off to a professional.

I understand being upset that most people don't see suicide as a valid option and that they inadvertently bar the vulnerable from their only escape, but to be fair, suicide isn't generally anyone's first choice and that's where things go wrong. They get caught up in that fact and they confuse fantasy with reality; they want you to recover and get whatever it is you need to live, but they don't actually have the means to make that possible for everyone and it's grim to confront, so they don't.

It's a shitty situation all around, I'm afraid. The majority of people also aren't suicidal and that makes the legality of assisted suicide difficult (especially without lethal physical illness) to implement. People don't understand. They can't. Most suicidal people don't understand, either - I think the people on this website are a special breed.

 

[Soapie]

When suicide becomes a problem in larger capitalist countries, the prevention comes not from a place of healing but a place of enforcement. To kill yourself is to state that the system has not worked for you. It's the most raw admittance of dissatisfaction a human being can do. When suicide becomes a problem, it's often following dissent. Governments want to solve this problem, yes, but not in a way that will empower and dignify people. Instead, they'll keep the mentally and physically unhealthy low. Make therapy incredibly expensive, outlaw and block off ctb methods, keep people alive no matter how unhappy they are. If we catch them doing it, they won't go to prison, but they'll be charged for the ambulance we used to stop them. We'll put them in a minimum-funding psych ward and we'll let them sit and think about what they did. Make them feel ashamed and dehumanized. The problem in the eyes of the government is that you tried to kill yourself, not that you were in pain. The pain isn't what needs to be fixed. Just the action. The attempt to make the pain stop. It's a crime to them.

 

[thefoodispoison]

People who are in deep depressive states don't need a shitty suicide hotline. They need practical support -- meals delivered, house cleaning, laundry, opening mail to pay bills, etc. Provided with no judgement and as part of comprehensive universal healthcare. And paid time off work.

If the suicidal ideation is not permanent and they just need time and help getting out of the hole, the best way to support that is by letting them use their very limited energy on getting better, whatever that looks like for them.

 

[callme]

I can't think of a worse reincarnation of mainstream concern about the "life and wellbeing" of people than emergency phones on The Golden Gate and anywhere near Dutch railways. Hey there Hans, If I was really in the mood for sob stories, would I put my neck on the rail?

I'm beginning to think those things are just there to scare the shit out of people on those places for other reasons by reminding them how might they end up if in an accident.

Next time it happens to me, might ss well call and say "I used up all of my sick leave, so I'm calling in dead."