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PSA: Most suicides occur while the person is alone. Company can be a strong deterrent to attempting suicide.
Thanks in part to an incurable medical condition, I'm sometimes suddenly suicidal and basically deranged. At such times, my adult sons don't leave me alone.
They mostly try to avoid discussing it with me. They don't try to make me feel better or act like unpaid therapists because it not only doesn't work, it's actively counterproductive.
Their policy is to take care of me physically (food, drink, warmth), keep me company and "do not engage Teh Crazeh."
In other words, trying to argue with me at such times about how irrational I am amounts to adding fuel to the fire. It just makes me more upset.
I've lived with this a long time, so I'm often able to just tell them "I'm not right and can't be trusted to be alone right now."
As my health improves, such incidents have become fewer, farther between and shorter in duration. It happened a lot while homeless. It's been much less common since getting back into housing.
Having fought depressions myself, I recognize the pattern of "depressives talking bullshit".
In depressive episodes your mind believes strongly in how hopeless your situation is. When people challenge that conviction, you'll only come up with more reasons, no matter how hare-brained or even psychotic at times. It's just the way it works...
> Most suicides occur while the person is alone. Company can be a strong deterrent to attempting suicide.
This is a lot more complicated than you're making it out.
plenty of people kill themselves in front of their family. Others kill themselves when their family are in the home. Others kill themselves in public. Others kill themselves in hospital wards when they're on 15 minute observations. These are not a tiny fraction of the total number of people who kill themselves.
EDIT: I'm glad you've found something that works _for you_, but it's really important to recognise that your experience is not usual, and that many people would find it invalidating.
EDIT: Page 33. https://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=38469
> Living alone -- Women: 45% Men 50%
This shows that living alone is a risk factor, but it also shows that most people who die by suicide do not live alone.
Page 55 suggests that it's external support that helps, not support by the family:
> 149. In 834 (43%) the patient lived alone. They were less likely to receive additional social support from outside the home (e.g. from a relative, friend or neighbour) as part of their care plan compared to those who did not live alone (138, 44% excluding unknowns vs. 270, 71%
Really glad to hear that your sons are there for you. Even gladder to hear that such incidents are fewer and farther between! I can only imagine how much harder it must've been without housing.
> incurable medical condition
which is ? seriously wondering
Great summary of the suicide literature. This is why it's okay to restrain suicidal people against their will - it's temporary madness most of the time
If your happy but very drunk friend wanted to tapdance on the edge of a tall building, would you restrain them if necessary? Or if someone high on shrooms was trying to drink bleach?
A suicidal mind is often one caught in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality, even if it comes from internal wiring going haywire instead of external substances.
Preventing someone from killing themselves is in their best interest most of the time for that reason. Suicidal impulses are most often fleeting relative to normal lifespan.
It would be interesting to talk to these people and ask if it was the suicide attempt itself that made them not attempt again. If you prevent the attempt will it have the same effect?
I remember working through rounds of depression and constantly confused and doubting my interpretation of .... anything / everything.
It was hard to understand the differences I perception when depressed and not.
One day a doctor almost as an aside said "When you are depressed, you don't see the world the way it is, but you also can't comprehend that entirely or maybe at all."
I finally understood why it was just so different on either end of the depression and non depression world and also how far "off" my ability to understand certain things were.
> This is why it's okay to restrain suicidal people against their will
Well, it isn't.
If you believe that, then you should also be willing to exempt anyone who has given notice in advance (let say 2 weeks).
If you are not, then please don't go and lord your believes about peoples lives over them.
i agree to a large degree, though even 1/10 is an appalling rate of suicide vs the general population of 1/5000~
You made quite the leap of logic there.
The article is about people whose suicide attempts failed, and ended up with them alive in hospital. Of these people, only about 10% will successfully suicide later.
There is no connection between these incidents and your justification for restraining suicidal people against their will. I am certain that there is evidence to support your claim, but this is not it.
These kinds of results also point to how much of an impact guns have on suicide rates.
Guns make it a lot easier to attempt suicide and achieve it. In the US, guns are often more readily available than medical treatment. If you have a gun laying around, and you have a short bout of suicidal ideation, that can be an unfortunate combination.
On top of that, people believe it will be less painful than other methods, increasing the appeal.
Virtually any other method of suicide takes more effort and time. The more time an attempt takes, the less probable the patients are to go through with it, and the more likely the attempt is discovered in time.
Methods seem to vary a lot by country, and some of the highest-rate countries don't primarily use guns, so I'm not sure other methods can be easily dismissed as less dangerous. For example, Belgium's overall suicide rate is higher than the USA's, and the most popular method there is hanging (a majority of male suicides, and a plurality of female suicides) [1]. Of course I can't say that the rate wouldn't be even higher if Belgium had more guns, but it manages a quite high rate without them.
I'd be interested to read any research on how drugs impact suicide rates (particularly if it prevents people who would have otherwise committed suicide). As easy it is to get guns, I think drugs actually a bit easier to obtain despite being the thing that's illegal (due to gun purchase wait period).
Suicide by car accident seem close in both effort and time, but maybe the reason we don't hear about it is that determining suicide in those cases is quite hard.
I saw a fascinating interview with Kevin Hines, a guy who attempted suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, and lived. He said he immediately regretted it after he jumped.
It seems like there is something about there being no turning back that totally transforms one's perspective. Why, after weeks, months, or years of planning suicide, are peoples' perspectives able to totally flip in an instant, precisely when it's too late?
In my circle of friends, there was a similar tragic case: Someone suicidal took deadly poison with delayed effect (5-10min), immediately regretted it and called one of my friends for help. (Sadly, the ambulance couldn't save him.)
The very pessimistic philosopher Emil Cioran (author of e.g. De l'inconvénient d'être né, "The Trouble With Being Born") who beside his suicidal thoughts died at age 84 once said in an interview, that suicidal thoughts are paradoxically the reason, why he stayed alive: The knowledge of the choice to end existence if the suffering is too much makes it possible to endure its insufferableness.
Maybe it is this choice, to live or not, that makes a lot things bearable? And it's much harder if this choice is gone for whatever reason, in one direction or another?
(my conjecture) It’s human nature: your animalian instinct to avoid death takes over once you’re actually facing it
Here are some more interviews with people who survived suicide.
https://www.kent.gov.uk/social-care-and-health/health/releas...
In England suicide prevention is a Public Health duty, and public health is normally located within local authorities (a form of local government). So there are a variety of suicide prevention approaches across the country, but they should all be informed by the national suicide prevention strategy.
Kent and Medway felt one problem was with "male help seeking behaviour". They did a lot of work to understand what this actually means, then they released material that appealed to men. They avoid use of mental health language (eg, "depressed"), and they use the words that men use themselves "knackered", "stressed", "regret" etc.) https://www.kent.gov.uk/__data/assets/image/0005/95009/relea...
is this a literal example of survivorship bias?
Any traumatic experience will have an effect. Why is that at all strange?
Have you ever wanted to ask a girl out for weeks, months or years, only to realize you are completely incompatible once you get her? Life is like that, especially when you're younger :)
Maybe this is one problem that VR can solve. Virtually simulated suicides? Virtually simulated anything. You don't have to die or hurt yourself, try X in a safe simulation first to see if you really want to go through with it.
I'd rather say that the urge to kill yourself is fundamentally irrational. Yes, there are relatively "rational" suicides, but these are very rare.
But it may take going to the edge to realize that you want to live and want to die at the same time. An irrational suicidal urge does not remove your survival instinct or will to live, it can only hide it, at best.
I believe that this conflict is at the center of many "strange" or counter intuitive behaviors around suicide.
What percentage of those with chronic suicidal ideation attempt suicide?
Could VR suicide dissuade people from attempting suicide?
As someone who chronically ideates about suicide (but has never attempted), things like VR rock climbing and (real life) bungee jumping have just made me scared of jumping. But it doesn't make me not want to die, it just makes me want to do it a better way that's less scary
No. People committing suicide aren't doing it because they're curious about the sensation of it (which VR wouldn't be able to replicate anyway).
Doubtful. If anything I could see it making people more comfortable with it. Could trigger a copy-cat-like effect where people already fantasizing about it could see getting through the VR experience as a "success" they are ready to emulate.
What the hell would you do in VR suicide? Be present during your own wake? Experience being buried alive?
This is actually an interesting question, and people are being entirely too dismissive in down-voting you. Everything from "assisted experiences" in VR to Neuralink could offer really interesting options for those going through something so terrible.
Why should it? AIUI, suicidal people actually want their suffering to end. Going through a VR suicide is totally useless to achieve their actual goal. I think you mistake the motivation. Most people dont kill themselves because they are thrill-seekers. The suicide is a means to and end, literally.
I don't believe VR could ever reproduce what you feel during an actual suicide, so no
The other day a lady jumped off the bridge in a suicide attempt. A passing tourist dived in and rescued her from the river below, someone else went out on a paddle-board to rescue the pair of them and the air ambulance arrived shortly thereafter to take her to the hospital.
The river is tidal and not always that deep. Luckily she didn't jump at low tide when she could have broken her legs or ended up crippled for life. As it happened she ended up in the mental health ward. I imagine they will put her on drugs such as lithium and she will lose her mind. Or they might find they have no reason to keep her in and she might discharge herself to try again.
However, if she had crippled herself then she would not be able to attempt the same thing - jumping off the bridge. But her body would be a living reminder constantly with her of a failed suicide attempt. There would be some impostor syndrome going on with that, people going the extra mile for her due to her being disabled, not through birth or accident but through a failed suicide attempt.
Due to the nuances of a suicide attempt I am not sure that the statistics in this article have much real meaning. Also, what comprises an attempt? A walk into the woods where no rope gets hung from any branch is still an aborted attempt if the intention on the first step was hanging. But actually jumping off the bridge is past that point of no return. There is grey area in this, the teenager taking too many pills can be put down as a 'cry for help' even if there is a point of no return being crossed.
Survival is also a grey area, not just in terms of physical quality of life but mental. The mental health wards of a hospital will put people on pills that take out the high and low notes of someone's mind, turning them into a functional zombie. Survival needs to be qualified as not needing the harsh medication that goes with being processed by the authorities.
I had this weird and strong question the other day: how come evolution didn't manage to wipe out suicidal gestures. Why don't we just fall into a partial coma when our mind is overwhelmed by events. It's a bit odd.. alas evolution is no silver bullet (sic):
The susceptibility for depressive episodes (and suicidal tendencies) is probably the result of other more beneficial "features" rather than evolutional neglect.
For example when you have a serious infection, especially with fever, the immune systems triggers quite a few mental symptoms similar to depression, in an attempt to conserve energy, lessen the impact of the infection and maybe even limit your ability to infect others.
I don't know what partial comma is.
But depression exists for evolutionary reason to conserve energy when we are sick, to limit the risky behaviours like movements (jumping from rock to rock, running after a wild buffalo) etc...
But the problem is that the mechanism which can set us into depression can be tricked by our perception of the reality.
What your eyes see and what you sense does not only depend on your eyes or your senses but also on how your brain interprets those.
If your brain interprets a perfectly sunny day as warning for really long winter, your system can be tricked into sending yourself into depressive state.
Now this can happen for variety of reasons like family problems, where you see your mom and dad hating each other while you were still developing at age 5, your brain development is affected and you sense more danger and pessimism than what a normal person would sense.
It isn't necessarily crazy to want your suffering to end and to believe death is the only solution. This is why we have the right to die movement.
The same reason we have babies born that get cancer. Why do babies get cancer? How come evolution didn't wipe out cancerous gestures in babies?
We do have mechanisms that deter us from committing suicide like fear and pain.
The good thing about fear and pain is that they are universally useful, e.g. both when we are on the verge of being reckless and suicidal.
I am 45 and am 99% sure I won't make it to 46. This isn't some unexplained "out of nowhere" ideation. It's a consequence of being beat down and taken from over and over, then having to make due with less and less, rinse, repeat. There is a breaking point. In my experience most suicidal people I come across are so because of the same chronic loss and suffering. Pills and therapy and hotlines don't help. They are plasters ignoring root causes. Root causes take time and money and that's too much to ask.
I posted over a year ago in a desperate attempt to find a job that I could do despite all my issues. I'd been fighting for that for years. Because there is no social system where I am, not one that helps people. Culture here is about bootstraps and anyone who doesn't pull them or have them is a mooch loser who "deserves" what they get. I couldn't get myself anywhere better because of my issues. So I had to try and make due in the same grind but with far less ability and energy. One kind soul, the only one in all this time, offered such a job and I tried to get there, things got worse for me from a few sides and I slid back and couldn't go. I am still TRYING and hoping, but hope isn't enough. You have to be able to act, and the ground has to stay under you and not collapse.
We all know how difficult work and earning can be even when we are young and healthy and love what we do, imagine doing it when in constant pain, with no family who loves you, with no access to high quality medical care. Imagine seeing everyone around you grind and be exhausted and not having the opportunity and endurance they do. Not being able to go home and enjoy something after work because it takes all your mettle just to survive a day.
I have taken to using HN to vent my feelings on this topic when it comes up, and probably sound like a one trick pony. I am not even sure I care anymore. I used to worry what impression I would leave. That I might upset someone or ruin an ally with my depressive state. It all seems like it is irrelevant now as I won't make it anyway. Years ago when I still had some shreds of bootstraps I couldn't get any help from people or systems. I am incredibly resentful because I believe I could have built something then to get through this life and do some good. Now I feel most of the time like I won't make it regardless. I feel only social support/financial security/medical access would even possibly give me a chance..and society and family have decided I am not "worth" that. My value has been recorded and notated. You cannot really beat a system like that. Once you lose you means to grind and become a drain on profits you become a thing to be disposed of rather than a person. Nobody WANTS to be in these shoes. Nobody CHOOSES it.
Until next time...or not...
They realize that everything is futile, including the act of suicide itself
It's also an interesting argument for stricter gun control - guns make it incredibly easy for suicidal people to follow through on that impulse. The amount of suicide deaths by gun in America is a testament to this.
In time, I will be that 1 of 10.
This could be an argument against assisted suicide, which probably has a higher completion rate than unassisted suicide. If people want to kill themselves, let them do so themselves. There's a good chance they won't actually follow through.