|
Post by Admin on Dec 2, 2020 12:15:30 GMT
How to talk to a suicidal friendTwice as many people worldwide die from suicide as from homicide. Here’s how to help your loved ones back from the brink by Lindsay Weisner psyche.co/guides/how-to-talk-about-suicide-and-save-the-life-of-a-loved-oneNeed to know ‘Do you remember that scene in Avengers: Endgame? When Captain America is fighting himself?’ ‘I do,’ I assured Bethany. ‘That’s how I feel every night,’ she confessed, tucking her long, blonde hair back behind her ears. ‘It feels like I am fighting myself to stay alive.’ I had been meeting with 17-year-old Bethany twice a week for the past six months to help her understand and move through her depression. Bethany was smart, pretty, a talented musician, and had a streak of sarcasm that made her funny as hell. And Bethany couldn’t stop thinking about killing herself. She fought herself to stay alive every day, a dichotomy so beautifully explained in her Captain America reference. (Fortunately, I was a Marvel fan myself, so this gave us an excellent platform to relate back to during the course of treatment.) There were points during the two years I treated Bethany that it seemed as if the only things that allowed her to stay alive and put one foot in front of the other were small, time-limited goals. Little things that she could look forward to, such as the release of a new movie, or a musical performance she had spent months preparing for. Bethany ended up in hospital once during the course of treatment. Her psychiatrist was frustrated that her medication wasn’t working, and sent her for a psychiatric consult. She was at the hospital emergency room for six hours, worrying that she was going to fail her French test the next day because she wasn’t getting a chance to study. This should have been a sign that Bethany was not in immediate danger. But, of course, no medical or mental health professional wants to be wrong in such a situation. No one wants to end up reading about a dead teenager the following morning because they weren’t cautious enough. How do you ask a friend or loved one if she’s thinking about killing herself? How should high-school teachers and college professors approach someone they’re concerned about? When a patient comes to me with symptoms of depression and anxiety, by the end of the first session, I always ask about suicidality – in detail rather than merely as a formality. I allow the words they might have been frightened to hear spoken aloud to leave my mouth. Because I am not frightened of words. When I was growing up, my mother’s depression and suicidal ideation were never to be spoken about with outsiders. Her suicide attempts and hospitalisations were hidden for longer than should have been possible. By the time I was old enough to realise that my silence had been purchased through years of subtle, silent oppression, her anger and hostility and unpredictable nature had isolated all of us from the friends and family who should have been there to support her – and us. This realisation, as an adult, freed my mouth to speak openly and honestly as a clinician. ‘It sounds like you’ve been feeling really awful. Have you ever had thoughts of hurting yourself, or of taking your own life?’ If the answer is even the teensiest bit of a yes, I explore it further. ‘I know we just met, and it must have been really difficult for you to tell me that. There is a huge difference between thoughts and actions. How often do you think about killing yourself? Have you ever thought of how you might do it? Have you ever made a real plan and considered following it through?’ Those last questions, a method to take one’s life – and the realistic possibility that this method might result in death – the formation of a concrete plan and the intention to act on it, are the most important pieces of information. There is a huge difference between a person who thinks about killing himself with a gun, has easy access to a gun, and who would ‘probably do it on a Friday so that Mom didn’t have to be the one to find me’ versus someone who ‘sometimes thinks it would be easier for everyone if I was dead. I don’t know how I would do it, maybe I would just jump in front of a car, or drive into incoming traffic.’ Both are painful to hear. But one is more likely to end in suicide than the other. Indeed, you don’t have to be a therapist to intervene and help to save a life. What most patients with suicidal thoughts actually want is to have their fears and feelings heard without judgment. Some might want to voice their secret, scary, suicidal fantasies to see if they’re shunned. To see if they are, in fact, as hopeless as they feel. The purpose of this Guide is to help lay people listen to and support friends and loved ones throughout their depression and suicidal thoughts before professional assistance comes onboard – and during that period as well. Reach out to the people you suspect need help. At worst, your kindness is rejected. At best, your words make someone feel less alone. Your words might be the difference someone needs in order to stay alive another day.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jan 2, 2021 23:31:03 GMT
Black Suicidality and Mental Health #BlackLivesMatterwww.madinamerica.com/2020/06/black-suicidality/Suicide attempts made by Black youth rose by 73% from 1991 to 2017. The Congressional Black Caucus Emergency Task Force On Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health recently published a comprehensive report designed to not only educate but to sound the alarm on Black suicidality. Attempting to push back on the trite belief that Black youth simply “do not kill themselves,” this group of Black scientists, Black mental health care practitioners, Black organizers, and Black activists are working to bring Black youth suicide into focus during conversations concerning mental health care in the United States. This blog post is largely informed by the report—please consider reading the report before reading the rest of the blog post. It is not surprising that this may be the first time you are reading exclusively about Black suicidality. Given the pervasive and prevalent systemic racism found within academia, alongside the insidious and covert discrimination (racism) found in both the nation’s greater science community, (the NIH, the NIMH, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychiatric Association) and the United States of America writ large, Black scientists and practitioners have been trying to sound the alarm with little to no avail. The reason for their lack of success is twofold. 1. White and non-Black researchers and practitioners are not doing the work nor are we listening to those who are doing the work— evidenced by your surprise at the 73% increase in suicide attempts made by Black youth in the past thirty years. And 2. Black researchers are 10% less likely to be awarded research funding in comparison to their white counterparts, leaving the important work concerning race and mental health unfunded, unfinished, and undone. Moreover, media of all kinds fails to address race statistics when reporting and disseminating information surrounding suicidality. Indeed, even in popular media, Black youth are rarely depicted on the big screen as dealing with thoughts of suicide. Black pain and suffering, particularly Black mental pain and suffering, is made invisible and invalidated as it does not fit in with the white racist oeuvre of what it means to be Black in the United States. Typically, it is the frail, misunderstood, chain-smoking white teenage boy or the bullied white teenage girl. Rarely, if ever, are we given any insight as to what specific lived experience of suicidality Black youth deal with day-to-day in the 21st century—and based off of the statistic above, it is obvious they are dealing with it. If we are to be authentic in our chants and ever-changing profile pictures, all proudly proclaiming that Black Lives Matter, we must take seriously all the ways Black people die and are at risk to die at disproportionate rates to non-Black people, inclusive of suicide. The risk factors for suicidality outlined in the Congressional Black Caucus Emergency Task Force’s report are all inextricably intertwined with inequality and modernity. Each “risk factor” outlined is a non-dominant identity—showcasing that we force Black people in the United States to pay a mental toll for each of their deviances from whiteness, the patriarchy, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism. For example, LGBTQIA+ Black youth, Black youth hailing from a low socioeconomic status, and Black youth who are targets of bullying i.e., racism, are all considered at high risk for a suicide attempt. Sure, all queer people in the U.S. pay a mental toll for their identity. It is already dangerous to be transgender and live in the United States, but couple that identity with Blackness, it is not just dangerous, it is deadly…. #SayHerName Nina Pop #SayHisName Tony McDade #BlackTransLivesMatter Similarly, socioeconomic stress is known to have deleterious effects on mental health and wellness. From slavery, to redlining, to gentrification, this country has always been designed to keep Black people socioeconomically disadvantaged—taking yet another mental toll. Another toll must be paid whenever a Black person logs into Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Will today be another day where they are forced see one of their peers lynched by police? In fact, a recent survey of young people of color suggests that exposure to “online racial traumatic events” is associated with depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms, both of which have been associated with suicide risk. Even outside of the scope of race, suicide can largely be understood as a symptom of inequity, caused by the compounding negative effects of all sorts of structural injustices: racism, classism, sexism, and ableism, rather than a direct tie to a diagnosable mental illness or an unexpected one-off crisis. What is the first step that mental health care practitioners and so-called allies can take to meaningfully push back against the rising rates of completed suicides and suicide attempts for Black youth? By understanding suicidality as a complex and nuanced social justice issue, rather than solely an issue of mental illness fixed only by pharmaceuticals and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, we are given the framework to critically understand, speak truth to, and breathe nuance into Black suicidality. In other words, we are given the framework to begin to fix it. To reiterate once more, young Black people who have attempted to take and have taken their lives did not lack resiliency nor were they necessarily mentally ill. No. The young Black people who are killing themselves live in a society where their Black peers are fearful every day. They live in a society where the odds are systemically and methodically stacked against them. They live in a society where Black people are murdered for going on a run in Georgia. #SayHisName Ahmaud Arbery. They live in a society where Black people are shot dead sleeping in their bed. #SayHerName Breonna Taylor. They live in a society where Black people cannot breathe. #SayHisName Eric Garner. #SayHisName George Floyd. They live in a society where a traffic stop is life or death. #SayHerName Sandra Bland. They live in a society where young boys are murdered for walking with their hoods on, with Skittles in their hand. #SayHisName Trayvon Martin. They live in a society where this is nothing new. #SayHisName Emmitt Till. These young Black people live within the confines of a culture that continues to foster and perpetuate such an insidious form of racism that we will never be able to say all the names of those lost senselessly to horrifying inequity and bigoted ignorance and indifference. These young Black people live in a country where they are told day-in-and-day-out that their lives do not matter. And yet, we have the audacity to be surprised when faced with a statistic that demonstrates exactly what we have told them. So, let’s call it like it is: The suicides that have transpired and will ensue in Black communities can be understood to be caused by an institutionalized inequality that requires Black folks to negotiate their quality of life with life itself. And, to only speak to their suicide and suicide attempts as a “mental health issue” not only underestimates their resiliency, but grossly discounts the emotional toll racism continues to take on Black people in the United States. And, even if Black suicidality were solely accounted for by the biomedical model of mental health, Black people are disadvantaged there as well. Indeed, Black people are less likely to have access to mental health services, less likely to seek out services, less likely to receive needed care, more likely to receive poor quality of care, and more likely to end services prematurely. This inaccessibility is rooted in systemic racism, too. What is even more frustrating is that when Black people do seek out and acquire mental health care, the Black psyche has been historically portrayed as “unwell, immoral, and inherently criminal” (read The Protest Psychosis by Jonathan Metzl and see for yourself), rendering Black anger and sadness as needing mental health care but limiting quality and meaningful access to it. Therefore, the implicit bias (racism) toward Black minds, in conjunction with a dominantly white mental health workforce, is yet another emotional and mental toll society takes from Black people daily. It is my hope that by now, the statistic at the beginning of the blog post is unsurprising. So, what are you going to do about it? Here are five easy things you can do today to address Black youth suicide and Black mental health. Listen to and learn from Black practitioners, researchers, and organizers. (Below is a reading list.) Question, always, how systems of oppression are so obviously detrimental to mental wellness and health. Acknowledge and own your privilege if you are not Black; be proactive in finding ways to use your privilege to push back against anti-Black racism in mental health care. Stop reposting Black death. Sign petitions to defund the police and other petitions organized by Black people. Black Mental Health Resources That Are Accepting Donations BEAM Collective: We are a collective of advocates, yoga teachers, artists, therapists, lawyers, religious leaders, teachers, psychologists and activists committed to the emotional/mental health and healing of Black communities. www.beam.community/whatwebelieveThe Okra Project: The Okra Project is a collective that seeks to address the global crisis faced by Black Trans people by bringing home cooked, healthy, and culturally specific meals and resources to Black Trans People wherever we can reach them. www.theokraproject.com/The Loveland Therapy Fund: With the barriers affecting access to treatment by members of diverse ethnic and racial groups. Loveland Therapy Fund provides financial assistance to Black women and girls nationally seeking therapy. thelovelandfoundation.org/loveland-therapy-fund/Harriet’s Apothecary: Harriet’s Apothecary is an intergenerational, healing village led by the brilliance and wisdom of Black Cis Women, Queer and Trans healers, artists, health professionals, magicians, activists, and ancestors. Our village, founded by Harriet Tubman and Adaku Utah on April 6, 2014, is committed to co-creating accessible, affordable, liberatory, all-body loving, all-gender honoring, community healing spaces that recognize, inspire, and deepen the healing genius of people who identify as Black, Indigenous and People of color and the allies that love us. www.harrietsapothecary.com/who-we-areEducational Resources on Black Mental Health Written by Black People The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health: Navigate an Unequal System, Learn Tools for Emotional Wellness, and Get the Help you Deserve – Dr. Rheeda Walker Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We’re Not Hurting– Dr. Terrie M. Williams Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength– Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes Un-Ashamed – Lecrae Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, A Young Black Man’s Education – Mychael Denzel Smith Willow Weep For Me: A Black Woman’s Journey Through Depression – Meri Nana-Ama Danquah Heavy – Kiese Layman My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies – Resmaa Menakem MSW, LICSW, SEP *** Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jan 12, 2021 12:18:43 GMT
What I’ve learned about suicide There's an increasing tendency to trivialise this desperate act BY JULIE BURCHILL unherd.com/2021/01/what-ive-learned-about-suicide/They say there’s nothing worse than burying a child. I wouldn’t know, as for two weeks after the suicide of my son Jack in 2015, I mysteriously lost the use of my legs and lay in bed sobbing and starving until I hallucinated — so I wasn’t even at his funeral. On the upside, I lost a quarter of my body weight. On the downside, I lost half of my heart. Always somewhat detached, I wasn’t broken by the loss of the person I loved most in my life, as is the case with many parents in a similar situation. If anything, it had the effect of making me even more self-contained, or “sociopathic” as unhelpful husbands have invariably put it during domestic squabbles. I even tried it on for size a few times myself; the onset of tinnitus in the winter of 2017 seemed as good a reason as any, so I took too many sleeping pills before and after Christmas. Evidently, both attempts were unsuccessful. My fabled capacity for taking drugs saw me awaken both times with nothing worse than a mild headache, and a typically immature reaction: what a waste of good sleeping pills, which could have been abused with alcohol to lubricate a few fun nights. During a Twitter spat a few weeks ago, a number of disturbed people sent me Photoshopped images of my son in various degrees of deathly contortion. In the photos, ranged in age from angelic toddler to the handsome young man he was when he died by hanging at the age of 29. Many of my friends were shocked and reported these people to Twitter. But I felt only mild curiosity at what kind of mind would mistake such a strange action for acceptable behaviour. I even “followed” a few of them in the hope of finding out
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jan 14, 2021 16:17:08 GMT
Suicide: Shhhhhhwww.madinamerica.com/2021/01/suicide-shhhhhh/Editor’s Note: The following essay offers a candid discussion of the writer’s suicide attempt and ongoing recovery. We are publishing it because we believe it offers insight on suicidality and the need to remove taboos around discussing this topic. Suicide rates in the United States increased by 35% between 1999 and 2016. We do not speak of it. In 2018, nearly 50,000 Americans died by suicide. We do not speak of it. What we hear even less about are the 1.4 million people who did not complete their suicide attempt. I am one of these statistics. What follows are my reasons for wanting to end my life and my journey through the system that “handled” me, and finally the responses of family and friends. Ideation As I was nearing my 79th birthday (December 31, 2019), suicidal ideation began to permeate my thoughts. I was certain that I did not want to be here for number 79. I have always had difficulty accepting care. I was and wanted to be independent. For 38 years, I took care of others as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Then, on my birthday in 2018, I gave up my private practice and went into retirement. In addition, I held a large estate sale, selling all of my collectibles and emptying my house of thousands of memories. Also, for 31 years I had been in a relationship with Jim, who had been a wonderful life’s companion but had many major physical challenges throughout our time together. Jim was about to turn 90 and I wanted to exit before he did. Because I have had extensive therapy myself, I was aware of my deeper reasons for wanting to leave life. At the age of seven, I was sent away from my home and family in Budapest on a dangerous journey to escape Communism. My mother, stepfather, and two-year-old half-sister followed. But we were separated for over two years, years in which strangers took care of me first in Europe. During these formative years, I learned to be independent and self-reliant. I learned not to expect to be cared for in ways that a young child needs to be cared for because people were either too busy or too preoccupied with the aftermath of surviving World War II. It was only through the goodness of their hearts that they had something left over for a bewildered, confused, frightened, unhappy little girl like me. As I was approaching my next birthday, I felt a decline in my energy; my life’s purpose had left when I closed my practice. I saw my future as one of having to need care eventually – care to live and care to die—and this felt unacceptable. I saw no way around it. I did not want to be warehoused into a nursing home and I did not want to go to what I consider a summer camp, those assisted-living places. My family is very small. I do have a strong spiritual life and received a Doctorate in Divinity in my 60s. I relate most to Buddhism. I have wonderful meditation room in which I keep a holographic picture of Christ welcoming a weary soul. I held this picture in my hand as I was making my attempt to leave this earth. I’ve had this picture for many years and each time I look at it, it brings me to tears. It’s the way I picture myself being welcomed, taken into the arms of Christ who understands the plight of the weary traveler. Preparation The Sunday before my suicide attempt Jim and I attended the Bat mitzvah of our friend’s granddaughter. On the outside, all seemed normal. On the inside, I was actually anticipating Tuesday, when I’d planned to end my life’s journey. Meanwhile, Jim awaited the arrival of his oldest daughter from California on Tuesday. She is a very strong person with whom I have had great difficulty but who I knew would somehow help her father get through what was to come. I had written everyone letters long in advance. I wanted to try to make sure that no one was left with feelings of guilt. In the letters, I left the name and number of the funeral home to call with instructions for my cremation. (I later found out that Jim, understandably, destroyed all of these letters except for the one to him, which remains in my computer.) In the letter, I talk about my difficulty deciding from where to leave and explain why my final choice was from our home. It said, in part: For me, it has so much to do with my difficulty feeling a sense of belonging. I have throughout my lifetime had a terribly strong need to belong. That need was satisfied twice in my life. Once by the Hammonds, who really made me a part of their big family, and then later by Florence and her family who also brought me in. And of course, I have talked to you a great deal about how strongly I have been impacted by your claiming and making me believe/know that I belonged to you. It never happened with your family and now, after you leave, that’s all that I’ll be left with. I definitely want to leave before you do. Maybe that’s extremely selfish. It probably is, but I’m so very afraid of being left. I just want to make sure that I leave first. …. Please know that your love, for now over thirty years, has poured over me, protected me, encouraged me, supported me, and helped me stay alive. … My biggest worry right now is that I get it right and that I really manage to leave the way that I am planning to. Because, really, no matter how much I love you, I worry about you. I just can’t take another day. Jim goes to bed at 10:00 every night and takes strong sleeping pills. He then sleeps soundly through the night. So I was quite sure that he would sleep till morning, when his daughter was due to arrive. At 11:00 pm, I went upstairs. I had my favorite pajamas on, navy blue with “Follow your Dreams” on the front. I made the physical preparations that I knew would soon kill me, and by 11:15 I was lying on the couch ready to go, holding the picture of the welcoming Christ. I did not feel regret, fear, anxiety, or sadness. I just wanted to exit. I began feeling some heaving in my abdomen. It was bearable. And then I heard our little dog barking at the bottom of the stairs. The barking was annoying and distracting so I went downstairs and let him up. The barking stopped and I went back to the couch. The heaving continued. That’s all I remember. Hospitalization My next memory is of Jim and policemen. I remember grabbing onto the rail, walking down the stairs, being placed into an ambulance, and taken to the hospital. I don’t remember the ride in the ambulance, but they whisked me off to a nearby hospital, where I lay for over 12 hours with three different guards on shift duty. I felt like I was being treated like nothing short of a criminal, without even being read my Miranda Rights! I was contained in a small, very cold, dimly lit room in the basement. No food or drink. No one to ask for a blanket. I was able to see some movement of staff behind a glass window, but no one came out to talk to me. No one told me what to expect or what the next step would look like in my imprisonment. I saw a camera in the room that was aimed directly onto the bed that I was lying on, so there was absolutely no way for me to have continued with my suicide attempt. There wasn’t anything in the room that resembled either a rope or any sort of sharp object, so what was this costly security really all about? I have since spoken to others who have survived a suicide attempt and learned that treatment such as this is pretty much standard. Late in the evening, someone came to tell me that I would be transported to a psychiatric hospital in another town almost an hour from my home. I asked if there was a hospital closer because I had a 90-year-old husband who would not be able to make the trip. The answer was firm. NO. Finally, at 11:00 p.m., I was strapped onto a stretcher and in the dark, pouring rain, taken to the psychiatric hospital. When I began to realize what had happened. I felt rejected by God. I was not wanted in whatever place might exist after death. I wasn’t angry. More confused and very much without a future plan. I’d arrived at the psychiatric hospital around midnight and was asked to sit in a chair. Fifteen minutes later, a nurse told me that she needed to take a picture of me. I yielded because I had no choice. Then she asked me to follow her into a private room where she said that I needed to strip so that she could look at my skin. She said that she was checking for bruises, tattoos, etc. I am the daughter of Holocaust survivors and the stripping brought flashbacks. However, at that point, I was too numb to really care what they would do to me. After this, she gave me a uniform, navy blue pants, and a shirt of questionable material. It was close to 1:00 a.m. when she gave me a little blank book and a pen with which I couldn’t stab myself. They couldn’t give me anything to sleep because, they said, they can’t dispense medication after 12. It didn’t seem possible to get any sleep there; it was incredibly noisy, with lots of patients sleeping in the hallways. When I asked the nurse why she said that people preferred that. Later I had four vials of blood drawn and met my roommate. The patients could make phone calls out. And I did, every day. I called Jim. I told him how awful the place was, and he very wisely told me that this was my penalty for doing what I did. Somehow, his saying this made a real difference to me—and a difference in my attitude toward my confinement. It made sense that I did, indeed, have to suffer the consequences of my actions. Psychiatric Treatment I absolutely could not stand the psychiatrist. Somehow, she reminded me of a black widow spider, interesting but deadly. In our first meeting, she asked if I was glad that I was alive. At this point, I didn’t know what the answer should have been and gave the wrong one, the honest one. No. How could I be glad when I put so much effort into killing myself? She gave me a dubious look and said that she would see me the next day. The atmosphere in the wards was very disturbing at night—lots of noise. My roommate slept in the hallway but every night someone brought her to bed at around 1:30 a.m. with much talk and commotion. My phone, of course, had been confiscated. All of my phone numbers were in the phone, so even if I wanted to—and I didn’t— I couldn’t call anyone. Today when I told the psychiatrist that I felt like I was in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, she took serious umbrage. She then put me on medication, saying that I was suffering from Major Depressive Disorder. She assured me that I would be with her for at least 10 days and after that she might send me someplace else. That’s when I understood the enormous power she had, and I made myself into a model patient. No more Cuckoo’s Nest! My daily meetings with the psychiatrist changed. I began giving her the “right” answers. Yes, I was really glad to be alive. I am finding a purpose. And what is it? It’s to appreciate how much I mean to others. The medication is helping. That last one was possibly the only bit of truth. She’d put me on Effexor, plus Remeron for sleep. I was not sure how much the meds were helping, but I didn’t think they were hurting. I watched the psychiatrist and I know she was watching me. She didn’t trust me. With good reason. I didn’t trust her either, also with good reason. She came into the common room daily and for a few minutes visited every patient. Except me, whom she called into her office for a few minutes. I wondered how these “visits” would translate for insurance purposes. Life on the Wards Throughout the day there was group therapy. The groups were all centered on Behavioral Cognitive Therapy, teaching people how to understand and control unhealthy thoughts and behaviors. I diligently attended every group because attendance was taken, and participation observed and recorded. And, I am certain, relayed to the psychiatrist. The people on the ward were divided into sides by age– I was on the side of the elderly. There was very little talk on the old people’s side. But there was a great deal of noise, complaining, screaming, and yelling. However, because my mind was still intact, I had the privilege to go across the hall to visit the younger group. Some of the younger ones there completely distanced themselves from those of us who came over from the other side. Also, in order to get there, I had to ask one of the busy people at the desk to buzz me in. They didn’t like to be disturbed like that. There was no eye contact at all in that place. The patients didn’t look at one another. The staff, too, did not make eye contact. They were either too busy, too tired, or too burned out. Therefore, if you needed some kind of attention, you had to advocate for yourself. I have had a lot of work with great expense done on my teeth and at home, I am required to use the water pick in addition to flossing and using a tiny broom-like cleaning contraption that goes in between the teeth. Since my handbag was confiscated and under lock and key with the “instruments” in my bag, I was unable to access these innocuous dental aids. Finally, on day six, I spoke up, and very begrudgingly, my locker was opened, and I was handed my little wand. The staff person had to follow me into the bathroom to make sure I wasn’t in there trying to stab myself. The staff was definitely overworked. Twelve-hour shifts! From their vacuous, tired eyes, it was hard to tell the staff from the patients. I doubt there were anything close to staff meetings where there might be some support for them and some debriefing, some talk of coping strategies. The staff seemed as uncared-for and as isolated as the patients, except they got to leave. Transition While in lockdown I had to meet with a social worker. The meeting with her gave me a bit of hope because she said that she knew my therapist and mentor with whom I had worked for over 14 years. When I met with her one on one, she was personable, available, open, helpful, and real. However, near the end of my confinement when I had to attend a group meeting for my final evaluation, she acted as if she had never seen me before. She was on automatic pilot, behaving mechanically and throwing printed-out questionnaires at me to make sure that I was not still suicidal. She was clearly caught in the system. It was this social worker’s task to secure an outpatient program for me. Consequently, I found myself at a university behavioral health center one week after coming home. Ironically, I had worked as a clinician for that same center during the 1980s. This was hardly the full circle that I would have envisioned. The program was three times weekly for eight weeks. I was also to check in for half an hour each week with a very nice L.C.S.W. whose goal, it seemed, was to ascertain that I no longer had suicidal ideation. I assured her, truthfully, that I did not. At the center, I was placed into a group called IOP (Intensive Outpatient Program.) The group was facilitated by a competent, gentle social worker who made a heroic attempt in meeting the needs of a diverse group of us. A 55-year-old woman’s issue was that she wanted the program to help her get out of a nursing home in which she felt she did not belong. A young man with ongoing suicidal ideations sat mostly in silence. An extremely verbal man of 78 dominated the group. He was a retired bus driver and was left without a purpose. We had that in common. Not much else, but it turns out that he gave me the most to think about when, in his many musings, he proposed that people who were suicidal were fearful. I thought about that a lot and, for me, that’s absolutely true. I was fearful of becoming dependent, fearful of losing my autonomy, fearful of becoming a burden to others. Aftermath The reason for my coming out and sharing this experience is the incredible silence I’ve experienced around it. Not one person has mentioned my suicide attempt to me. Recently, I visited family members who obviously know about what happened. I caught their 28-year-old staring at me. My more-than-likely accurate guess is that he was wondering what was going on with me then, and what is going on with me now. I know that he, too, has had some mental health issues. The next time that I saw his mother and dad I brought up their son and told them that I felt that he might have some questions for me and that I would be glad to talk to him about it. I was assured that their son was all right and that it would be best to leave it alone. And when I have opened up about it, there’s been more silence. When I told one of my good friends, a clinician herself, why I had been missing for 11 days, she said: “You’re crazy.” I know she didn’t mean to insult me; she just is not able to go there. She is unable to get it. She herself has a tremendously strong urge to live, and my guess is that when we have that, it must be very difficult to understand another person’s wish not to live. No one has been willing or able to go there with me. This silence has left me very much alone. Alone is also one of the reasons I wanted to leave. Alone is probably one of the many reasons why people choose to leave. Something needs to change. Will it? I don’t know. I hope so. My thinking really hasn’t changed all that much since the attempt. I still don’t like the idea of the journey ahead, in which I will have to face more of my vulnerability and fragility. Truthfully, I would be terrified of a second failure. And I do believe I have to learn the hard lesson of allowing others to care for me when I need it. I carry with me one of the prompts given to me at OIP: ASK FOR HELP. I’m going to call my friend Margie today and ask her to give me a lift to the supermarket! It’s a start. As a society, we’re becoming a bit more comfortable talking about sex, race, diversity, and so on. But I think we’re still a long way away from dealing with the intimacy and complexity of suicide. Jim, for example, has refused to mention my suicide attempt until I asked him about it recently. His answer was insightful. He said that his silence was because he felt that there was “shame” associated with suicide. And when I questioned him further, he said that it was because there was also “guilt” associated with the shame. It doesn’t have to be that way. For people who have had someone in their lives make a suicide attempt, try not to avoid thinking about it. Instead, focus on developing empathy. This would mean actually feeling badly for the person who was no longer was able to tolerate living, and expressing compassion by being open to talking about it with them– however difficult that may be. *** Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jan 28, 2021 12:06:55 GMT
What working in emergency care taught me about suicide riskpsyche.co/ideas/what-working-in-emergency-care-taught-me-about-suicide-riskIsabel wanted to escape the pain she has lived with for years. She wasn’t sure what would come after death, but she knew that it would be better than her life at that moment. A few hours later, after her husband found her surrounded by empty packets of medication and a bottle of vodka, I am preparing to assess her in the emergency department. From her notes, I see that Isabel has been seeing a community mental health team for the past year because of depression. In the first appointment, they picked up on some worrying use of binge-drinking to cope with her feelings, but this hasn’t been brought up again. I also see she had an appointment last week to increase the dose of her antidepressant, and that the team updated her risk assessment. I check the risk of suicide: low. My heart sinks. ‘Low’ tells me nothing about Isabel, and it doesn’t explain why she has tried to end her life. ‘Low’ has left me more confused than when I started. At the moment, in many parts of the world, anyone who is assessed by a mental health professional will have a suicide risk assessment in their first appointment. If they are seen by someone new – for example, in an emergency department – the assessment will be done again. On the basis of this, a patient is typically classified as being at a low, medium or high risk of suicide, or no risk at all. The trouble is that these categories are extremely poor at predicting if an individual will die by suicide. Research shows that 85 per cent of people who died by suicide while under the care of mental health services were deemed to have ‘low’ or ‘no’ immediate risk at their final assessment. At the same time, only 5.5 per cent of people labelled at ‘high risk’ of suicide will go on to die that way. Expert enquiries have now clearly stated that these ‘categorical’ risk-assessment tools shouldn’t be used to make clinical decisions, such as whether to admit someone to hospital. Despite this, the majority (85 per cent) of mental health services in the United Kingdom are using this type of suicide risk assessment. This approach is also common in other countries, including the United States. This is partly because they’re quick and straightforward to use: a simple series of tick boxes (a free-text section is usually provided at the end, but it’s optional). In addition, these simple categories make it easier to collect data for research purposes. But speed and ease don’t count for much when the tool isn’t accurate, and therefore doesn’t actually help patients or communication between clinicians. The problem is that categorical risk assessments rely too much on population-wide risk factors, rather than taking individual circumstances into account. A decision about whether a person is at high risk, and therefore what level of care is needed, is based on broad factors such as their age and whether they’re unemployed. But it’s the individual details that tell us something about how badly a person needs help, and what we can do about it. Suicide is a highly complex human behaviour that involves myriad personal factors and a large amount of uncertainty. How can placing someone in a risk category ever be useful when people are pushed and pulled out of these categories every day by life events and the fluctuating symptoms of mental illness? Consider the chance involved in a parent leaving the medication cabinet unlocked, or the death of a loved one in a car accident, and how these events would impact on someone’s risk of suicide. Additionally, population-wide risk factors for suicide largely tell us about a person’s lifetime risk of suicide, but in clinical practice we need to make judgments about the coming days, weeks and months. A final issue is that ‘low’ and ‘high’ are comparative words: ‘low’ and ‘high’ compared with what? This is never specified in a risk-assessment tool.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Feb 2, 2021 20:20:46 GMT
Anatomy of a Suicide: Stress and the Human Condition www.madinamerica.com/2019/12/anatomy-of-a-suicide-stress-and-the-human-condition/I remember saying to my therapist that I must be doing something wrong. Life felt so hard. Why was I struggling so much? I would have given anything to fit in with the favored crowd — the commendable, worthwhile, socially entitled, who wear success like a loose garment, bedecked with grace and ease. Why couldn’t I just follow my dreams and the latest instructions from Oprah, Dr. Phil or Martha Stewart Living and pull prosperity casually, effortlessly out of my trendy, warm, chunky, soft-stretch, cable-knit beanie? (Like they presumably did.) Wasn’t that the point of popular media, celebrity talk shows, and mainstream self-help? For everyone in the know, this kind of flow is regarded as manifest destiny. For the rest of us, there are coping skills. Either way, respectable people do not lose their shit, not for a moment and certainly not for years or decades at a time. A hard lesson for me to get in my suicidal journey was that my body was having none of this. I kept pointing to the beautiful tri-fold brochure that the culture said my life was supposed to look like. It was such a great message: Bountiful living is free for the taking. Personalities, careers, and relationships can all look fabulous. All they need is a bit of shaping, conditioning, and polishing. My existence can be as readily manicured as cuticles and nails. But my body kept pointing out my real experience. Incontrovertibly, the two didn’t match. I did everything I could to get myself on board. I tried drugs, self-talk, journaling, yoga, mindfulness, all kinds of therapy and a zillion self-help strategies. Try as I might, my body refused to cooperate. The more I tried to convince her what was good for us, the more she dug in her heels. I would use the most esteemed positive self-talk. She would fart, burp, and break out in impetigo. So I tried to up my ante. I prodded her, cajoled, manipulated, offered or withheld praise and treats, resorted to shame, blame and outright cruelty. Nothing worked. In fact, it backfired. At some point, my body just got too upset. She started doing her own thing, whenever, wherever and however she felt like. No matter that my career, housing or finances would be ruined. Some imperceptible line had been crossed, and she slipped out of my reach. On those rare occasions that I could get a rise out of her, she refused to focus or calm down. Try as I might, I couldn’t bring her back. That was my state three years ago, when I thought I would toss in the towel. It wasn’t my first visit to this realm, but it was probably the scariest and darkest. We’ve come a long way since then, my body and me. It’s taken considerable study, reflection, and experience to give my body some credit. I now believe my body was a lot wiser than I suspected. I wish I had listened and started taking what she was trying to tell me seriously a lot sooner. I might not have had to sink so deep or stoop so low in so many areas of my life if only I had. What My Body Wants Me to Tell You My body doesn’t speak English. She speaks feelings. When she’s upset with me or my life, the language she speaks is stress. 1. Stress is a natural response to threat and overwhelm The human body has a “surprisingly similar set of responses … to a broad array of stressors.” (Sapolsky, 2004, p. 8.) 1 The same basic templates appear to be hard-wired in all of us — a sort of instinctive pre-programming — for when life gets too threatening or overwhelming. 2 3 Thus, when certain thresholds are reached, corresponding survival defenses (mediated by the stress response) predictably emerge. 2. The stress response tells me what I care about Like most modern humans, it’s not just physical survival that I’m concerned with. I want to survive socially, emotionally, and economically too (among other things). As a result, I don’t just activate the stress response when I’m being chased by a tiger. The range of concerns is much broader than that. According to Robert Sapolsky (2004), professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and world-renowned stress researcher: We activate the stress-response in anticipation of challenges, and typically those challenges are the purely psychological and social tumult that would make no sense to a zebra. (p. 9) 3. Stress is a response to things that matter Stress is how my body tells me something matters. It may be tangible or intangible, physical or psychological, material or spiritual, cognitive or behavioral, personal or social, passive or active… Any or all of this (and more) can activate the stress response and its corresponding mental and physical impacts. Again here’s Sapolsky (2004) describing the stress response: There is now an extraordinary amount of physiological, biochemical, and molecular information available as to how all sorts of intangibles in our lives can affect very real bodily events. These intangibles can include emotional turmoil, psychological characteristics, our position in society, and how our society treats people of that position. And they can influence medical issues such as whether cholesterol gums up our blood vessels or is safely cleared from the circulation, whether our fat cells stop listening to insulin and plunge us into diabetes, whether neurons in our brain will survive five minutes without oxygen during a cardiac arrest. (p. 5) Thus, the stress response is every bit as complex and multi-dimensional as I am. 4. Stress is about protecting my future Something does not have to be happening now to stress me out. As a survival strategy, the stress response is always trying to get a head start on trouble. Thus, my stress response thoughtfully alerts me whenever I’m afraid something could happen: [T]he stress-response can be mobilized not only in response to physical or psychological insults, but also in expectation of them. It is this generality of the stress-response that is the most surprising—a physiological system activated not only by all sorts of physical disasters but by just thinking about them as well. (p. 7) In other words, I don’t just stress about things that threaten my present survival. Continual uncertainty about future survival will do me in too. That’s the normal human body. I’m not saying anything new or radical here. I’m just stating the facts of life about the body I was born with. No chemical imbalance, pre-existing trauma, or genetic defects required. Just my human body, as engineered by evolution, operated according to the instructions encoded in normal human DNA. So How Do I Get from There to Suicide? In my own experience, wanting to die is a logical consequence of mounting physical and mental distress. The more overwhelmed I become, the less I am able to function and, as a result, the physical, emotional, and practical fallout progressively rises. Ultimately, this reaches intolerable, seemingly hopeless levels that lead me to want to end my life. Here’s a diagram from the first piece in this series (“The Sisyphus Cycle: How everyday stress leads to suicide”), if you want a quick review: Rest in Link.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Mar 3, 2021 16:18:30 GMT
Devastating news for our community; In loving memory of Kelly Michelle Walsh, The Positivity Princess Posted on March 3, 2021 by Katie Mottram emergingproud.com/2021/03/03/devastating-news-for-our-community-in-loving-memory-of-kelly-michelle-walsh-the-positivity-princess/It’s with deep deep sadness that we’ve received the devastating news that our lovely Rep Kelly decided to end her life and transition last weekend. I know this will come as a huge shock to many of you. Kelly was a beautiful loving Soul and had been struggling for some time, especially as a sensitive empath with the world in such crisis. As we all know, this is not a linear journey and every day can bring new challenges for us to navigate. This is a tragic loss of a beautiful Soul, too bright for our world in crisis… Kelly touched so many hearts whilst she was on the Earth plane. It’s been a hugely challenging decision as a friend and Publisher to decide whether to continue to promote the Emerging Proud through Suicide book that Kelly was Rep for, but ultimately I think Kelly would wish for her message to continue in the hope that other lives can be saved. This is an opportunity for Kelly’s voice, message and love to continue to have a positive ripple effect beyond her death. This tragedy demonstrates just how vital the messages in this book are, and how safe holding places are desperately needed which provide love and compassion over pathologisation, whatever a person may be experiencing. Kelly had unbounded energy and enthusiasm for doing this work, and in this book her voice, loving spirit, positivity and magic can live on. Please please take time now to self-care – Kelly was so dedicated to her mission she always put others before herself, but I know she would want each and every one of us to take care of ourselves during this grieving process. Surround yourself with support; I’m attaching a resources list should you need to reach out for anything more than you already have around you. I am doing the same. Resources for Suicide - emergingproud.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/resources-for-suicide-1.pdf
|
|
|
Post by Admin on May 8, 2021 18:31:33 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 7, 2021 16:03:22 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Aug 1, 2021 8:40:43 GMT
Suicidality: When Your Feelings Are Too Dangerous By Chris Rothbauer -July 24, 2021 www.madinamerica.com/2021/07/suicidality-when-your-feelings-are-too-dangerous-draft/Have you been telling people online you want to die?” I just stood there, looking at the police officer on my doorstep like a deer in the headlights. It’s true; I’d been in a Christian chatroom telling people that I didn’t want to live because it felt like God had abandoned me. I’d been venting my emotions through online interactions for weeks, but I’d never really thought much about it. Now, I found myself trying to explain to the cop about behavior that could potentially land me in protective custody. The thing was, I hadn’t called the police. I would later find out that a moderator in the chatroom had looked up my IP address, called my Internet Service Provider, and told them that someone was trying to commit suicide in a chat room. My provider proceeded to figure out which account had been using that IP address and sent the police to the billing address on my account. All of this had taken about an hour (technology then wasn’t what it is now, so it took a while to find me), so I was quite surprised when there was a knock on my door. “I’m fine.” It was all I could think of to tell the cop. I wasn’t fine, but I knew that, in that moment, he wanted to hear that I had no intention of harming myself. “Why don’t you come with me? We can go and get you some help,” the officer replied. The idea of going to a psychiatric hospital, frankly, frightened me. My religious beliefs had gone so far as to tell me that mental health issues were demons, so allowing myself to be taken away by this police officer would mean admitting to the world that I was being controlled by sinful forces. “No, really, I’m okay.” I didn’t want to go and, if he took me, it wasn’t going to be voluntarily. Of course, I didn’t realize that I could be taken into custody without my consent. We went back and forth like this for maybe fifteen minutes as I practiced the broken-record technique. Whatever the cop told me, I just kept on telling him I was all right, not willing to let him wear me down and take me away. A lot had gone wrong in my life in recent years, but it felt like someone wanted to remove what little self-determination I still had left. Eventually, the cop threw up his arms in defeat. I don’t know why he didn’t take me into involuntary custody that night, but to this day, I’m glad he didn’t. It’s not that I don’t believe that I didn’t have things I needed to work through, but at that point in my life, I don’t think hospitalization was what I needed. What I did learn was that talking about my feelings of wanting to die wasn’t safe. That I felt things that were so dangerous, there was no one at all with whom I could talk about them, and nowhere –not even online—was a safe place to talk about my deep feeling of not wanting to exist anymore. As a result, I spent the better part of the next decade not telling anyone when I was suicidal. *** In my teens, it felt like my life was falling apart. Growing up in the 1990s was tough for a queer kid who didn’t want to be queer, and I was trying all I could to change who I was. The evangelical church convinced me that I was a sinner, that I was a horrible person, and that, if I couldn’t figure out how to change, I’d end up in Hell with other people like me. As my efforts to change my sexuality failed repeatedly, I started to wonder whether maybe I deserved the eternal damnation that was being promised me. The turmoil I felt over my sexuality and gender identity was just the latest in a series of upheavals in my life. Emotional abuse was normal growing up: from my father, from my peers, from my minister and people at church, and even from teachers. They constantly reiterated that I could not trust my emotions. What I learned was that the person I knew myself to be wasn’t okay, that other people knew me better than I knew myself, and that there was something deeply wrong with me. In retrospect, there were signs that depression was creeping into my life as early as fourth grade, with my emotions coming out in uncontrolled fits of anger. I had never been suicidal, though. Not until I discovered and expressed my sexuality, mourning over unrequited love with a male friend who was never into me in the same way I was into him. I didn’t want to be queer. I wanted to be “normal,” whatever that was supposed to mean, and I was desperate to find a way to be the straight man that society told me I was destined to be. In my mind, if I didn’t grow up, marry a woman, have children, and a house in the suburbs with white picket fences and a dog in the yard, I had failed. Added to that, all the years of abuse had left me feeling I shouldn’t defend myself, thinking that other people knew what I needed better than me. So, when I got my first job at a local fast-food restaurant, I didn’t question when my boss started asking me to work later and later, eventually sometimes until 2:00 a.m. on school nights. With less and less time to do homework and study, by my junior year I’d stopped even showing up for school most days. All my life, the one thing I’d always been praised for was my performance in school. It was the sole thing I always felt I did right, and I got what little self-esteem I had from being a “good” student. Between my emerging sexuality, emotional abuse in virtually every area of my life, toxic religious beliefs, and the loss of my identity as a student, I had lost any hope I had of my life going the way I thought it was supposed to. Because I had never been taught that there were other ways of imagining my future, I had no resilience to be able to withstand the loss of my vision of how I thought life should be. *** When I was 16, I was introduced to the burgeoning World Wide Web through public computers at the library. The internet was a new thing for most of us: It had previously been restricted to rich people and niche hobbyists. Now, though, I could just drive down to the local library and find a world of information at my fingertips. Eventually, I acquired a hand-me-down i486 computer. Combined with a low-cost dial-up connection, I now had the ability to access the internet from the privacy of my home. On one hand, I was now able to privately access gay erotica, and it was becoming more and more apparent that my worst fears about myself were true. On the other, I discovered the world of chat rooms, where I could talk with strangers about anything instantly. I found myself spending more and more time in evangelical Christian chat rooms, where I would spend hours and hours talking about things I did not feel comfortable bringing up with my pastor or fellow church members. Instinctually, I felt I needed someone to talk with, someone who could understand me and maybe even provide a little guidance. I didn’t have anyone in my life that I felt comfortable talking to, but strangers were much more neutral, and I didn’t have to worry about their judgments affecting the course of my offline life. I got a lot of bad advice in those days and a lot of insisting that, if I just trusted God enough, I’d be able to change my sexual orientation and gender expression. The problem, I was told, wasn’t beliefs that were gaslighting me into believing I was irreparably flawed. No, the problem was I just didn’t have enough faith, and it was up to me to change to fit a way of life that was becoming increasingly impossible for me. This did not help my mental health and, since I felt completely comfortable telling the strangers in the chat rooms how I was feeling, I didn’t hold back in telling them I didn’t want to be alive any longer. In a strange way, it was cathartic, being able to get these emotions out, expressing the despair I felt, and having someone listen. I didn’t have a plan and I don’t even know how I would have killed myself; I just felt so low that a part of me wished I had never been born. Of course, I know I wasn’t truly being heard; the people in the room spent most of the time trying to talk me out of actions I didn’t intend to take. I was naïve enough to believe that, since these people didn’t know me, there wouldn’t be any consequences for venting in these rooms. That was until that night a moderator figured out how to find me and sent police to my house to prevent me from killing myself. *** The funny thing is, in retrospect, I don’t blame the person who called the police on me. Our society so misunderstands suicidal ideation that merely uttering any hint that they might want to die leads to feelings of fear and urgency in others. We are taught that such thoughts mean that a suicide attempt is imminent and that the person must be stopped immediately from hurting themselves. Suicide is the ultimate expression of the brokenness of our system and our world. If we fail in stopping a person from committing suicide, our culture sends us messages that their death is somehow our failure. I have known people who harbored guilt for decades after because they didn’t recognize that their loved one had slid so far into despair. The result is that we become ultra-vigilant towards any hint that suicide is possible. Suicidal ideation is considered an early warning sign that it is possible our loved one could kill themselves. While it’s true that ideation is a risk factor for suicide attempts, most people who think about killing themselves, even chronically, never actually attempt suicide. This is not surprising considering how common suicidal thoughts are. One 2008 study estimated that 8.3 million U.S. adults aged 18 and over, or 3.7% of the population, had suicidal thoughts in the previous year. This data points to the reality that, while suicidal ideation shouldn’t be written off, it is a sign of a deeper malaise that doesn’t always lead to death. It also confirms an uncomfortable reality: suicidal ideation is relatively common, and there are probably people in all of our lives that have thought about killing themselves. If we institutionalized every person who’s recently felt like they wanted to kill themselves, we would need to build many more psychiatric hospitals. The truth is that suicidal ideation is so often a cry for help. I know mine was. People who are at the point of taking their own lives typically do not try to reach out in the ways I was. I was still looking for hope that the state of my life was not permanent. Instead, I was met with such fear that I learned I could not trust how I was feeling, that my feelings were to blame for my misery rather than the state of my life. When we fail to learn strategies to address suicidal ideation, we send a message that what’s wrong is the person who feels that they want to die, not the system that has left them feeling such despair that there doesn’t seem to be a point to living. *** In retrospect, I think that my life felt so out of control that I didn’t see a point in going on. I really believed that even God hated my life and, if that was the case, why should I even keep trying? Visiting chat rooms was my way of trying to get someone to convince me that I was worth fighting for, that my life could be changed, and that I wasn’t destined to live a miserable existence that would end in eternal torment. As an educator, I now train people to recognize that what people are seeking in these moments is connection, and that’s definitely what I was seeking. I wanted someone to listen to me and tell me that a reasonable person would feel despair after having as many things thrown at them as I had. I wanted someone to tell me that my mental state wasn’t the result of demons but because I had lived a hard life to that point. Instead, I was met with people who, through no fault of their own, didn’t know how to relate to me. They just wanted me to stop being suicidal. I’m not sure it ever occurred to any of them that maybe feeling like my life was pointless was normal in the social conditions I was living in and after the trauma I had experienced throughout my life. Would things have been different if they had told me that my feelings, while maybe seeming abnormal, were completely understandable? *** Recovery has been a long, hard road for me, a process of learning to reshape my beliefs, going back to school, and finding new ways of living. Today, in my role as a Unitarian Universalist minister, one of my most precious duties is to hold close the emotions of the people I serve, to connect with them, and to help them feel that there is a road forward. As an Emotional CPR educator, I hope that one day we’ll all have the tools we need to know how to respond to people who are in the midst of emotional crisis. The truth is, though, that I occasionally experience suicidal ideation even today. After all, recovery is not linear; there are lots of twists and turns, and the things that happen in my life can bring up old hurts that I thought were long ago healed. The difference today is that I have a support system of people who help me through the difficult times. Though I occasionally feel despair, these periods have become shorter and shorter as I’ve come to feel that there are more roads forward than I ever could have imagined. I’ve never forgotten what I learned when the police came to my door. It still takes a lot of trust for me to talk about those feelings when they happen because, frankly, I don’t know who the next person will be who calls the police because they heard me say I was feeling suicidal. I learned that I can’t trust people, and, to some degree, I still think I have to be really cautious in whom I decide to show my feelings. There are still colleagues, family, and friends with whom I would never talk about my feelings because I don’t trust that they could handle them, much less strangers and acquaintances who don’t know me well enough to judge whether my thoughts are a sign that I’m in imminent danger. I have even questioned whether therapists and psychologists I saw in subsequent years would have understood or if, like that chat room moderator, they would have called the police and reported that I was a danger to myself. When I don’t feel like anyone understands me and that my emotions are too heavy to be expressed, the result is that I just bottle them up until they explode. This can lead to much more tragic consequences, including alienation and even pushing me further toward suicide, than if I were simply given space to feel like someone is truly listening to me without an agenda. I am involved in the radical mental health movement because I want this situation to change. When we push people aside, make them feel their thoughts are so dangerous they can’t be expressed without their volition being stripped from them, we do a great disservice to everyone involved. The result will not be healthier people, but people who feel disconnected from others because their emotions cause such distress they can’t be trusted not to harm us when we express them. The result of this situation is a loss for everyone: people become disconnected from one another and we all learn to be silent and to suppress our emotions, especially when others don’t trust us to find our own way forward. This means that people for whom suicidal thoughts may lead to a plan or even an attempt to kill themselves will keep those thoughts private as well. After all, when seeking health care could lead to disempowerment and disconnection, why even bother to try to find any other way through the pain we’re feeling? We each need ways of responding to others’ emotional crises that will nurture connection in the midst of their trauma. The result of not doing this is that we will continue to teach youth that they are “too much” and that it’s safer to just keep their mouths shut and try to push through without the support and connection they yearn for so deeply. This requires a profound paradigm shift, one that would ask us to stop viewing psychiatric treatment as the sole option for suicidal ideation and recognize that, when people feel connected to others and to life, they will realize that deep within them are limitless resources to navigate their challenges and a support system to hold them when they feel overwhelmed.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 10, 2021 21:16:14 GMT
Suicide prevention www.who.int/health-topics/suicide#tab=tab_1More than 700 000 people die by suicide every year. Furthermore, for each suicide, there are more than 20 suicide attempts. Suicides and suicide attempts have a ripple effect that impacts on families, friends, colleagues, communities and societies. Suicides are preventable. Much can be done to prevent suicide at individual, community and national levels.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2021 11:46:24 GMT
Injury Prevention & Control #BeThere to Help Prevent Suicide Image of one person comforting another person by holding their clasped hands Suicide is a serious public health problem that can have lasting harmful effects on individuals, families, and communities. Suicide is more than a mental health concern. A CDC study showed that a range of factors contribute to suicide among those with and without known mental health conditions. Everyone can help prevent suicide by knowing the warning signs and where to get help. www.cdc.gov/injury/features/be-there-prevent-suicide/index.html
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 20, 2021 18:29:39 GMT
|
|
|
Post by flyingcarpet46 on Oct 26, 2021 8:10:12 GMT
My 36 year old daughter called me. Asked me to come to her. Said the reason was 'mental' .Turns out she wanted me to be with her while she called the doctor for help but she didnt tell me this when I arrived.She didnt call the doctor. 'Suicide' has not arisen in our chats but she eventually told me she was very sad and it had become unbearable. I had not told her that I have been suicidal at times but her dad did tell her about me (I was not pleased). I dont take medication (long story) but D is not me and if medication helps her I will support her. She tells me she just wants someone to tell her things will get better. I'm not good at this but I have a friend who is and D is going to meet up with her. The S word has not been mentioned but may crop up retrospectively. At the moment she just wants to be held, for me to be close( watch videos together, listen to music). She has upsetting physical conditions and carers/PersonalmAssistants visit daily but she has not told them why I am here with her. Support/payment can be refused or withdrawn if family/friends can provide it but D told Social Services when applying for Direct Payments that I cant provide the physical assistance she needs. Will my presence be reported back to the agency/social services providing her carers in these times when there is not enough funding/care support to go round? My daughter has not told them why I am here. She doesnt want to.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 26, 2021 9:28:09 GMT
My 36 year old daughter called me. Asked me to come to her. Said the reason was 'mental' .Turns out she wanted me to be with her while she called the doctor for help but she didnt tell me this when I arrived.She didnt call the doctor. 'Suicide' has not arisen in our chats but she eventually told me she was very sad and it had become unbearable. I had not told her that I have been suicidal at times but her dad did tell her about me (I was not pleased). I dont take medication (long story) but D is not me and if medication helps her I will support her. She tells me she just wants someone to tell her things will get better. I'm not good at this but I have a friend who is and D is going to meet up with her. The S word has not been mentioned but may crop up retrospectively. At the moment she just wants to be held, for me to be close( watch videos together, listen to music). She has upsetting physical conditions and carers/PersonalmAssistants visit daily but she has not told them why I am here with her. Support/payment can be refused or withdrawn if family/friends can provide it but D told Social Services when applying for Direct Payments that I cant provide the physical assistance she needs. Will my presence be reported back to the agency/social services providing her carers in these times when there is not enough funding/care support to go round? My daughter has not told them why I am here. She doesnt want to. Am sorry to hear of your very difficult situation. X
|
|