BunnyRainbows said 10 years, 10 months ago:

I’m creating this thread because there is entirely too much ignorance regarding depression and suicide.

Suicide- attempting, planning, or thinking about it – is indicative that there is something so painful going on that the person is actually considering death as a better alternative. Think about it for a moment – doing harm to yourself is not something that most people do for fun.

Body piercings and BDSM are one thing, those are a sort of manner of expression. If you want attention and don’t mind pain, you get a whole bunch of piercings, or a tattoo. If you dislike pain (as most people do, I know, weird), you get attention by… Calling someone, updating your Facebook status, complaining on twitter, creating a blog, or sighing really loudly. There are a ton of methods for getting attention that don’t involve hurting yourself. People tend to gravitate toward the easiest thing they can do to solve a problem, and some of those things can be very negative.

For example – low on cash and have a leaky pipe? You’ll google it to find the fastest and cheapest way to fix it “good enough” to not have to hire a plumber. Not really talented at anything, but DESPERATE for attention? Start posting extremely offensive or incendiary things in forums or make a YouTube channel.

If you have never even considered suicide as a solution to your problems, try to imagine what it would take to kill yourself. Besides that, if someone is attempting suicide, there is a pretty good chance that they could die. If they wanted attention so badly, wouldn’t they want to be alive to get it? What sense does that theory make. Flaying yourself like a fine cut of salmon sounds like a self-made solution centered on pain.

“I’m in pain now, so what’s this much more to end it all?” That would be a general thought.

In fact, most people who commit suicide don’t actually WANT to die, they just don’t want to live with the pain anymore. They are basically finding the quickest solution that they have access to resolve the problem of pain. Sometimes cancer patients become suicidal because of the pain they endure.

The point is that for people who say they want to kill themselves, they are reaching out for help and they don’t know how to get it. They don’t want to be in pain anymore, but they don’t know how to make the pain stop. And, since so many people continue to choose ignorance over understanding, mental illness is still something that is stigmatized in mot parts of the country for the pure and simple fact that you can’t “see” it. The person afflicted doesn’t get a runny nose or turn purple to make it obvious to the world that something has happened with the brain’s chemistry that is causing a great deal of pain.

Remember Harry Potter? The 4th movie (sorry book fans) where he comes face to face with Voldemort? Voldemort’s ominous threat that he would torture Harry so much that he “would beg for death”. Yeah, that’s the kind of idea I’m communicating here.

If someone close to you expresses that they want to kill themselves as in “I want to kill myself” not “OMG I’m so embarrassed. I wish I could crawl under a rock and die!” Though either way, you’d still want to make sure they aren’t actually suicidal. Here are the steps you take:

1. Ask them if they have a plan, that is, do they have an idea of how they would kill themselves? If they do, that means that the pain has reached a high enough intensity that they’re actually looking around and seeing what is available to them to use to kill themselves.

2. If they do not have a plan, encourage the, to speak with a counselor at school or with a counselor either provided by the employer via EAP (employee assistance plan) or elsewhere. If they can talk with a professional through these feelings, they can prevent the pain from becoming so bad that death is actually an appealing option.

3. If they do have a plan, try to convince them to go to the hospital. They will be there for a few days (they can expect 3-5 days depending on the severity of their illness and their response to treatment). You can always go online to find out if there’s a hospital better than others for inpatient mental health if that will convince them to go willingly.

4. If they refuse to go to the hospital and you believe they are in immediate danger (especially if they leave – you can’t force them to stay in your house against their will), you need to dial 9-1-1 or whatever your emergency line is if outside of the US. You need to tell the operator that your friend expressed that they wanted to kill themselves and that you clarified and found out that they have a plan. Give as much detail as possible to the operator. If your friend is prone to violence or owns a weapon, let the operator know. When the police pick them up, your friend is NOT under arrest. The police will, however, cuff them, and take them to the nearest hospital. They will be mad as hell at you for doing that for a while, but after a few days when they realized how bad it became, they will come around.

Apfelle said 10 years, 9 months ago:

While on the whole I agree with the main points of this, you have to keep in mind that not everyone who’s suicidal is suicidal for the same reason. Suicidal behaviour is a symptom, not a cause of symptoms, so everyone experiences it differently. Many, in fact, do at least threaten suicide on the premise that people will, after their death, love them more (most cultures I can think of respect and honour the dead, and don’t slight, berate, or abuse them), understand what they were going through more (nothing alerts a friend, colleague, family member, etc. to the fact that someone had serious problems like that person killing him- or herself), etc..
To say that suicide is ‘an attention-seeking behaviour’ is a bit of an overgeneralisation, yes, because other components more or less always have a role in suicide. But at the same time, it’s silly to dismiss all cases of suicide as having nothing to do with the victims wanting attention.

Love-and-be-loved said 10 years, 9 months ago:

I agree with the quote aptell said. No one wants to die it just feels like its better than whatever life is.

Deleted User said 10 years, 9 months ago:

There was a point in my life where I’d write one suicide note a day. I was so sure I was going to end my life because I guess I was in a ‘dark place’. I never told or threatened anyone that I’d plan to kill myself, it wasn’t for the attention. I just didn’t see a value placed on my life by anyone around me. I grabbed a pen and I thought of just jamming it in my wrist, but I couldn’t. I needed to know what would happen in the future, will I be a lawyer? Would I get married? I found some type of hope. Haven’t looked back since. Till this day, only one person knows about my past. I’ve never cut myself or caused any self harm. And I just hate when a student commits suicide and suddenly their whole life becomes important. This is a great post to reduce all misconception.

Deleted User said 10 years, 9 months ago:

Crying suicide is something that really pisses me off, and I think it’s partly why there is such an ignorance when it comes to suicide because it’s become pretty common for people to say they want to kill themselves as though it’s nothing. I’ve lost count of the amount of people I’ve come across who say they want to kill themselves for attention, and yes – it’s for attention because they themselves admit it’s to make someone pay attention to them. It pisses me off, not just because they’re using something so tragic like it’s nothing but also because they feel so alone they think they have to do that. It frustrates me that they’re in that situation to begin with.

Most of the time I’ve found that those who commit suicide, you genuinely don’t see it coming.. which is maybe another part of the problem. Even if someone says they feel suicidal, people don’t always want to deal with that so they’ll just think they’re looking for attention and treat it as such. I don’t know. I have a friend who was genuine about it, and she didn’t admit to having tried for a long long time. I had another friend who used to threaten to kill herself by overdosing on pills to stop her boyfriend from leaving her (she’s alive still, by had I meant we’re no longer friends.) Personally, I’ve only ever felt suicidal once and I didn’t tell anybody close to me – or anybody for that matter until a couple of years later, and even then it would only be in a general conversation where people would forget about it. I suppose it’s different for everybody, but I can understand why people think it’s an attention-seeking behaviour – because it genuinely can be.

Deleted User said 10 years, 9 months ago:

I agree with the original poster—it is not for attention and we don’t want to. I don’t want to die, never did. But I wanted to end the pain. I did not know where to get help, I have been in hospital, they never really gave me any answers or quick cures. I had to start helping myself and that meant, at first, to change how I felt about myself and the world. It’s a process. It still hurts. I would be lying if I did not sometimes still have suicidal thoughts. I have learned not to act on them.

Threats to kill ourselves can be extremely disturbing and maddening; we feel so helpeless—and so does the person wanting to end their pain.

My roommate wanted to end himself last year and he did not want to go to the hospital. I did get mad at him, and I blamed mostly his situation, not him. Like I was, he was in a situation that he did not feel he oculd get out of and neither one of us had/has any friends. I called the psychiatrist I was seeing at the time and he told me to call 911. Bruce did not want to go in hospital; I asked him if he had a plan; he said no. So, I called my uncle in Seattle and for a while he calmed down; just having someone caring for him, me and my uncle was enough to help. Every situation is different. If it seems like it is absolutely imminent and you know you can’t stop it, do call 911 or the crisis line. It’s not the cure or the best feeling for anyone, but at least for the moment, the person is alive. Life is precious. We are precious. We just don’t want to keep hurting! It is hard for everyone.

Apfelle said 8 years, 5 months ago:

This is an extremely old thread but I just wanted to weigh in again, mostly to clarify my post from over two years ago. Since that post I have gone through a very long, very messy path of suicidality — in the past couple of years, I’ve experienced everything from not particularly caring whether I live or die, to actively attempting to kill myself. (I’ve never had a will to live, yet. I’m still working on that.) When I posted two years ago I was already extremely disillusioned with life, but I wasn’t ready to admit to myself that I wanted to die. Anyway, now that I’m more experienced with that sort of thing, I’d just like to restate what I was trying to say before: verbal threats of suicide CAN be abusive, attention-seeking behaviour. Attempting or committing suicide, however, is not.