There are numerous examples of the police turning up on a suicide call and killing the individual, even when unarmed[2][3]. They simply aren't qualified to deal with suicidal individuals and should only be used when other's safety is at stake.

[0] http://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/375040-police-need-mor...

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/police-...

[2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/unarmed-teen-killed-by-police-...

[3] https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/02/santa-clara-da-clears...

My sister attempted suicide as a teenager and the police that responded spent hours ransacking our home and further tormenting my family for no good reason. Then to think of her being locked up in the hospital (I wasn't able to see her for at least a week).

If I were having such thoughts, I certainly wouldn't tell anyone for this precise reason.

Maybe I'm a nutcase, but I've taken the time to prepare a set of scenarios under which I would no longer want to live, and think about what would need to be taken care of to exit the world without undue burden on those that depend on me. That seems like an eminently rational thing to do.

I believe professionals would categorize what you wrote there as "planning suicide". So long as you have not started "taking care of" those things you have not begun executing your plan. Planning is a rather big step beyond contemplating - I hope you're doing better now. You may also want to consider that actually getting your affairs in order could be an enabler.

It's evaluating a set of contingencies. Like, the general staffs of armies make war plans that they will never execute, unless the particular parameters fall in place, all the time. To do otherwise would be irresponsible.

The public health responses to you should be very different to the people who experience rapid onset despair.

When I was a kid my oldest brother enrolled in some free counseling from a church. They had him fill out why he was going to counseling so he honestly wrote down that he had been having suicidal thoughts.

So this church freaked out and sent a pastor and someone else over to force him to promise not to kill himself.

Which as you can imagine was horrible and completely broke his trust in the system.

Also taught me to never ever be honest with people about serious things like suicide unless you've already know how they will react or you think you are a real danger to yourself.

Suicidal thoughts from time to time are fine. The issue is when you start to have real intent to carry them out. That's when you need help.

There was a situation in Canada where police incident reports were shared with the U.S. border authorities under a law enforcement information sharing agreement, and a few people were denied entrance to the U.S. as a result of historic crisis encounters with police. Cops aren't bad, but institutions can be callous. Similarly, the record of a mental health crisis (or failing to disclose it) can have an impact on certain kinds of insurance, security clearances, (as above) travel, custody agreements, and by extension, jobs.

Learn to stay mentally healthy, and realize that it is an investment you make, often at the cost of other immediate things, which pays off as the result of sound decisions compounded over years.

Many officers don't receive sufficient training on how to deal with mental health crises, and sometimes the result of contact is bad.

> Police Broke Into Chelsea Manning’s Home with Guns Drawn — in a "Wellness Check"

She wasn't home. But the surveillance video is frightening. At least, it wasn't a SWAT team. But damn.

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/05/chelsea-manning-video-tw...

You may not like it, but the system utterly sucks and you can be easily, even casually, abused. In fact the likelihood is high this will happen. And the kicker? No one gives a damn if you do get abused, and if you die then your mental illness will be used against you for the reason that some cop killed you.

I don't know how other people who've suffered depression most of their lives feel, but I can't stand this advice. It reeks of being the lowest effort possible by someone who has no understanding whatsoever of what they're talking about and prefers to just parrot something that sounds good to them. I'd honestly rather have people tell me they think I'm a weak pussy who should just suck it up, because at least their being open and honest about their lack of give-a-damn.

He spent two years just keeping me accountable on the little day to day things and while it didn't immediately cure my depression my quality of increased dramatically. The idea that something like keeping my room tidy would help with my depression sounded absolutely god damn insane at the time, "I want existence to end and you're telling me to make my bed?" ..but somehow those hundred small things mattered, life's pretty good these days.

God damn brains are dumb.

Being home, alone, unshaven, unclean, in an unkept house made me feel worse because of all the things I saw that needed to be done, and the isolation allowing me to think about that and only that.

A bit of tidying made my space feel better (less cramped) and a bit of tidying each day reduced the sense of burden compared to seeing the whole place as one big mess. Same for the self-care and other aspects.

Every undone thing is an extra stressor because it's an extra thing that you know needs to be done, but in a depressed state you do not feel able to do or that there is sufficient time to do (it seems overwhelming, even when in reality it's a small chore).

Being somewhat social (even as an introvert), being physically active and getting my sunlight, and maintaining a decently tidy home (I still suck at cleaning the shower often enough, and I never make my bed), have made an immense difference.

There's also the benefit of routine and ritual. That's part of what the showering and shaving did. I'm lying in bed and I haven't shaved yet, I need to shave, let's get up and shave. I have to do this, once it's done it's done and I can move on. Now I'm out of bed and I can maybe do something else or not, but the ritual helped force me out of bed and gave me even the chance to have a healthy day.

> (I still suck at cleaning the shower often enough, and I never make my bed)

I stopped using the top/flat sheet, which means "making the bed" is as simple as fluffing the pillows and shaking your duvet/comforter/quilt out over the bed. The flat sheet is responsible for probably 95% of the effort in making a bed. Coming home to a made bed is nice.

Bonus: when you buy sheets in the future, you can invest the top sheet savings into a comfier bedspread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duvet

I hate making my bed so I can't be happier now :)

He begins by telling me, "If I take this baseball bat, and smash your knee, would you come tell me, or would you go tell a doctor?"

I said, well obviously the doctor. He said "Ok, go and do likewise."

I went to counseling that week, which included temporary relief via SSRI's. I am still coping, but it is _worlds_ better than it was years ago.

Talking to people, especially that have the same philosophies, helps. If you haven't found the right people to talk to, keep looking. They are out there. It took me 4 tries, but glad I did. I live with a spouse that does not understand depression what so ever, so it is an absolute lifeline to be able to talk to an understanding professional.

In other words: less than 25% of them are right. About the same experience here.

My personal gripe: Most psychologists are feminists. If you explain them a problem you have, they’ll percieve it in a gynocentric way. They are in denial that men can be on the receiving end of a problem or injustice, so much that one of them posited to me that male and female suicide rates were the same. Which tells a lot about the state of science on men’s problems.

Many years back, my partner was sexually assaulted, so I attended a few of her counseling sessions with the local Rape Crisis center as a support person. The female counselor commented that I was "very brave" to do that - something I found very odd.

Years later, my partner said that the sessions I didn't attend were little more than "man hating" and "man-blaming" for all of the world's wrongs.

I have also attended counseling, as I've recently started to understand the level of physical and psychological abuse that was inflicted upon me by my mother (and her boyfriend, as well as my stepfather) while I was growing up. My counselor was also female, yet not once did she belittle my suffering as less because of my gender. As I described a few events, I'd even hear her let out a gasp or draw a sharp breath, or a few words of concern.

It seems possible to me that you've come across individuals with their own concerns and agendas that lie outside the requirements of their jobs, but I couldn't write off an entire profession based on that.

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/11/having-sad.h...

Yea I'm in agreement with this. No direct effort to "help" has been useful at all.

You know what would be helpful, is if people actually started being honest about how not together their own lives are. Forget depression, I just want the average person to actively acknowledge and vocalize that they don't have all the answers and haven't figured things out.

One of the biggest sources of anxiety for me is looking around and seeing all the people who "have their shit together" and thinking that I'm the only one over here drowning. Yet when you talk with them one on one, it's pretty clear they don't have any better handle on things than anyone else.

I’m sorry that talk therapy didn’t work for you. It has, however, shown to be effective at disarming suicidal thoughts long enough for other outcomes to seem attainable.

But besides that, what is there to do? Is depression even something that can be helped with?

I've been thinking this topic today. I happened to lose a (young) family member to suicide a couple days ago and, shit, that bothers me immensely.

Every time the subject of suicide comes up the first thing that is said is "call the hotline," however, in the last couple days, I have been questioning if suicide hotlines are evidence based. I have zero idea if the topic even has been studied, or even if it could be studied. I wonder if our resources can and should be better allocated. I wonder if people are calling suicide helplines instead of calling their doctor.

Or even people are saying it just because it makes them feel good. Because preventing suicide is actually hard and telling someone to call a phone number is easy.

I'm just pondering right now, I have no answers.

Personal story: I called a suicide hotline once and it was extremely unhelpful. It was the opposite of helpful, it actually made things worse.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24086443 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24163237 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22320194

No such luck.

When the media adds the number for Lifeline it’s just lazy and backside covering. Hell, for a long time the media were so badly informed aboutvsuicide they wouldn’t even report on it.

So yeah, suicide hotlines are not only ineffective, they can be positive detrimental to your health.

https://www.reddit.com/comments/1c7ntr

If you already mid attempt, and yet you are also calling a helpline, in that case there's nearly no reason to complain if the cops come.

Call Centers are not particularly effective. It's also true that there aren't widely available good options.

It's a difficult situation, and the tools to address it are inadequate.

Maybe not a great thing to do on a high-traffic website on the day of a high-profile suicide.

It's the only time people seem willing to discuss suicide. A week from now everyone will have forgotten that suicide is a real epidemic. I'd rather see people discuss real solutions instead be of endlessly repeating the same pointless things.

Has self-directed CBT actually been studied?

As far as I understand most people receiving CBT who have been studied have received it in a professional setting with weekly meetings.

Then yes, there was actually a study of the book Feeling Good (kind of meta), and told to read it with a checkup every 6 weeks just like you guessed it in the quote. There are other CBT books that are smaller and to the point, more tactical approach to learning the methods (I think one is called Learning CBT) of Feeling Good. The second half of Feeling Good goes into drugs, which at the time was written no long term studies had been done or possible. From my personal research, these drugs do not work and cause more damage then good. I have found that through suffering and depression, and then working my way out of it, I believe I am better off then just taking a drug. I feel they are supressing some kind of natural force that is needed to build character, but for some people they are needed as a "backstop" to get out of a hole. On another note, depression has grown several folds since the introduction of antidepressants. I do not even consider that there is actually a thing as a drug that can do what they claim, but that's my personal belief.

Star Trek V!

Sybok: Let us explore it together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me, and gain strength from the sharing.

There's another good quote I've heard: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Maclaren) I have heard it with " you know nothing about" at the end.