[spritefs]

> via suicide prevention measures (nets under bridges, restrictions on drug purchases etc.)

Those are all negative, in those cases you're not allowing someone to do something (which is different from forcing someone to do something). There are other forms of suicide prevention though, like forcing suicidal people to take medication

[chrisbaker98]

In the UK, if you want to kill yourself by overdosing on paracetamol, then you're forced to visit several different shops (because you can't buy more than two packets at once) then spend a long time tediously popping each pill individually out of the blister pack before you can swallow them all. (The pills don't come in bottles because bottles make it too easy to quickly pour a fatal overdose of pills into your mouth).

These measures won't stop a truly determined person, but they stop a lot of people. It's well understood that erecting even a minor inconvenience in front of a suicidal person can be enough to keep them alive. Popping all your paracetamol out of the packaging takes enough time to give you a chance to reconsider the whole thing.

By forcing someone to do something, we prevent them from doing something else.