| Were you previously depressed yourself or are you just trotting out the party line? I have been depressed before. While it's true that some people can take medication and receive platitudes and coping methods on how to deal with the facts of a sad and sorry life, this won't "cure" everybody. What about those people that suffer for 10+ years? --- In regards to the typical statements that depressed people have to hear day-upon-day: When I was depressed (and I was very depressed for around 5 years) I knew that based on what I saw around me, I could probably expect to stop becoming depressed at some point of my life. However, it greatly annoyed me when people said "suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" because when you've felt particularly bad for years and years, you're not dealing with something which is so easy to change, and it's in fact far more permanent than many things in your life. Time stretches without pleasure. Days are long but years are unimaginably scary. Another statement which I would hear a lot was the idea that you shouldn't kill yourself because your family, friends and community need you. It doesn't necessarily sounds nice to a depressed person. Here's how I used to rationalise it: I was committing a selfless act of martyrdom by continuing to exist without pleasure - every day I would be nailed to a cross and for their pleasure would hang there on a side of a hill they didn't care to visit. "What did they get out of my suffering?!" |
The vast majority of the anti-suicide efforts were just—insulting in her case, in a lot of ways. There were a lot of people and organizations telling her very loudly not to kill herself, and that it would get better if she just stuck it out a little more and saw a therapist. There was a legal and medical system willing to lock her up, for a fee, and keep her from actually physically harming herself. (This terrified her. She said her stay in a mental institution had been horrific and entirely unhelpful—they basically put her in solitary and kept her from doing anything at all, for hours. They wouldn't even let her have a pen and paper to write with because they were concerned that she would use it for self-harm.)
But there was nobody actually providing a way to make her life less painful. She came from a wealthy background and had good health insurance, so could afford weekly therapy sessions and psych meds. Some of the pills would work, for a few months or weeks at a time, but none of them were permanently helpful—and most of them took weeks to titrate up to an effective dose, so with each switch there would be a huge gap of time where she was as bad off as ever and nobody knew if the next pill would even work.
The anti-suicide efforts were like—it was like she was burning alive, and there were all these organizations and people in place determined to keep her from shooting herself to end the pain. But there was nobody who could actually stop her from burning.
I don't know. It's an awful situation all around. There are definitely a lot of people who are just temporarily upset or suffering from mild and easily treatable depression who do benefit from things like fences on bridges and national help hotlines. But more research is definitely needed. Someone else said in this thread that what we should really be doing is trying to keep people off the ledge entirely, not just trying to keep them from jumping, and I definitely agree there. What we really need is ways to keep people from wanting to die, not just ways to keep them from committing the act.