Does there tend to be a “Boy who cried wolf” effect when a suicidal person tells other people about suicidal feelings?
That is, that the first time or second time that a (genuinely) suicidal person confides his/her suicidal thoughts to other people, he/she is taken seriously, but after several such incidents, eventually either people don’t take the suicidal intent seriously anymore, or the suicidal person feels that he/she has “used up” all of his/her attempts to inform others about suicide and can’t reach out anymore, either for embarrassment or feeling that “I’m suicidal right now” has become standard and routine to others?
Yeah. Shit or get off the pot.
Amirite?
:dubious:
Have you ever known anyone who was constantly talking about or threatening suicide? I mean what do you do call 911 daily?
It is easy to take it seriously when you don’t deal with someone who threatens suicide all the time.
Oh yea and if they are the BPD type or toxic type and you do take them seriously, expect them to bring family or allies to bear on you and make you out to be the villain who is trying to make them look crazy should you try to get help instead of feeding their need for sympathy.
You’re not suicidal until you’re dead and suicidal.
Serious answer: yes, there can be.
Someone who is seriously depressed, and speaks often of suicide, may tend to numb his or her loved ones to this depression. The family, no matter how much they love the victim, doesn’t have an unlimited capacity for the proper compassionate response.
Some very depressed persons attempt suicide, occasionally in ways that are designed to fail. I know a woman who took a fatal dose of drugs…but then phoned the hospital. She was saved, and is alive today.
I know another woman who “jammed the gun.” She got another gun a few years later, and destroyed herself. The family simply had no way to monitor her at all times; she bought the second gun in secrecy.
Depression is a very nasty and insidious mental illness. It defeats the victim’s rationality, yet leaves the victim wholly able to scheme in secret. Sometimes, talk of suicide is a “cry for help.” But that help is extremely difficult to provide.
Take every discussion of suicide seriously, but…don’t panic. Don’t over-react. If someone says, “God damn it, I’d just like to end it all and be free of all this misery,” that might not be enough, by itself, to start arranging immediate hospitalization. It is enough to open a dialogue.
(But…sigh…such a dialogue tends to be hugely formalized, with lots of non-responsive offerings. “Oh, you know.” “You’d be better off without me.” “Mind your own business!” “I didn’t say any such thing!” “But it hurts, dammit…” And my favorite, “If you really loved me…” Depression sometimes puts severe limits on a person’s ability to express their emotions rationally.)
Not just to the people around the depressive: for her or himself too. You get tired of that person feeling so bad? Think how tired they themselves get.
I read somewhere that this is more common with women.
Actually, there was an article about a few recent cases in the Netherlands of euthanasia for long term suffering mental patients. A twenty year old girl, who said she wanted to die ever since she was eight. Suffered from depression, borderline, and several psycotic episodes. Was as happy as a kid when finally her set of lethal pills arrived in the mail. Said goodbye to her family, set up a camera to ensure the actual suicide was her own doing, died. The mom was interviewed a few years later. Said that she was fine, was happy for her daughter, missed her very much, did not miss the misery and madness living with her daughters illness brought on the whole family.
Suicides are now the number one cause of train delays in the Netherlands. The shock of the delayed train passengers had given way to dogged annoyance. Everybody seems to think there really ought to be a more decent and helpful way to help the truly hopeless sufferers besides saying: don’t!! ( I’m talking years of illness and several hospital stays)…
To clarify, my OP is not about people who threaten suicide; that’s manipulative. I mean people who are genuinely suicidal.
That’s one of the awfully saddest things I’ve ever read.
Serious question. How can we tell if the person’s merely threatening suicide or if they are genuinely suicidal? 
This thread is meant mainly about the perspective of someone who is hypothetically suicidal. What could such a person do in that sort of situation when he/she has “used up” all of the times that they could tell someone that they are suicidal and seriously mean it?
But anyway, to answer your question, I don’t know.
Tell someone else. If I’m understanding you correctly, you know, for this hypothetical, that the person is actually suicidal, but they feel they won’t be taken seriously or helped because they’ve used up their credibility with someone? Then they should find someone else. A different family member or friend or doctor, whatever it takes.
Yes, unfortunately, good people do suffer from compassion fatigue, but there are always more people in the world who don’t have a history with you.
I tried to think of situations in which someone might threaten sucide, and decided that if someone is threatening you, they probably aren’t suicidal.
On the other hand, if someone is suicidal, although you may have trouble understanding, or even noticing, you probably won’t confuse it with a threat.
Taking it one step further: if someone is trying to get something from you, and you can clearly identify what they are trying to get, and that thing which they are trying to get clearly isn’t suicide, then they probably aren’t suicidal.
Another thing that people sometimes wonder about is, how can you tell if a depressed and suicidal person is actually going to commit suicide? And you can’t tell very well, that’s why depressed and suicidal people are all taken seriously. There are standard checklists: does the person have an actual plan? does the person have the means of carrying out the actual plan? has the person previously made attempts?
You can google for a standard checklist, but I wouldn’t suggest that it’s the best approach for you: If you know someone who is depressed and suicidal, then out of kindness you should do something to help them, regardless of if they have the actual means and organisational ability to attempt suicide. Such people are at high risk of accidental death by something obvious like walking into traffic while obsessing, or shooting themselves in the face while trying to figure out if they are suicidal, even if they lack the clarity of thought required to commit an actual suicide.
You can’t and if they are bringing up such a socially sensitive subject you can assume in all likelihood they are genuinely at least contemplating it if not actively planning it. The “They’re just saying that to get attention” is mostly BS people tell themselves to deal with the frightening revelation. The cry wolf syndrome truly is a thing even on the first sharing of suicidal thoughts.
While not a mental health professional I spent years as a well trained volunteer crisis counselor. The above fits with our training program that professionals were involved in setting up and my actual experience with client. Most of the suicide calls I dealt with were people that couldn’t talk to anybody else except the anonymous stranger on the phone. Some had tried to talk to those closest to them… and got disbelieved and shut down. They talked to me because I’d believe them and listen unlike the people that supposedly cared for them.
There were some regular callers, which was beyond the scope of what we provided, and mostly they already saw more professional help regularly. A very small subset or those regular callers brought up suicide fairly often. In those cases it was perfectly in keeping with their longer term mental health issues they’d shared. Hear the same thing often over a long period (and know that other volunteers heard it many times a month) and fatigue sets in. Even then I treated it seriously but… I got good and checking out if today was different/active, and dealing with them efficiently so I could clear up the line to talk to someone I could actually help.
If someone you know is hinting at it, sometimes not very subtlety, ask them directly if they are thinking about suicide. Let them know that you care and listen (instead of telling them how to fix it all quickly so they stop scaring you). Then help them get to professional help.
I also used to be a crisis intervention counselor, and my experience was very similar to DinoR’s . . . especially in that we took every caller seriously. But we had a book by the phone, with notes about all the chronic callers, detailing previous conversations, referrals to professionals, and suggestions for dealing with each caller. Basically, after hearing the same stories repeatedly (and being able to tell whether they were in fact the same stories), our job was to once again direct the person in the appropriate direction, and hope that this time he takes the necessary step.
There were, however, people who’d been calling for years, with no significant improvement. For all I know they’re still calling.
I dated someone who had issues - addiction / use, unsteady job, etc. (Yeah, a real winner) Three times, in a single week, he called me three nights making comments that he planned on overdosing that night. He would already be on something, yelling at me for some imagined slight, etc.
The first time, I sped over to his place to make sure he was okay.
The second time, I called his friend, but since she wasn’t able to answer her phone, I ended up going back over. He lived in a quad, and since he was a smoker, he often would lean out his window when he lit up a cigarette. This was very fortuitous, as I had to crawl into his bedroom window when I saw him passed out on his bed.
The third time, I called his friend again, and basically told her that she would be better equipped to handle it, as her boyfriend had similar issues, she was my ex’s best friend, etc. I went over to make sure he was okay, and after his violent outburst (both verbal and physical), I told him that he would have to find someone else to take care of him, and that his female friend was on her way.
Luckily, the guy was far from lucid, so his assault was negligible (he tried to shove me and take a swing at me), and he wasn’t the strongest guy.
Last I heard, he got his act together, but I’ve made a point to avoid any situations where I could come into contact with his craziness.
I don’t know if he was doing it for attention, or he really intended to follow-through, because he never wanted me to contact his family when he was telling me about his overdose plan / attempt. When I would go check in on him, he would be hostile and violent, so it’s not like he was doing it to see me. I think he just enjoyed the drama / conflict, as my friends continually tried to tell me.
After the first attempt, I was really torn, because I knew what I’d be getting into, if I went and checked on him, but I drove to his place each time, for the OP’s exact reason - I didn’t want the time that I ignored him to be the time he actually followed through on the attempt.
Not to take away from your experience and valuable contribution, but you are looking at the set of people who were serious enough to call a helpline, and that really doesn’t include the whole set of people who make threats…
I remember at school we had a year when threatening suicide became really quite popular, very much in the shouted, dramatic “Well I’ll KILL myself and THEN you’ll be sorry!” mode. It wore off after a bit, when kids started thinking it through a bit more.
The one kid who definitely did have suicidal thoughts and made a half baked attempt once was never very vocal about it, but there was one really persistent and dramatic girl who was definitely just jumping on the bandwagen and after the attention. She would never have spoken to someone like you though- why would she call a suicide prevention helpline? She didn’t actually want to kill herself.
Bit of a tangent, but this is not true in all cases. Sometimes, severe enough depression could cripple the ability to think or do anything,