I just finished watching a bit on PBS Newshour about how the pandemic was impacting teen suicide rates and mental health.
Since my own experience with that impulse years ago, and the counseling and therapy that followed, this has always remained … hard for me, as topics of discussion go. For me, the ideation has never really left me, Ive just developed nondestructive (self or otherwise) coping strategies for controlling the impulse to act.
The questions I have are; is there therapy that is ongoing for suicidal ideation? Is it just one of those things that is part and parcel of treatment for depression, or whatever other mental health issues that may be present?
Is continuing suicidal ideation without the impulse to act(or a controlled impulse, or what ever it is called) common after going through it once and coming out … Ok, so to speak, on the other side of it?
I really want to be really clear here, I am NOT planning anything, crying out for help or what have you, just trying to explore something that I saw in the news that touched on a very sensitive feature of my inner life.
This article seems to answer some of your questions. Disclaimer: I’m not a therapist or anything like it. I just found this article on the internet.
There’s a section on who is prone to these thoughts and why they happen.
There’s also a section on therapy.
I’m glad you’re not actively planning anything, but there’s a hotline number in the article if you’re in the US. If you’re not in the US, there are lists of hotline numbers that are easy to find.
I’m sorry you’re having these thoughts. I hope you find relief from them.
I’ve suffered from depression almost all my life. I’ve posted how as an early preteen, possibly as young as 5 or 6, I contemplated suicide, only stopping because of fear of reprisal if I survived.
Believe what you will, coincidence, confirmation bias or divine intervention (my personal belief), I’ve stopped myself / been stopped multiple times over the decades.
For me, the obsessive thoughts never stop, despite going to anger management and becoming a Christian, and, “I’m much better now”, John Astin in some TV series that I can’t recall, but rarely does a week go by without thinking how best to end it all.
IMHO, it’s an addiction and like all addictions can only be controlled and tempered, never taken away.
I’ve participated in many mutual support groups that, if not specifically geared towards suicidal feelings and thoughts, were for emotionally frazzled people who needed someone to talk to and lots of folks who come to that environment are driven to do so by suicidal ideation and inclinations and the accompanying desperation.
None of them were connected to established psych services— more like anti-connected, run by psychiatric patients’ rights folks who’d been traumatized by institutional psychiatry.
That’s not to say that everyone who turns to traditional psych institutions fails to find them helpful and supportive. There’s a bit of “different strokes for different folks” involved there. The psychiatric profession is far more likely to address suicidal thoughts and feelings with a mind-altering medication — at a minimum because they’re licensed to prescribe same and the rest of us are not; at more of a maximum because they’ve been taught in their coursework to think of anything other than a generally benevolent and smooth-sailing emotional and cognitive status combined with a lack of upsetting anyone else in their midst to be a symptom of mental illness, and mental illness in turn to be, by definition, a brain failure at the neurotransmitter or transmitter-uptake biochemical level, hence a reason to treat with psych medication.
I’ll probably have more cogent thoughts in the morning, but there’s a difference between, “I want to die, I should probably kill myself” and “I should probably kill myself. Time to start researching firearms. Should I use a shotgun or a pistol? What’s the optimal time of day to do this?” The first is typically dealt with as part and parcel of depression. The second is a crisis situation. Maybe there’s some intermediary state I’m leaving out? I’ve experienced both. I want to die is at least once a week. I deal with it the same way I deal with intrusive thoughts. Observe and move on.
As someone who went through a recent-ish spate of suicidal ideation after my son was born, I think it can be a sort of near-death experience. I have somethimg like trauma from it. When I am in that state I am in a constant state of panic, I can think of nothing but suicide and have disturbing intrusive thoughts of what it will be like to die or my husband finding my corpse or whatever. I am crying nonstop and hyperventilating and totally unable to function that way. I’ve experienced that only a few times in my life. I can’t imagine someone dealing with that on a chronic basis.
I’m revealing too much, but I’ve had that exact inner monologue about shotgun or pistol many times plus other logistical issues that I won’t get into.
For me, there is a middle ground. Make it through the day as best I can, some days better, some days worse. At the end of the day, lay in bed and hope and pray I don’t get up for the next day. Rinse and repeat for decades.
Bottom line, I’ve learned to, no pun intended, live with it.
Depressed nearly all my life. There have been times when I wanted to be dead, but I never actively pursued it. But no, thankfully with antidepressants, I haven’t had those welcome death thoughts for a while now.
I remember some TV show that gave off some flippant comment about suicide being a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Wow, that got me mad. I’ve had dark depression for decades. Nothing temporary about that.
One of the main things to understand when you’re contemplating suicide is that you’re going to die. That’s a given. The only variable is when. I take it as self-evident that you have the unalienable right to assess whether or not you want to stick around for the remaining life you can have. But what you’re weighing is not the life you are currently living. Yeah, I get that that might not be better than just being dead or you wouldn’t be thinking along these lines, but bear with me. If you’re considering offing yourself, then you should seriously also consider throwing all caution to the winds and doing exactly whatever-the-fuck you want to ever do with your life, go for broke, because if you were going to toss it all away anyhow, what have you got to lose? You’ve basically assessed that life as you are currently living it is not worth living. So live it differently. If that doesn’t pan out or blows up in your face, you’ve still got suicide available as an option, right? So break some damn rules that you set for yourself or that other people set for you and reach for some imaginary life you think you’d have like to have lived but couldn’t for Reasons. Get divorced, liquidate your assets and move to Borneo and live in the jungle. Or enroll in law classes at the university even though you’re 82 years old. Keep reminding yourself that you were going to toss it ALL away so if you fuck everything up, this one doesn’t really count and you can do absolutely anything you want cuz you’re still going to probably toss it all away anyhow, so let’s go out with some adventure and some risk-taking. Do what you want to do, or try something you’ve always wanted to try. To hell with the consequences at this point, you get what I’m saying?
As someone once said (paraphrased), “Most suicidal people don’t actually want to die; they just want their pain to stop. Unfortunately, death is the only way they perceive their pain can stop.”
What many people don’t understand about those of us who suffer from depression is that we’re often very good as masking it. Smile at everyone all day, then cry alone all night. Cheer up, we care about you, see a doctor, take meds, etc. All temporary bandages that only mask the inner demons. For me, I’ve been able to keep them at bay for decades, for others it may be weeks, days or hours before the pain becomes too much.
Given a couple of paragraph breaks, this is really good advice.
I’ve lived with suicidal ideation most of my adult life, from 18 on up. These days, I reason that it would be pointless to kill myself when things aren’t really really bad. I mean, I may experience severe stress, with ideation, due to financial straits, but it would be folly to kill myself over them, until I am actually seriously fucked, financially. The same goes with every individual stressor.
Your reply takes this attitude further, in an open horizons-kind of way. When the alternative is nothingness, anything truly goes. No matter what happens, it’s more than nothingness, so worth checking out.
Of course, a severely depressed person is so wrapped up in the black tar of depression that such horizon-expanding is simply impossible. The depression needs to break up some, first.
I was depressed for several years and was put on a low dosage of SSRIs that helped somewhat. For some reason a couple of years ago I started experiencing really bad passive suicidal ideation, in that I desperately wanted life to end but didn’t have the balls, or resources, to actually do anything about it (but boy did I fantasize and plan).
I saw my GP and got my dosage doubled and started getting some serious therapy. After several months that finally got sorted out. I’m still getting therapy for a host of other issues but at least I’m no longer depressed.
After all this I will never, ever judge anyone for committing suicide; it’s terrible and tragic but I’m not convinced that “it will [magically] get better”. Sometimes it won’t. If you put nets under every bridge (or any other tall object, nothing’s been solved.
If, back in the day, a big bag of fentanyl (or carfentanil) magically appeared, then maybe I wouldn’t be here, but then, so what?
Not sure what else to say but sometimes life or the brain sucks and it is what
it is.
I realize the depression will never disappear for more than a couple of weeks and that is a rare occurrence. But somehow, I have learned to stick around and hope that I will have another time of joy in my life. But it’s always at the back of my mind that I can suicide if the situation warrants it.
Of course, disliking pain and fear of failure really help me stay around, too.
I remember having the same reaction-- I don’t know if it was the same TV show, but it was TV, or Ann Landers, or my Health and Safety text in high school. What a dismissive way to treat people. You don’t know why one person or another might choose suicide-- and frankly it isn’t your business.
Well, this thread has certainly not gone as I expected. I’m ok with that, kind of grateful actually, to hear all these stories that I can identify with with, @Didi44 especially, superficially at least, sounds so similiar to me. I sort of hope it keeps going. It’s doing a world of good for me right now.
I fairly recently did CAMS therapy, which is specifically geared toward suicidal ideation.
It was very helpful for me. For one thing, with a regular therapist, especially one you don’t already know very very well, you never know how much you can actually say. If they ask you if you’re having suicidal thoughts… I mean, yeah. Every day of my life. And I probably will forever. I don’t think I can even comprehend what it’s like not to. But if you don’t know them and you say that, you never know if they’re going to tell you you need to be hospitalized or that they can’t help you. With this, I could be a lot more open about it. My CAMS therapist emphasized that the goal wasn’t necessarily to make all that stop because it probably never will, but to manage them.
It’s a limited-time deal. I got hooked up with it because I was in the hospital and, as I recall (I was doing ECT at the start of it, so it’s a bit murky), it was a sort of new thing they were trying. So after inpatient, I did video chats with a group for a couple weeks and then saw my CAMS therapist once a week over video chat for, in all, I think about six months. The website I linked has a “find a clinician” link, but I can’t vouch for how easy or hard it might be to find one in practice.
She also gave me a website which is a little corny, but there were some things on it that I found helpful- Now Matters Now. A lot of that stuff is kind of obvious, but… sort of helps when you name it and treat it as a tool, I guess? And when I first visited the website, I found some comfort in people describing things I had gone through and continue to go through.
Nowadays, I get through every day. It’s still, and probably always will be, a little like having a really crappy old car that is just limping along until it gives out. You more-or-less trust that it will get you to work tomorrow and to the grocery store and it will probably last the week or month, but you won’t be surprised if it doesn’t and certainly wouldn’t plan on driving it across the country and back. I see (well, talk to on the phone) a psychiatrist who seems decent and take my meds and have a talk therapist I see once a month who is okay. So I’ll still be here tomorrow and next week and we’ll talk about next month when it gets here and I might keep going like that for another six months or another ten years or until I’m old.
This is the best metaphor I’ve ever heard for recurrent major depressive disorder. For as long as I can remember I just have these times when my life falls apart. The older I get the more infrequent it’s gotten (meds? More coping tools? Who knows?) Right now I’m stable, even happy. But there’s always going to be a next time for as long as I’m alive.
I’m bookmarking this thread so when I have my next time, I’ll have some resources.
One of the major issues I have that complicates everything is intrusive thoughts. I’m not suicidal at the moment but even today while driving my car I was imagining that I did kill myself and envisioning my husband’s agony. I could even hear the sound of his cries in my head. When I’m actually suicidal and having intrusive thoughts at the same time I can’t bear it, and I can’t sort out what I’m actually likely to do from what I’m afraid I’ll do.
I believe that is what happened after the birth of my son. I had the “baby blues” from hell. It only lasted until I got some sleep, but those three or four days were a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. I’m still shaken when I think about it. I finally shared the details with my husband a few weeks ago, and he said, “I knew it was bad, but not that bad.” Conveniently, he’s an expert in the treatment of OCD and anxiety disorders, so he was able to help me sort out the intrusive thoughts from the ideation and better understand what was happening to me.
This is just life, you know? For many years I had therapist after therapist tell me, “If we can just treat the trauma you’re going to get better.” I finally, yonks ago, found a therapist (ACT) who looked at me one day and said, “You realize this is not going away, right?”
It was such a paradigm shift for me. I stopped trying to cure myself and started focusing on learning to live with a chronic mental health condition. And I’m better off for it. ACT is amazing - highly recommended for anyone living with chronic anxiety or depression.
Agree and disagree. That is, I really, really wish people would stop thinking of suicide as 1) something people do when they can’t figure out how to resolve a problem and 2) assume that people who commit suicide have “fallen through the cracks” and could have had their depression/ideation resolved if only they’d gotten therapy and/or others had paid attention.
These are the stories people tell themselves to feel better: depression is controllable and treatable, we only need people to care about us to make life worth living, etc.: There’s no reason for anyone to suffer from depression! Get antidepressants! Go to therapy! The fact is, depression is a terrible, sometimes chronic illness that we don’t fully understand and sometimes can’t treat effectively.
I disagree, however, that it’s nobody else’s business. Having known a number of people (most but not all adolescents) who’ve killed themselves, I can tell you that suicide inflicts an excruciating, often lifelong pain on those who loved that person. I am not saying nobody should kill themselves because other people will suffer. The answer to “Whose Life is It Anyway?” is “Yours.” But I’ve lost students who killed themselves for reasons even their observant, well-informed, loving parents will never know. and those parents, siblings, friends, loved ones, spend their lives in hellish recrimination and “if only” scenarios. The fact is, there are other people who will suffer for the rest of their lives because someone dear to them killed themselves.
So no, it may not be the business of snoopy neighbors, but it sure as hell is the business of people who will suffer the most from the loss of a loved one.
