The therapist is the best person to assess how serious her suicidal ideation is. Therapists deal every day with people who have some degree of suicidal thoughts.
You are not in a position where you are qualified to judge that, and as her friend you shouldn’t be in that position even if you did have the know how. Therefore, I definitely think that you did the right thing by making sure her therapist is aware of it.
I did consider that my friend might be scared off if her therapist confronted her, but it sounds like the therapist knew what he was doing. My friend would not promise me she would tell her therapist what she did, and I truly believe the only way my friend could get the help she needed is if her therapist knew about what happened. She’s had a hard time admitting how depressed she is, and I don’t think she could have told her therapist she tried to kill herself. But the therapist knew about it before their appointment, and he managed to get her to talk. And now they have a treatment plan.
I think I did the right thing in a really difficult situation. I have no plans to tattle to my friend’s therapist on a regular basis. Or an irregular basis.
A quick google gets How To Help guideline. And the suicide prevention hotline 800-273-8255. I bet if you gave that number a call they could give you some good advise.
I think this was a last resort since the OP indicated she discussed it with her friend first and the friend did not promise to tell her therapist.
I’m guessing those who work for suicide hotlines are trained to determine how serious a person is about suicide and that is how they determine whether or not to get someone else involved. I think attempting suicide qualifies as having a suicide plan.
A decent therapist should also know how to keep it confidential if someone calls and says a patient has attempted suicide. A decent therapist should also be able to determine if the caller is a meddling nut or telling the truth. And hopefully the therapist would be able to bring it up in a way to not make it obvious that someone called and mentioned the suicide attempt.
No it doesn’t, not if you say you’re not going to try again.
My mom isn’t a nut and wasn’t lying, she was just blowing it out of proportion and thinking that she could push me into getting help, which was completely the wrong approach in that situation and just made things worse. It isn’t always the wrong approach, and it sounds like it wasn’t in the OP’s case, but it definitely can be and that’s why I brought it up. Everyone was so quick to say how she did the right thing, even with the limited information we had to judge on, so I just wanted to mention that it’s NOT always the right thing to do and really does need to be very carefully considered. It’s not something that will either help or will have no effect. It can hurt too.
If your mom wasn’t a nut and wasn’t lying, then that means that you did actually attempt to kill yourself, yes?
I really hate to be the one to tell you this, because I have severe hospitalization and loss-of-control issues myself, but as a fellow sucide-attempter, I have to say that it’s difficult to take a suicide attempt and ‘blow it out of proportion.’
Even if you weren’t serious, even if you didn’t really mean it, even if you were really low for just a second and realized you didn’t want to die, you still actually tried to end your life, and for our loved ones, that is a very serious concern.
I know that if I ever get that low again, my husband is going to report me, and I might end up hospitalized. We had our only screaming fight of our whole relationship over that. If it happens, I will be livid at him, but you know what? My brains are messed up, and he’s not wrong to take action (even action my messed-up brains don’t approve of) to try and keep me alive, because he loves me and he’s trying to help in the best way available to him.
And I respect him for that.
No, she didn’t tell my doctor that I tried to kill myself. She was afraid that I might in the future. But I wasn’t considering it, I just wanted to to be left alone. She also thought maybe I was on drugs because she couldn’t think of any other explanation (I was actually just depressed), which I wasn’t and never have been, so that was really annoying. I’m not going to a doctor who thinks these things might be true.
I agree it would have been different if I really had made an attempt, or was threatening to. But even then, it’s better if you can convince the person to let you help them than to push them, if possible.
I wasn’t calling your mom specifically a lying nut- I was speaking in general as there are some people (who are lying nuts. Again, not your mom) who will do stuff like this to hurt people deliberately which is a terrible thing to do and hopefully any respectable doctor would be able to determine if an accusation in that circumstance is not true.
What you’re describing with your mom is more complicated and I believe you that telling a doctor can hurt in some circumstances, especially if something is blown out of proportion. And if you ended up dropping your doctor I’m guessing your doctor was unprofessional in how he or she handled the situation?
I don’t see how reporting an actual, confirmed suicide attempt is blowing something out of proportion though, especially if the OP simply reported it and did not add any embellishments.
I also don’t see how actually attempting suicide doesn’t mean that one doesn’t have a suicide plan. They clearly do if they tried it out. Perhaps it was a cry for help, not a serious attempt, but cries for help can be fatal. And if one is serious about suicide after an attempt of course they’re going to say they’re not going to try again because they don’t want anyone to interfere.
I think the OP did the right thing (especially by not going to the parents which may have made things worse) by giving the doctor the information and letting the doctor decide how to handle it.
There is a risk of course of a doctor not handling information such as this in a discreet, professional and confidential manner, but it sounds like everything was fine in this situation and I hope the OP’s friend is able to get assistance in dealing with her problems.
I didn’t think you were saying that, I was just pointing out that the only two options aren’t that the report is accurate or that the person is just making shit up because they’re crazy or an asshole.
Well, not really. He called and left a message saying that my mom had called him and she was very concerned about me and he listened to what she had to say even though he couldn’t tell her anything, and he would like me to come in. I didn’t already have an appointment scheduled so I think that was probably all he could really have done. I just didn’t want to keep going to a doctor who would always have it in the back of his head that maybe I was a suicidal drug addict. I’ve always been honest with my doctors about my depression and I want them to believe what I say.
Legally it’s not, and I don’t think it should be. There is a pretty wide range of seriousness in suicide attempts (or “gestures” as the less serious ones are sometimes called) and forced intervention is not always the answer.
The people who are 100% serious and absolutely do not want help will almost certainly find a way. If someone does mention it to anyone, that means they have at least some tiny inkling of wanting help, so that needs to be handled extremely sensitively (as I’m sure you agree). Next time they start feeling hopeless and want to reach out to someone, you want them to feel that they can without risking being forcibly hospitalized or something.
I can see how you would have felt uncomfortable continuing to go to that doctor. Did he believe you over the phone when you told him what she said wasn’t true, or did he insist on you coming in? When I was in middle school a mom of one of my friends (and this mom was actually nuts and would do things deliberately to hurt people) told a guidance counselor that I was hurting myself (untrue). He called me in, but thankfully believed me when I told him it wasn’t true and said he was aware that she had a history of making accusations- he just had to verify. Telling me he believed me made all the difference. I would have been very upset if he hadn’t said that and if the same thing had happened but with a doctor, I wouldn’t go back either.
I think the OP took a risk in that the therapist could theoretically have hospitalized the OP’s friend, but I think it takes a lot more than just someone calling in and saying so and so is suicidal to do that. And of course I think it has to be handled sensitively and that one should use their best judgement. I think the OP did handle this sensitively in that she talked to her friend first and did not say anything to the parents which would have made everything a lot worse.
Perhaps calling a suicide hotline for advice would have been a better idea. The OP never said how her friend tried to kill herself though. There is a difference between making a half hearted attempt with pain killers (ETA: obviously ODing on strong pain killers can be fatal, but I mean like taking a bottle of ibuprofen or anything else non-lethal) or something and actually setting up a noose for example. I’m also assuming that the OP did not want to take any risks in assuming the friend was not** serious given that she has first hand experience with suicide (her mother).
It sounds like in this case everything worked out ok. I do see your point in that it could backfire and hurt someone. I also think that there are so many grey areas here that it’s hard to know exactly what to do, which is why I don’t want to say the OP did the wrong thing. Since you mentioned legality- I don’t think there are really any legal issues here aside from HIPAA- the OP can call the therapist but the therapist cannot give out any information about the patient.
Right. When I called the therapist’s office, I told the receptionist I knew she couldn’t even confirm my friend was a client, but that I needed to leave a message for the therapist. I told the receptionist what my friend told me, that she had tried to kill herself last week. I said I was very worried about my friend. That’s it.
It wasn’t a half-hearted suicide attempt. If it weren’t for what I’m going to call “technical difficulties,” my friend would be dead. (I’m being vague to protect her privacy to the extent that I can.) Today, she told me that after the technical difficulties, she realized she didn’t really want to die. She showed me the note she wrote, and we got rid of it together. She said that for the first time in a long time, she feels like she can be helped.
So yes, it turned out well so far, but I realize I could have made things worse. I took the three hours between when my friend told me about her suicide attempt and when I called the therapist to weigh the risks and possible outcomes and to consider how much my experience with my mother was affecting my judgment. I realize my second post in this thread doesn’t convey that, but I truly did put a lot of thought into whether to call the therapist and what to tell him.