Actually, that’s not the case, but I’m not on a computer where I can pull up the citation.
Well, that’s been my experience and it’s been corroborated by, like I said, a lot of reading and talking to people. I’ve known lots and lots of people who have threatened suicide but the 3 people I know who actually did it just did it. Obviously each case is unique but some general patterns do show up.
Sometimes people do threaten and do do it, of course. There were a couple people on the documentary The Bridge who threatened frequently and did eventually go through with it.
And that’s fine, if their depression takes them to the path of suicide, we can see why it naturally went that way. However, if a depressed person has the werewithal to wish it were different and asks for help, it is a disease that can be treated.
I’m on the flip side–I struggled for years with the idea of taking psych meds, because I am who I am, and meds would make me not me. But if I’m going to be alive anyway, why go through so much suffering when there is treatment, the way there is treatment for physical diseases.
More on this later, but I’m entirely supportive of voluntary euthenasia for people who are terminally ill. I don’t regard that as the same issue, although obviously friends and family members have every right to try and talk the terminally ill out of that decision.
Regardless of the reasons behind the suicide attempt, one reason we try and talk people out of it is that one day it might be us or someone about whom we care.
Why would they call you threatening suicide if they didn’t want help? If people truly wanted to die you would only get calls from the family members that found the corpse. “Hello police, im going to kill myself” = “please help me”, if someone called begging for help would you deny it to them?
Against the apparent tide, I agree with BrknButterfly. I have not lost a family member to suicide, but have lost three very dear friends if it matters. In each case, as in every case that someone close to me dies, I had a period of mourning, perhaps with more guilt than normal, but it passed.
I do not understand the rush to ‘save’ suicidal people either. I may miss my friends, but I believe they did what they felt was right for them. That is the freedom I want in my life; why would I not want it for them?
But if in either case you think other people have the right to try to discourage the person from committing suicide, where do you differ as between the terminally-ill prospective suiceide and the more general case?
Throwing it open to everyone: If you think it’s reasonable to try to discourage a potential suicide, what precisely constitutes permissible discouragement? Just talking to the person? Physical interference (taking away the gun/pills; pulling the person back in the window)? Post-incident confinement (civil commitment)?
Did you know about it ahead of time? If not, and you had known, what would you have done, if anything?
That’s a dangerous way of thinking. To some degree, it’s true - there are people who threaten it who have no real chance of doing it. But that’s not always the case.
Yes - clearly someone seeking some sort of help hasn’t completely decided to do it, but that doesn’t mean they won’t - they may be overwhelmed, unable to cope with their situation, and need help. And if they were shrugged off as people that weren’t really serious and never got that help, it might push them over the edge.
If someone feels like they’re at the last of their ability to handle whatever it is they’re suffering from, and they reach out for help, and the response from society as a whole is a big “meh, we don’t care you attention whore” (or even just “we don’t care”) then that might be the thing that makes them say “yep, I knew it” and push them over the edge. That’s where some sort of support network can help.
Which is different from trying to dissaude someone with a miserable life and no real chance of meaningful recovery - like in the case of terminal diseases or other cases. You seem to be mixing the two types of cases together and applying logic from one to the other.
I think anyone announcing their suicide is simply asking for help so what would be “permissible” should be exactly the same as what would be permissible when helping anyone else in a life or death situation. You are not preventing them from doing something they want, you are not taking away any freedoms, you should exert the same amount of effort as you would saving someone from drowning or from a fire. People who really want to die DONT ask for help.
I did not, although I was not suprised by the last one. I gave him a hug and wished him well the last we spoke, perhaps I would have added an “I’ll miss you”.
If you are asking if I would have stopped them if I could have - no.
So my wife’s reaction should have been more philosophical in the morgue? She should adopt your enlightened attitude?
I’ve been close to several people who suffered major personality changes, fixed by medication. None attempted suicide, happily, but it’s absurd to say that their distorted personalities were them in any way.
You gave a great example. Medicine restored my heart to its normal rhythm. It got into its bad state by itself, and that was natural, but I can’t see that the use of medicine to restore it was wrong.
Another cause of suicide might be a serious, if brief, problem. Just lasting through it cures the problem. A large majority of those who jumped off the Golden Gate bridge and survived never tried committing suicide again.
This is exactly what I am saying. It is their life. Their choice. While I understand the responsibility of any police department and I followed every SOP (standard operating procedure) while working there, I don’t understand the taking them against their will and putting them on a 48 hour hold at some hospital. It’s their life and their choice with what they want to do with it.
I don’t expect people to agree with this. I often talk to FourPaws about this often and he doesn’t agree with me as well.
I just think, that on some level they are breaking some legal right? I’m not sure.
*I just know that if one day I decided this is what I wanted with my life I would hope that people wouldn’t look down upon me for making that choice. If things ever got that bad or drastic, it was a choice I would believe was best for me. Sure others may get hurt or feel some kind of lost, but in the long run I would hope they all would want what was best for me.
*Disclaimer - Using as an example. I don’t need a cop at my door. 
I agree that anyone should have the right to decide to end their own life. I also think people tend to make a lot of lousy decisions.
What if it’s really their will—that is, the will of their sane, rational self—to live, but they are under the influence of something—a hallucenogenic drug, a demon possession, a sci-fi alien that has taken over their brain, or just the fucked-up brain chemistry that comes with some forms of depression—that’s telling them to kill themselves?
This is a sore subject with me. Last month one of my younger cousins cut his own throat. His brother found him 4 days later. Another young cousin of mine shot himself in front of his father about 10 years ago. Another cousin climbed up on the Port Mann Bridge a few years ago and it took nearly 5 hours for the police to talk him down. Reading this, I flinch about that side of my family: prone to melancholia and depression, exacerbated too often by drugs and alcohol. I don’t care so much that the dead men are dead, but I do care about the pain their families have endured. The truth is, there is no “nice” way to kill yourself unless you are lucky enough to be in a hospital bed attended by solicitous medical professionals. Should they have been “stopped”? Yes, they should have been stopped. The bridge-climber got treatment and leads a pretty good life now, and he says he’s glad to be alive. More to the point, in my mind, his wife and children are glad, too.
The 13 year old daughter of some friends hung herself. They had been watching her every minute for months and, encouraged by what they saw as “successful treatment”, had left her alone long enough to go the the neighbours for a beer, maybe a half hour, and came home to find her dead. There is just no way to describe the pain that poor child left behind her. I truly think children that age do not understand the finality of death, and cannot comprehend how much their families will suffer. As someone said above, the teenage years are often difficult and if children can just trudge along until they’re adults, they find that life doesn’t suck so bad as they thought.
Death is final. I think life is too precious to stand by and watch it end unnecessarily. (Terminal illness is a different matter.)
If I by stopping taking my happy pills, I’m going to be back to my ‘natural’ way of thinking, does that mean that abandoning my asthma medication will return me to my natural way of breathing, too?
I think there’s a very large gap between someone who is in pain and going to die soon-ish deciding to end it sooner, and someone who is generally otherwise healthy and suffering from depression or other mental illness deciding to end their lives as a result of that illness. The thought process strikes me as being completely different and they’re not exactly comparable situations.
Everybody has the right to do what he sees fit with his life, and anyone who is attempting suicide should be discouraged from carrying it through. Lives are worth saving. I just see euthanasia as offering a kinder option to the sick, not an absence of discouragement.
I haven’t got a problem with any of those.
And now for the personal story, which you’re free to disregard because only surveys count.
My father’s older sister overdosed on pills when she was young. She had enough time to realize she’d made a mistake and call someone for help - aha, see, “cry for help” - but she didn’t get through. She died, and I have to imagine that’s a pretty miserable way to go. So I’m thinking that even though she may have thought she wanted to die when she took the pills, she didn’t shortly thereafter, and everybody would have been happier if she’d been stopped.