what on earht are you all doing wih tis suiceide stuff

How do you decide who is suicidal & who isn't? You don't necessarily declare your intentions when you're at the end of your tether. Let those who need to vent, vent & those who don't want to hear about it, stay away.

All of us who post on MN are attention-seekers. If your thread or post goes unanswered, you feel ignored.

As for the fear of saying the wrong thing or giving bad advice & "pushing" a suicidal person over the edge, I doubt it. Much more likely to do harm by telling them their thread is inappropriate & to go elsewhere with their problems. It's certainly vital for the suicidal person to get appropriate medical help asap but presumably they already know that! Mental illness does not equal stupidity & ignorance.

Perhaps a solution would be to not let the thread go on indefinitely without some sort of MNHQ intervention.

agree with fox. And excellent comment, berolina

and if you read the thousands of posts on internet forums dediated to MH you will find that a large amount of people suffereing MH problems think psychiatrists are a waste of space/legal drug pushers who havent a clue.

I am not sure how
'this is a situation and a responsibility which it is generally not appropriate or possible for MN to bear'
has so often been understood as
'we do not want this and do not care'.

yes, very true expat

and there is also the issue of calls for HQ to track down the poster asap, when the board is not constantly moderated and particularly not late into the night when some of these threads get going.

daddyj, I think if you read the consultant psychiatrist's view, you'll see she thinks the threads are unhealthy. And I think you misrepresent the views of a lot of the mental health professionals on here who have categorically said that suicide is best left to trained professionals.

As ahundred said, you and many others on this thread misrepresent the views of myself and others as being uncompassionate. I don't think anything further could be from the truth. Just because I don't want to post on those threads doesn't mean I don't care about people who are suicidal.

But objectivity admitted further down that she ACTIVELY avoided the police that day. How is that accepting real life intervention?

And as for the attention seeking - call it a cry for help if you don't like that term. As lapin said, there are loads of attention seeking threads on here.

But these threads aren't started with someone thinking 'oh I'll come back tomorrow and see if anyone's posted', they are started wanting posts RIGHT NOW and you have people who feel COMPELLED to post in case this person does something stupid and you get other people constantly watching and refreshing for posts and they FEED off each other these threads AND you get the people who feel and get dreadfully emotionally involved in the whole thing. OF COURSE, there are lots of those type of threads on mumsnet but these always involve the most drama because it involves the possibility of someone ending their life.

I can see madamez's argument that compassion costs nothing therefore what is the problem with providing an ear or an outlet but I still believe, and haven't changed my stance, that a public board is not the place for that. We may not be helping. In fact, we may be doing exactly the opposite. And I'm talking here about the purely suicidal threads. We may providing someone enough of a crutch that they don't go and get help. And I know madamez will say 'but you could be helping' - well, I just STILL do not think we should be taking ANY chances with people's lives.

I have no problem with mental health threads or any other thread where people want to support each other but I just think the very nature of suicide being SO serious and SO final means we are not the place to deal with it. That is all.

Maybe pulling the threads straight away isn't the answer. Maybe they get pulled into a private area away from the main board where MNHQ or somebody (don't know who) speaks to them until real life help arrives. I don't know.

Someone mentioned that the people who responded most often to so-called "suicide threads" are the ones with mental health problems of their own & therefore the least likely to be of any help. Heavy paraphrasing but that was the gist of it. Utter nonsense! Such a statement serves only to encourage & uphold the prevalent belief that anyone depressed, suicidal or with overt negative thoughts is to be branded as an incompetent fool & shunned by the masses possessing a stiff upper lip. I think you'll find that most sufferers of mental illness are all too aware of life's fragility & seemingly random incongruity.

DaddyJ, have just gone back through the early posts myself and I really don't see where anyone was being dismissive or mocking.

dittany, I do agree with Boco that you are representing this in a very blac-and-white way. (Excellent posts, btw, Boco and Slubber). It is unfair to imply that those of us who have concerns about the appropriateness of MN to help people in extreme despair, in acute life-or-death situations, as callous, uncaring people who want to see these posters hounded off MN with a cry of 'get thee to the Samaritans'.

I am far from convinced that actually deleting the thread mid-flow is the way to go. But I certainly think there needs to be a much stronger, if you like, community impulse on MN to direct the person to the correct help. NOBODY is saying we should post 'here's the number of the Samaritans, now bugger off'. But I do feel in these circumstances a post along the lines of

I am very, very sorry you are feeling so desperate. Everything seems extremely bleak and overwhelming for you now, but please be aware that this can and will pass if you get yourself some help. We on MN are here and we are listening, but there is only so much we can do for you, and there is RL help out there, and we really want you to take it to start on the road to safety and then recovery. Please call [samaritans/GP/MN team/A&E] now. Come back and update us when you can - we care and we want to know you are getting to a place of safety

is (IMVVVHO) as close to appropriate as one can get in this situation.

(This has taken forever to write. Apologies if the discussion has moved on)

DaddyJ, I've just had a re-read too. I realise that a lot of the threads at the start were blunt in the extreme (and I'm sure could be seen as dismissive), I think that what the majority of us (initial) 'pull the threaders' were saying is that professional help should be sought in these situations.

I imagine plenty still feel that way.

I don't see a lot of mocking tbh.

With regard to your opinion that mn is as good as the samaritans, well we will have to agree to disagree on that one.

...and I'm being kicked off the computer now.

Regarding the tone of this thread, slubber, I just re-read the first 100 posts
(including yours) and they are crawling with dismissive and mocking statements about people in despair.
Makes very ugly reading, I am sorry to say.
(though I respect the fact that you have moderated your stance since)

It's a long thread so let me reiterate for those who still think that Mumsnetters cannot do this, only Samaritans can:
This argument has been comprehensively knocked on the head.
By Samaritans. Who are on this very thread.
And who have confirmed that Mumsnet is doing a perfectly good job in these situations,
regardless of a few rubbernecking trolls.

A person was going to end her life. Her children were going to lose their mother.

If some people think that's entertainment, well, that's their problem,
why on earth would you want to punish the person who has asked for help?

oooh lapin were you harsh?

That's also a perfect example of how not to be helpful to someone suicidal isn't it! This is just what a depressed person needs isn't it, someone getting pissed off with them for not providing regular progress reports and demanding something 'back' for the support they've got!

and I really think you are missing the tone of this thread that the last thing anyone here wants to do is dismiss or deride them.

The reason I think you are not listening is comments about the people on this thread -' turning their backs on people who are really in need of help.', reinforcing the taboo, having a low opinion of mnetters, seeing everyone as either attention seekers or liking the drama - you're picking out the bits that suit your argument and not recognising what is actually being said.

No one is objecting to people getting much needed support and talking things through AT ALL. No one is saying that people giving support are liking the drama. The specific situations being discussed are crisis situations where people are threatening to take their own lives, something that we are not able or equipped to deal with and that does not make us cold or dispassionate.

dittany I think there is a huge problem with the term 'attention seekers'. It is seen as a terrible insult, an insinuation of weakness.

Of course if you look at thie term literally then that is a very good and accurate description of what is going on. If you need help, human beings on the whole tend to say help me.

I think lapin on another thread said that really all of the threads on mn are attention seeking in a way, they are all saying

"hey you lot of mners come and talk to me about.......

shoes
cake
tents
my terrible day
my hideous MIL
vegetables

etc etc"

It is just when somone is in acute mental distress they would probably phrase it more along the lines of any of the recent thread titles and OPs we are discussing here.

I do not, for one moment think they are weak or silly, or anything else negative really. I am filled with pity and sadness and I do not know what to say.

I did say not all of them and that some are genuinely thoughtful. And I don't have a blanket opinion of all mumsnetters, there are thousands of people who use this site, no, i don't trust the motives of all of them. I dont' think all suicide threateners are attention seeking either - I have no idea how serious or how desperate they are which is exactly why they need to find actual help rather than rely only on mn.

Dittany you are not very good at actually listening to what people are saying but you are excellent at twisting things. You are determined to see this as a disagreement between The Compassionate and The Not Compassionate. You're actively wrong about that.

Divastrop I agree. I think if you look at services for any chronic health problems (mental or physical) they are underfunded (badly underfunded) and understaffed.

I cannot go back to work as a physio as there are no jobs in the field in which I specialise, all the posts have been frozen. Elderly rehab is just not important (or deserving of staff to do it)so it seems .

I know people have bad experiences when they seek help from the health service (and this tempers their view of how useful/helpful it is).

I still (with my free nhs rose tinted glasses on) think being seen by a MH professional is the best route in these particular types of cases.

oh,and MH is still very much a taboo subject.i agree.the reason it gets talked about fairly freely on MN is that we can remain annonymous here.i doubt very much most posters who talk about their problems on MN would do so in the school playground.

there was a recent thread where someones MIL said that mums with PND just needed a good nights sleep,and that thread certainly showed that many people are still very ignorant about MH issues.

Well isn't that the exact point mummylin?

'i would like to think that someone would help my sister and try and persuade her to get the correct help.'

That's what's being said, persuaded to get the CORRECT help. Maybe a long thread of 'talk to us, tell us everything, tell us what's going on for you?' is really the correct help. I don't know if it is or not, if it could make things worse or better, I don't.

So, referred to correct help is the only way really isn't it. Directed to gp, a&e, cpn, samaritans etc rather than encouraged to deal with it all online with strangers watching.