Like too many women my marriage became extremely abusive when I was pregnant. (In retrospect it was abusive before my pregnancy, I had just become too used to it to notice, and it amped up when I was pregnant.) I stayed until my DC was a few months old and then I left and moved back to my home town. I threw myself very, very much into building a new life for myself and DC. As a result pretty much all of my friendships are younger than my DC, if that makes sense.
The important backstory here is that one of the manipulation techniques my XH used was threatening suicide. Whenever I wasn't doing what he wanted, he'd make comments about wanting to die and then he'd disappear for a day or two, leaving me to freak out, assuming he'd killed himself. And eventually call me up and tell me he couldn't cope unless I did X or stopped doing X, or stopped expecting him to do X, etc. A part of me suspected that it was pure manipulation and he had no intention of committing suicide but I was too terrified to test this idea. Especially as if I didn't respond as panicked as normal he would increase the level of threat to himself, like locking himself in the bathroom with a knife, emerging briefly to show me him with the knife to his wrists, before running out of the house for days. Or send me photos of himself on a bridge before turning his phone off. It all culminated on the morning I was due to leave when I woke to find him in the livingroom unresponsive and surrounded by pill bottles. I remember standing outside the room in A&E where he was being treated, holding a small baby and hearing him roar like an animal as the detox drugs went through him and feeling really cold, sure it was an attempt to trap me. I went home and went through his computer history and found lots of searches along the lines of "how to overdose without dying." When I went to see him when he came around the first thing he said to me was "I told you I couldn't live if you left." And finally a week later the psychiatrist who was treating him told me he did not believe he was a genuine suicide risk. I left that day. And while obviously that wasn't the complete end of our relationship, there were plenty of suicide threats and manipulation attempts over the next 2-3 years. None of them were ever followed through on and as I stopped reacting to them, they eventually stopped completely.
Which brings me to now. One of my friends has been having an utterly horrendous time within her marriage, which has in many ways become worse once she insisted on a separation. I wrote a really long post here detailing the last year but decided to delete it as it's too outing and upsetting. But the short story is that while her Ex is truly a manipulative bastard, she has been doing everything she can to needle him. Every time he messes with her, she messes back with him. She's made stuff public, humiliated him and if he doesn't react, ups the ante until he does. Then she freaks out and gets really panicked and upset and turns to me and a few other friends to help her out. I've dropped really important stuff in my life to come running and help her, only to have her deliberately rile up her ex again that same day.
I found myself needing to back off a bit, deciding to never give advice anymore because if I say what she doesn't want to hear I don't hear from her for a while. And only offering to meet up when I actually have free time. Which is still once or twice a week (even though I do have to arrange a babysitter) but not come running at a moments notice any more. At first this resulted in her backing off from me. But now I've started getting messages that I think are hinting at suicide.
I'm terrified for her. But I honestly don't think I can cope with this or offer her a lot of help. I feel a lot like it's an attempt to manipulate me which I acknowledge could be 100% down to my history with my EX. But it really makes me fear saying the absolute worst thing to her if she's genuinely feeling suicidal. I haven't slept for most of the night. I have 1000 things to do now but I can't as I have this going around and around in my head. I think I've decided that the best thing to do is to let mutual friends know what's happening and why I'm the worst person to try help. To advise her to tell her counsellor. And be prepared to tell her to call for emergency help if it gets too dark but that I can't actually come. (She does know everything about this part of my marriage.) And let her know I'm prepared myself to call 999 for her if she needs me to.